Axie Infinity to reimburse victims of its $622M hack
Remember last month’s $622M hack of Axie Infinity ’s Ronin sidechain?
It seems like Sky Mavis, the company behind Axie, is indeed willing to reimburse users’ stolen funds. The amount is huge, however, and to do that the company decided to not only tap the existing company assets, but also organise a fundraising round.
?The $150 round led by Binance, Animoca Brands and A16z happened days after the hack and witnessed to the trust the industry leaders have in Sky Mavis team.
? However, even before the hack things were not going so well for Axie Infinity: the game’s on-chain activity has decreased from its peak of 55k daily unique active wallets in January to 22k in March. The decrease is mostly due to the changes in the SLP (game token) rewards ratio, which was introduced to make it more sustainable in the long term, but hurt the short-term profitability.
Sky Mavis and their investors focus on a bigger picture though. The team’s decision not to tap into the Axie community treasury, now holding over $1Bn of assets, speaks to the long-term thinking.
Also, the company has recently released Axie Infinity : Origin in early access, a game mode with a new, “more beautiful” battle system and free starter Axies.
We do hope Sky Mavis can learn on its mistakes (tackling the centralization issue among others), and if so, it may still be too early to dismiss the play-to-earn pioneer ?
