The U.S. government has managed to seize $30 million worth of funds stolen from play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, according to an announcement made by Erin Plante, senior director of investigations at blockchain sleuth Chainalysis.
The aforementioned sum represents roughly a tenth of stolen funds.
The confiscation was possible because of cooperation between law enforcement agencies and industry players.
Chainalysis says that its "advanced tracing techniques" were used in order to track down stolen funds.
As reported by U.Today, Ronin, a sidechain developed for the Ethereum blockchain, suffered a $625 million hacking incident.
In April, the U.S. government determined that Lazarus Group, a prominent cybercrime group linked to the North Korean government, was behind the attack.
Chainalysis has estimated that the North Korean hackers behind the Ronin heist leveraged 12,000 different crypto addresses in order to launder stolen funds. They made use of the recently sanctioned Tornado Cash protocol in order to mix stolen Ether in batches and swap it for Bitcoin. After mixing Bitcoin, the hackers would then use different services to cash it out.
According to Chainalysis, North Korean hackers have already stolen roughly $1 billion worth of crypto this year.
The rogue state, which is among the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world, relies on stolen crypto in order to finance its weapons programs.
Last year, North Korea stole roughly $400 million worth of cryptocurrencies.
Godfrey Benjamin
Vladislav Sopov
Dan Burgin