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On 23 March, hackers invaded part of Sky Mavis’s Ronin Network and stole $540 million worth of Ether and USDC stablecoins from the Axie Infinity game the company operates, it reported.
The losses totaled 173,600 ether and 25.5 million USDCs and rank as the second-largest crypto theft ever, according to data service Elliptical.
The company attributed the breach to “social engineering” and not to any technical flaw the company failed to notice, Sky Mavis COO Aleksander Larsen said in a public statement.
The ill-gotten gains are still in the hacker’s digital wallet, the company said, and Sky Mavis has enlisted the technical firm Chainalysis to help track down the culprits.
Sky Mavis has pledged to recover or reimburse all value that clients lost in the theft.
The robbery brings unwanted attention to crypto’s vulnerabilities at a time when the industry is touting itself as a legitimate asset class, with reputable financial firms beginning to dabble in digital currencies.
However, the theft failed to dampen the value of ether or USDCs; the worth of the stolen property has grown from $540 million to $660 million in the week following the hack, The Wall Street Journal reported.