$625M worth of ETH drained on Axie Infinity's Ronin Network
As usual on HN there are a lot of useless comments in this thread that are ill-informed dunks on cryptocurrency, but the real story of what happened is actually about the hazards of <i>not</i> using a blockchain.<p>The system that was compromised was a &quot;proof of authority&quot; chain. These are different from proof of work or proof of stake chains that have hundreds or thousands of distinct validators. In a &quot;proof of authority&quot; chain, a usually small number of nodes, often run by closely associated entities have control over the chain. This is not a trustless system, and it does not have the same security and decentralization aspects that people usually associate with a blockchain. I would argue that it is not different than a trusted third party custodying the money.<p>In this case, the system was especially egregiously abused in that 4 of the &quot;validators&quot; were actually controlled by the same entity. This then required the hacker to compromise only two systems to steal the money.<p>The hacker is guilty of theft, but Axie Infinity, in my opinion, is guilty of falsely advertising their system as a blockchain.