Axie Infinity postponed the launch of its Origin play-to-earn game by a week after hackers stole roughly US$600mil of cryptocurrencies from a software system underpinning the popular online gaming world.

Axie Infinity: Origin will now be available on April 7 on the Mavis Hub, according to a post on Substack on Thursday. Origin was built to be approachable for a mainstream, worldwide audience, Axie had said in a post in February.

"While the game is ready for soft launch, we’ve decided to give the engineering and security team an additional window of time to deeply investigate all implications of the breach, before asking for their full attention to support Origin’s release,” the post said.

The hack on the Ronin Bridge that supports Axie Infinity is one of the biggest crypto attacks to date. Computers known as nodes operated by Axie Infinity maker Sky Mavis and the Axie DAO that support the bridge - software that lets people convert tokens into ones that can be used on another network - were breached, with the hackers siphoning away 173,600 Ether and 25.5 million USDC tokens in two transactions.

Sky Mavis has said it plans to reimburse online gamers who lost funds. The Ronin Network has said it’s in the process of conducting a thorough investigation, working with blockchain researcher Chainalysis to monitor the stolen funds and CrowdStrike to handle forensics.

 - Bloomberg