Bridges Broken, Assets Frozen – That’s What’s Happening With Multichain

Stablecoin Issuers Circle and Tether Freeze Over $65M in Assets Related to Alleged Gateway Protocol Hack Multichain. This step follows an unexplained outflow of funds in excess of $125 million. from the Multichain MPC bridge on July 7th.

On July 7, more than $125 million worth of cryptocurrencies were withdrawn from several wallets, which affected the bridge to Fantom from Multichain, as well as the Dogechain, Moonriver, Kava and Conflux ecosystems.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

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

Multichain has announced a suspension of current services with no resumption date given. A spokesperson for the Fantom Protocol (FTM) claims that the transfer of funds “does not look like a normal hack,” as 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 has run into technical and operational problems since its CEO and co-founder, known as Zhaojun, disappeared a few weeks ago and is the only person with access to the codes needed to fix protocol errors. This made Multichain more vulnerable to attacks by hackers who could exploit smart contract vulnerabilities or manipulate transactions.