Axie Infinity raises $150M to help reimburse hacked user funds

Enlarge / New funds to replace Sky Mavis' hacked funds are... in the cards.

Sky Mavis, the developer of non-fungible token-based game Axie Infinity, announced Wednesday that it has raised an additional $150 million in venture funding. The company says the money "will be used to reimburse user funds affected by the Ronin Validator Hack," which purged over $625 million worth of crypto from the Axie Infinity ecosystem last month.

The new funding round is being led by major crypto exchange Binance, which has also stepped in to provide Ethereum withdrawals and deposits to Axie Infinity players for the time being. The "bridge" between Axie Infinity's Ronin sidechain and the decentralized Ethereum blockchain remains closed, however, pending "a security upgrade and several audits, which can take several weeks," Sky Mavis wrote.

Beyond the $150 million cash infusion, Sky Mavis said it will use "Sky Mavis and Axie balance sheet funds [to] ensure that all users are reimbursed." The remaining $475 million needed to make the marketplace whole could be a significant drag for Sky Mavis, which raised $152 million last October in a deal that valued the company at nearly $3 billion.

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