Key Takeaways:
- The hackers moved the $625 million worth of USDC and ETH to crypto mixer Tornado Cash.
- Decentralized exchanges Uniswap and 1inch were used to convert around 113,000 ETH to renBTC.
- The hackers transferred around 6,250 ETH ($20.7 million) to centralized exchanges before sending the funds to the crypto mixer Blender.
Ronin Network, a bridge chain that powers Axie Infinity, was attacked on March 23rd, resulting in a loss of 173,600 Ethereum(ETH) and 25.5M USDC, worth over $600 Million. Ever since the attack, investigators have been working hard to trace the movement of the stolen funds.
According to new findings by on-chain investigator BliteZero, the hackers moved the $625 million worth of USDC and ETH to crypto mixer Tornado Cash. Around 175,000 ETH — was sent to now sanctioned Tornado Cash incrementally between April 4 and May 19.
The hackers withdrew the funds from Tornado Cash and initially transferred a portion of the fund-around 6,250 ETH ($20.7 million) to centralized exchanges including Huobi, Binance, and FTX before sending the funds to North Korean crypto mixer Blender, according to BliteZero.
According to BliteZero, the hackers sent most funds to crypto mixers such as ChipMixer and Blender. Following the conversion into BTC, the attackers transferred 439 BTC ($20.5 million) to the Bitcoin privacy tool Blender.
“When I scanned bitcoin transactions (April 7 – May 14) for withdrawals from Ronin hackers, I came to the following conclusions: After withdrawing from ChipMixer, half of the funds were deposited to Blender”, BliteZero’s tweet reads.
₿liteZero stated that most of the sanctioned Blender addresses were used by the Ronin hackers to receive funds after withdrawing from Centralised Exchanges. US Treasury had earlier sanctioned Blender Treasury for its involvement in the Ronin hack accusing it of enabling the process of $20.5 million in stolen funds.
According to the investigator, the withdrawn amount from the exchanges is $20.72 million. This is consistent with the “over $20.5 million” US treasury accusation earlier this year. The hackers took use of decentralized exchanges Uniswap and 1inch to convert around 113,000 ETH to renBTC. Taking advantage of Ren’s decentralized cross-chain bridge, the hackers transferred Ethereum to the Bitcoin network and unwrapped the renBTC into BTC.
Ronin Bridge hack at the end of March was one of the largest hackers in the world of crypto. At the time of the hack, it was found that the hacker reportedly used stolen private keys to sign transactions from five of the nine validator nodes on the network, including four of Sky Mavis’ own validators.
