Victims of the Axie Infinity hack will be reimbursed, but at the current market value of Ethereum.
Sky Mavis, the play-to-earn game developer Axie Infinitysaid he would start reimbursing hack victims last March which saw the hackers walk away with $617 million in assets. The attackers were able to get their hands on $25.5 million in USDC (a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar) and 173,600 ether, which were worth around $591.2 million at the time. The FBI claimed that North Korean groups were behind the attack.
Victims of the Axie Infinity hack will be reimbursed
Impacted players will be able to withdraw one ether token for each ether they lost in this hack, Sky Mavis told Bloomberg, without mentioning any reimbursement from the USDC. However, as with many other cryptocurrenciesthe value of Ethereum has declined significantly since March.
And because of that, Sky MAvis will only reimburse users around $216.5 million. It’s possible that Ethereum’s value will go back up, obviously, but at the time of this writing, affected users will therefore only get back about a third of what they lost.
but at the current market value of Ethereum
In April, Sky Mavis raised $150 million to help repay victims. The developer intends to repay these on June 28, when they restart the Ronin software bridge that hackers had targeted.
Axie Infinity is considered the most popular play-to-earn game around. Players collect and mint NFTs depicting creatures battling each other, like a Pokémon game. These NFTs can be sold to other players, with a commission taken by Sky Mavis. By February, Axie Infinity had made $4 billion in NFT sales.
However, the NFT market is far from exploding, and this has an obvious impact on Axie Infinity. According to Bloomberg, the number of daily active players, which stood at 2.7 million in November, fell by a quarter at the end of May.