BTC Mining Revenue Remains Stable; Ronin Network Suffers Largest Ever Exploit

Chart of the Day 





On Wednesday, the broader crypto market experienced a slight correction. As of the time of writing, BTC is consolidating above the $47k handle after a marginal dip of 0.35% over the last 24 hours. The largest crypto by market cap seems to be struggling to gain the necessary momentum to break above the $48k resistance zone. However, and in some better news, a downside correction for BTC may also be limited to the $46k level as a key breakout pattern with its lower bound near the $46.3k mark has formed on the hourly chart.

In a similar vein, ETH is also treading above the $3,350 mark after posting a 0.25% loss from 24 hours ago. Most major altcoins have flipped red with the exception of LUNA and SOL, while AXS has also shed 6% of its market value due to the Ronin sidechain exploit. Despite the recent spike in volatility, the BTC-denominated mining revenue remains relatively stable on the back of some negative difficulty on-chain adjustments. Meanwhile, the futures basis across most major exchanges has also seen a significant uptrend in the last seven days, as leveraged traders seem to be embracing the price rally with growing optimism. 





Talk of the Town 





On Tuesday, Axie Infinity's Ronin Network announced that they have been exploited for over $625 million worth of USDC and ETH on March 23, 2022. Sky Mavis, the publisher of the popular Axie Infinity game, revealed that the attacker used several "hacked private keys" to forge transactions in order to drain huge amounts of funds from Ronin's bridge. According to Ronin's blog post, the validator nodes for both Sky Mavis and the Axie DAO were compromised during the attack. Sky Mavis has since halted all operations on the bridge that connects Ronin to both the Ethereum mainnet and Katana, the decentralized exchange that runs on Ronin. Axie Infinity's co-founder, Jeff Zirlin, described the incident as "one of the bigger hacks in history" during an interview at the NFT LA conference.