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There is a group of hackers in North Korea that the U.S. Treasury Department says is behind the $625 million hack of the Axie Infinity Ronin bridge. They are called Lazarus.

The agency added an Ethereum (ETH) address that had some of the stolen money to its list of people who can't do business with them. In the wallet as of April 14, there were about 148,000 ETH in it.

Chainalysis, a crypto analytics firm, said that the wallet got a lot of the stolen money. Elliptic said that about 14% of the stolen money has been laundered.

The Lazarus Group is a group of people.

During the last few years, the Lazarus group has been involved in a number of high-profile crypto heists. It was set up by the North Korean government.

Lazarus first came into the public eye in 2018 when he stole over $200 million worth of crypto from Gate.io. He has kept getting more and more famous.

At least $300 million worth of digital assets from KuCoin, a Singapore-based crypto exchange, were stolen by the group in 2020.

Lazarus has started to use "high-level techniques" to steal and hide crypto that was made from cyberattacks, and it's thought that the DPRK government is behind it. A recent report said that parts of the Lazarus group have been hacking to pay for North Korea's missile projects.

What is Ronin Network going to do about this?

Ronin Network said in a blog that it is adding more security measures to the Ronin bridge to make it less likely that something like this will happen again. The bridge should be back in use by the end of the month.

The Axie Infinity play-to-win game is played on the Ronin network, which is an Ethereum side chain. It hosts the game. Sky Mavis, the person who made the game, uses it because it has a better scaling option, which is important for a platform like Axie Infinity, which is why Sky Mavis used it.

Meanwhile, Axie Infinity got $150 million from its investors to pay back people who were harmed. Users can now withdraw money from Binance, even though the Ronin bridge isn't back up yet, but they can do so now.

CryptoSlate recently said that the platform lost a lot of users even before it was hacked, and that was before the hack.

What the US sanctions will do to the wallet

With the U.S. blacklisting the wallet that holds a lot of the stolen money, the group would have a much more difficult time converting the stolen money into cash.

The hacker has to use a centralized exchange to exchange the stolen money because it needs a lot of money.

There was a Treasury spokesperson who said this:

Identification of the wallet will make clear to other VC actors that by transacting with it, they risk exposure to U.S. sanctions. This demonstrates Treasury’s commitment to using all available authorities to disrupt malicious cyber actors and block ill-gotten criminal proceeds.

Because of this, it will now be impossible to move money from the wallet to an exchange that isn't run by the government without getting caught.