Axie Infinity co-founder’s personal Ethereum wallets are caught in $9.5M crypto theft

It’s time yet again for another bit of bad news to come out of Axie Infinity, the pay-to-earn crypto-grinder MMO that’s most famous for suffering a $620M hack from a North Korean hacker gang as a result of an employee getting phished in a job search scam. The latest is that the co-founder of the game and its associated Ronin blockchain was apparently among those personally compromised in a new $9.5M crypto theft.

According to reports, 3,250 ETH was taken from multiple wallets on the Ronin network, then routed through Tornado Cash, “an automated service that mixes together funds from multiple users to make it more difficult to trace where the cryptocurrency ends up.” Among the wallets pilfered were two owned by Ronin and Axie co-founder Jeff “Jiho” Zirlin, who confirmed the attack on Twitter while also assuring that developer Sky Mavis’ crypto operations were not impacted. One of the other co-founders even tried to pass off the attack as something that “happens on every chain.” You know, no big deal, just $9.5M of totally real, not at all fake money being stolen. Happens every day.

“This has been a tough morning for me,” Zirlin wrote. “Thank you to everyone that’s reached out. I’m safe. I will get through this.”

Whatever assurances Sky Mavis’ founders tried to provide, the price of Ronin took a hit on the news, losing 13% of its original value. As of this current writing, it’s a few cents shy of its original $3.17 value, sitting at $3.01.”Whatever else you may think about crypto and Axie Infinity, it’s indisputable that this guy ran one of the few genuine successes of our brief delusional NFT cultural phase,” pointed out MMO dev Damion Schubert. “If this guy can be duped out of millions, it’s safe to say that crypto is not ready for prime time.”

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