Sky Mavis, the company behind the popular play-to-earn (P2E) game Axie Infinity, has announced that, with the assistance of Norwegian authorities, it has recovered $5.7 million from the notorious Ronin Bridge incident of 2022.

On June 7, Sky Mavis announced that Norway’s central unit for fighting economic and environmental crimes, called “Økokrim,” froze and returned $5.7 million in funds from the Ronin Bridge hack.

Sky Mavis said the efforts required coordination between law enforcement, lawyers, accountants and blockchain forensic teams like Chainalysis.

The blockchain gaming firm publicly thanked the Norwegian government and the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for tracking the funds and recovering the assets.

Some of the funds will be used to cover expenses

The gaming company said the newly recovered funds would return to the Axie Infinity (AXS) treasury. However, a portion of the funds will be allocated to cover the expenses of those who put in effort to recover them. They wrote:

“15% of recovered assets will be used to cover costs and expenses incurred by those involved in the recovery efforts. The remaining 85% of recovered funds will be deposited into the Axie Infinity treasury.”

Meanwhile, the company announced that in addition to the $5.7 million in recovered funds, law enforcement has frozen an additional $40 million in digital assets. The company stated that recovering these assets will take time, and they do not yet have a specific timetable for their return.

Related: Japanese crypto exchange raises $320M to recover funds after major hack

The Ronin bridge incident

The Ronin Bridge hack is still one of the costliest security breaches in the cryptocurrency space. On March 29, 2022, the Ronin network reported a security breach affecting its Ronin Bridge, a protocol that facilitates asset transfers from Ethereum to Ronin.

The exploit saw 173,600 Ether (ETH) and 25.5 million USD Coin (USDC) drained in two transactions when the attacker used hacked private keys to fake withdrawals. At the time, the assets were worth $612 million.

Sky Mavis raised $150 million to reimburse affected users in April 2022 through a funding round led by crypto exchange Binance. Since then, the Axie Infinity creators have bolstered the Ronin blockchain’s security by teaming up with more validators like Google Cloud.

Despite the incident, Ronin remains a top blockchain for nonfungible tokens (NFTs). Currently, it is ranked third among the top blockchains by all-time NFT sales, trailing behind Solana and Ethereum.

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