A side chain linked to Ethereum, Ronin, has plans to restart its Bridge this coming week. Ronin, which hosts the play-to-earn game, Axie Infinity, underwent a $600 million exploit three months ago.
The Bridge, which was supposed to be reopened this Thursday, was cancelled due to some delay. However, in a tweet yesterday, Sky Mavis, the creator of Axie Infinity, who funds the development team for Ronin, confirmed that the Bridge would be reopened on the 28th of June.
The team said,
Our engineering team has been working hard preparing for the bridge to reopen.
Additionally, the team added that for the Bridge to be restarted, a network hard fork is required, with validators intending to give their software an upgrade.
A North Korean group identified as Lazarus hacked Ronin on the 23rd of March and took five validator nodes out of the nine it had. The hack enabled them to cart away 25.5 million USDC and 173,600 ETH from the Bridge.
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At the time of the hack, the funds the group stole were over $600 million in worth, causing the stunt to be one of the world's largest cryptocurrency hacks recorded. Responding to the hack, the Ronin team froze the Bridge and paused one of the side chain's decentralized exchanges, Katana.
Now that the Bridge will be reopened by Tuesday next week, the Ronin development team has assured those impacted by the hack that they'll be reimbursed.
Axie Infinity creator Sky Mavis, in April, with the aid of investors like venture capital companies, Paradigm and Andreessen Horowitz and crypto exchange platform, Binance, was able to raise $150 million. The amount raised and Mavis' personal funds will be used to reimburse users affected by the hack.
The hack by the North Korean group, Lazarus, was discovered six days after it happened. The unfortunate incident caused the prices of the Ronin network native time, RON, to plummet. Sadly, since the incident, the price of RON has continuously declined, with the present bearish state of crypto partly affecting it. However, since the news of the Ronin bridge reopening, RON has witnessed a slight increase of 13% from its trading price a few hours before the announcement.