Google Could Team Up with Sky Mavis to Prevent Another Ronin Hack

Back in March, the Ronin network was breached, causing losses estimated above $600 million. At the time of the event, Sky Mavis only had 9 validator nodes; now, they have 18, including Google Cloud, to prevent another incident like this.

Alex Harutunian

Sep 20, 2022 - 1 min read

On September 9, Ronin announced in a blog post that Sky Mavis has entered into a multi-year collaboration with Google Cloud in order to enhance security and pursue its vision of building a rewarding gaming universe after the notorious hack earlier in the Spring. Google Cloud will be an independent enterprise validator in the Ronin node pool together with Animoca Brands, DappRadar and Nansen.

“By running and overseeing a validator node on the Ronin network, Google Cloud will contribute to its collective security and governance, while taking on the role of monitoring validator uptimes.”

Viet Anh Ho, the Co-founder and Chief technology Officer at Sky Mavis, mentioned that one of the reasons for the collaboration is Google Cloud’s autoscaling and automated application deployment capabilities.

“These free up our engineers to break new ground and delight users with interrelated and immersive experiences — all without disrupting active gameplay.”

Sky Mavis has also chosen Google Cloud for its content delivery network’s advanced load balancing and caching features to deliver smooth experiences to users anywhere, even in rural areas, on any device.

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Sky Mavis operates the popular Axie Infinity NFT game.

Ruma Balasubramanian, Managing Director of Southeast Asia at Google Cloud, commented that they look forward to working with Sky Mavis “to accelerate its product roadmap and grow the Ronin network with secure infrastructure as its core”.

As Sky Mavis aims to hire 100 more people over the next 18 months, it has adopted Google Workspace to continue attracting world-class talent and allow its centralized team of engineers in Vietnam to easily connect, create, and collaborate with their colleagues across the world.

On the one hand, this looks like a fruitful collaboration for both sides in terms of security, but on the other hand, teaming up with a global centralised company such as Google seems like a disingenuous move in the Web3 world. However, Sky Mavis is not the only one: Binance’s smart contract blockchain platform, BNB Chain, has recently partnered with Google Cloud to bolster Web3 and blockchain startups. Both collaborations will probably be heavily criticised. We will observe how the story evolves.