In March 2022, Ronin was the victim of one of the most serious hacks in crypto space. After the hack, on-chain investigator “₿liteZero”, who works for SlowMist and also contributed to the company’s 2022 mid-year Blockchain Security report, has tracked activities of hackers. ₿liteZero reported that hackers have transferred all of their stolen funds to the Bitcoin network.
Right after $625 Million drained from the Ronin Bridge, hackers have continued to spread out the stolen funds using Bitcoin privacy as a means to remain anonymous. Hackers, believed to be North Korean cybercrime organization Lazarus Group, initially transferred only a portion of the funds ((6,249 ETH) to centralized exchanges (CEX) including Huobi (5,028 ETH) and FTX (1,219 ETH) on March 28.
From the CEX exchanges, 6,249 ETH appears to have been converted to BTC. The hackers then transferred 439 BTC ($20.5 million) to Bitcoin Blender, which was also sanctioned by the US Treasury Department on June 5.
“I’ve found the answer in Blender sanction addresses. Most Blender sanction addresses are Blender’s deposit addresses used by Ronin hackers. They have deposited all their withdrawal funds to Blender after withdrawing from the exchanges”, the analyst wrote.
However, most of the stolen funds (175,000 ETH) was transferred to Tornado Cash – the platform was blacklisted by the US on August 8. The attack occurred in March, but it was not until April 15 that Tornado Cash put Ronin hackers’s wallet addresses on blacklist to prevent laundering money; however, only hackers’s original wallet was blocked.
Hackers then used Uniswap and 1inch decentralized exchanges (DEXs) to transfer 113,000 ETH to renBTC, while also using Ren’s cross-chain bridge to transfer the assets from Ethereum to the Bitcoin network and unwrap renBTC into BTC. Since then, approximately 6,631 BTC have been distributed to various centralized exchanges and decentralized protocols.
The report also said that Ronin hackers withdrew 2,871 BTC (out of 3,460 BTC) ($61.6 million as of Aug. 22) via Bitcoin ChipMixer. The Ronin hack is still a “mystery to be investigated” and that more progress is to be made. About Ronin, the project is still recovering. After the hack, it immediately raised 150 million USD to fulfill its commitment to compensate 100% of users’ losses and make some improvements.
Follow our channels for more crypto news:
- Cryptory Insights: https://t.me/CryptoryInsights
- Cryptory Global Community: https://t.me/CryptoryCommunity
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CryptoryNetwork
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/CryptoryNetwork