Quick take:
- Binance claims that Sky Mavis is now in a position to restore funds without significant investment from the exchange.
- Binance will invest an undisclosed sum in Sky Mavis.
- The sum will be substantially less than the initial commitment.
Binance is no longer leading the fundraise for Axie Infinity creator, Sky Mavis, according to The Block.
The fundraise was announced in April after the game developer’s Ronin validator nodes and Axie DAO validator nodes suffered a security breach, which resulted in 173,600 Ethereum and 25.5 million USDC (worth $625 million at the time) drained from the Ronin bridge.
Following the incident, Binance announced that it led a funding round to raise $150 million to restore stolen funds on the Ronin Bridge and reimburse victims affected by the hack. Major Web3 venture capital firms such as Animoca Brands, a16z, Dialectic, Paradigm and Accel also participated in the round.
It appears that the funding round is still ongoing as Binance is now backing out of the deal. Binance claims that Sky Mavis is now in a position to restore funds without significant investment from the exchange.
“Since April, Sky Mavis has been able to both stabilise and recover funds. As a result, Sky Mavis is now in a position to cover users’ funds without significant investment from Binance,” a Binance spokesperson told The Block. “To this end, Binance will no longer be the lead investor in Sky Mavis. Binance though will continue to support Sky Mavis.”
The exchange will still invest an undisclosed sum in Sky Mavis, but it will be substantially less than the initial commitment, a person familiar with the matter told The Block.
Sky Mavis said that the victims of the hack were being reimbursed starting on Jun 28, along with the relaunch of the Ronin Network on the same day. A Sky Mavis spokesperson said that all users had been reimbursed by the time the Ronin Network reopened.
“Sky Mavis is in a solid financial position with 150 employees and is still hiring,” said the Sky Mavis spokesperson. “All investors who committed to the round are still participating.”
On Jul 6, it was revealed that North Korean hacker group Lazarus may have used a fake LinkedIn job offer to lure Sky Mavis employees, one of which who was a senior engineer clicked open a job offer in the form of a PDF document that gave hackers access to Sky Mavis’ IT infrastructure and validator nodes.
The employee no longer works at Sky Mavis.
Stay up to date:
