Ronin Network lost $9.8 million worth of Ether as a result of a potential exploit, adding to the increasing list of cryptocurrency hacks in 2024.

Ronin Network, one of the popular gaming blockchains, lost 3,996 Ether tokens, or more than $9.8 million worth of Ether.

However, the exploit may be from a white hat hacker, i.e. an ethical hacker. Such hackers perform exploits to find vulnerabilities in a crypto protocol and return the stolen funds after proving that the code is faulty. If the Ronin attacker is such an ethical hacker, the funds may return safely soon.

It is not uncommon for malicious hackers to return stolen funds. In May, a hacker returned $71 million worth of stolen cryptocurrency to the victim following a high-profile incident. There was a note of hope added to the incident, as it turned out that the exploit was most likely carried out by a maximal extractable value (MEV) bot. This software tool is used by validators to analyze arbitrage opportunities in decentralized finance.

Since MEV bots automatically implement arbitrage strategies, it is not uncommon for these bots to accidentally exploit a vulnerability in a protocol.

The $9.8 million transaction on the Ronin bridge was carried out by MEV bot “0x4ab”.

MEV bot sent a small portion of the funds, namely 3.9 Ether tokens, to the wallet named “0x952”, also known as “beaverbuild”, according to blockchain data.

MEV bots were also responsible for the $7.6 million Rho Markets exploit in July. The protocol recovered all lost funds within a week.

The hack was confirmed to be caused by a MEV bot via a message sent from the distributor of the Axie Infinity contract. As Cyvers noted in his August 6 X post:

“Hello, thank you for white hat recovering user funds today. Can we talk via Blockscan chat?”

Crypto hacks in 2024 may surpass 2023. The first quarter of 2024 saw $542.7 million worth of stolen funds, representing a 42% increase compared to the same period in 2023.

July was a particularly bad month in the industry. An unknown hacker stole more than $230 million from Indian cryptocurrency exchange WazirX, in the second-largest crypto hack of 2024 so far.

The hacker attempted to launder the stolen funds. On July 22, hacker WazirX collected $57 million worth of ETH into new crypto addresses, likely aiming to convert it into cash.

In July, $266 million worth of crypto was hacked in 16 separate attacks, with WazirX being the largest incident.