Victims of the Axie Infinity hack will be reimbursed, but at the current market value of Ethereum.
Sky Mavis, the developer of the money-making game Axie Infinity, said it would begin to reimburse victims of a hack last March that saw the hackers walk away with $617 million in assets. The attackers managed to get hold of $25.5 million in US dollars (a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar) and 173,600 Ether, worth about $591.2 million at the time. The FBI said North Korean groups were behind the attack.
Victims of the Axie Infinity hack will be compensated
Affected players will be able to withdraw one Ether token for every Ether lost in this hack, Sky Mavis Bloomberg reported, without mentioning a USDC refund. However, as is the case with many other cryptocurrencies, the value of Ethereum has dropped significantly since March.
And because of this, Sky MAvis will only refund users about $216.5 million. It is possible that the value of Ethereum will obviously rise again, but at the time of this writing, the affected users will 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 pay victims. The developer intends to pay them off on June 28 when they restart the Ronin software bridge that the hackers have targeted.
Axie Infinity is considered the most popular play-to-earn game. Players collect and create NFTs depicting creatures fighting each other, just like in a Pokémon game. These NFTs can be traded to other players with a Sky Mavis commission. By February, Axie Infinity had made $4 billion in NFT sales.
However, the NFT market is far from exploding and this is having an obvious impact on Axie Infinity. The number of daily active players, which stood at 2.7 million in November, dropped by a quarter by the end of May, according to Bloomberg.