Multichain Experiences Destruction of Bridges, Asset Freezing

The issuers of the Circle and Tether stabilcoins froze assets worth more than $65 million related to the alleged hacking of the Multichain inter-grid router. This step follows an inexplicable outflow of funds worth more than $125 million from the Multichain MPC bridge on July 7.

On July 7, cryptocurrencies were removed from several wallets worth more than $125 million, which affected the bridge to Fantom from Multichain, as well as the Dogechain, Moonriver, Kava, and Conflux ecosystem. The reason for the abnormal transfer of assets remains unclear.

According to the 0xScope data analysis protocol, three addresses that received at least $63.2 million in the USDC from the Multichain bridge are now frozen and unavailable for transactions. In addition, Fantom Foundation reports that more than $2.5 million in Tether (USDT) was also frozen from two addresses that Etherscan marked as suspicious.

Multichain announced the suspension of current services without indicating the date of resumption. The representative of the Fantom protocol (FTM) claims that the transfer of funds is not like a regular hack, since the assets sent to the wallets of the alleged attacker were not moved anywhere else. The investigation is still ongoing.

Multichain allows users to transfer tokens between different networks. In addition, Multichain encountered technical and operational problems, since its general director and co-founder, known as Zhaojun, disappeared several weeks ago and is the only person who has access to the codes necessary to correct the protocol errors. This made Multichain more vulnerable to hackers who could exploit the vulnerabilities of smart contracts or manipulate transactions.