Nearly 5,505 ETH, or $10M of the $625M Ronin Exploit, Is on the Move

Addresses connected to Ronin Bridge’s $625 million exploit show upward of $10 million worth of ether (ETH) were on the move in Asian morning hours on Wednesday, as per blockchain data.

One address was funded by the Ronin exploiter this morning for 5,505 ether, with the funds coming in from another wallet that was directly funded by the main exploiter address, blockchain data shows.

Starting in the wee hours on Wednesday, the address sent ether in batches of 100 to Tornado, an on-chain privacy exchange. Over 55 transactions were made, the data shows.

The wallet contains just 3.4 ether – valued at over $7,000 – at writing time, suggesting most of the funds were transferred to Tornado and sold.

Tornado enhances the privacy of transactions by breaking the on-chain link between a source and a destination address. This allows exploiters and hackers to mask their addresses while withdrawing illicitly gained funds.

Wednesday’s moves follow the aggressive selling of stolen ether in early April, when the exploiters moved as much as 21,000 ether over several transactions to Tornado. The stash was valued at over $65 million at the time.

Ronin Network was hit by a $625 million exploit in March that affected Ronin validator nodes for Sky Mavis, the publisher of the popular Axie Infinity game, and the Axie decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). The attacker “used hacked private keys in order to forge fake withdrawals,” Ronin said in a blog post at the time, explaining the exploit.

U.S. officials have previously tied the exploiter address to North Korea’s infamous “Lazarus” group. CoinDesk independently confirmed the sanctioned addresses were linked to Ronin exploiters, as reported.

Read More: Axie Infinity’s Ronin Network Suffers $625M Exploit