Quote:While the gaming mainstream remains deeply distrustful of anything associated with crypto, one of the apparent successes was Axie Infinity: a Pokémon-style game built around pets called Axies that can be traded, battled and, of course, are claimed to have some sort of 'real' value. Axie Infinity's ecosystem was valued in the hundreds of millions. Then, on March 23, the company's 'sidechain' Ronin network was hacked, with the perpetrators stealing Ethereum and USDC stablecoins that were at the time valued in the region of $600 million.

The game's developer Sky Mavis was forced to acknowledge the hack and disable token withdrawal. But not before Trung Nguyen, the CEO and co-founder, transferred $3 million worth of AXS, Axie's main currency, from the game's blockchain into Binance, a crypto exchange.

I appreciate that this is becoming a word salad of crypto terminology. The important point is that, when the outside world was unaware of the hack, or that trading in the game would be suspended as a result, a key inside player transferred a lot of value out of the Axie ecosystem. Oh: and no-one should have realised.