Multichain’s $65M in Assets Frozen by Tether on Crypto.com

Circle and Tether Freeze Over $65 Million in Assets

Circle and Tether, two of the most prominent stablecoin issuers, have frozen more than $65 million in assets that are linked to the alleged abuse of the cross-chain router protocol Multichain. This follows the sudden outflows of a large sum of money from the Multichain MPC bridge on July 6.

According to the 0xScope knowledge graph protocol, three addresses that received a total of $63.2 million in USD Coin (USDC) from Multichain have now been frozen. Additionally, the Fantom Foundation reported that more than $2.5 million in Tether (USDT) has been frozen from two addresses listed on Etherscan as “Multichain Suspicious Addresses”.

On July 6, over $125 million worth of cryptocurrency was withdrawn from multiple wallets, including Multichain’s Fantom bridge, as well as Dogechain, Moonriver, Kava, and Conflux’s ecosystems. The cause of the abnormal transfer of assets remains unknown.

Multichain took to Twitter to announce that it was suspending its services, without specifying a return date. “Please don’t use the Multichain bridging service now,” the firm warned, adding that “all bridge transactions will be stuck on the source chains.”

Cryptocurrency Exchanges and Hacks

Fantom protocol CEO Michael Kong recently stated that the transfer of funds did not appear to be a normal hack, as the assets sent to the alleged attacker’s wallets were not transferred elsewhere. Investigations are still ongoing.

Multichain, a platform which allows users to transfer tokens between different networks, has been facing technical and operational challenges since its leadership vanished a few weeks ago. Crypto hackers have taken advantage of bridges like Multichain, with several incidents reported in 2022.

SlowMist, a blockchain security firm, recently revealed that since 2012, over $30 billion in crypto assets has been hacked in hundreds of incidents. The most common hacks include rug pulls, flash loan attacks, scams, private key leaks, and vulnerabilities in smart contracts. Exchange hacks alone have resulted in a loss of over $10 billion in crypto assets.

Crypto.com, FTX Crypto, ACH Crypto, XMON Crypto, FED Crypto, and Shiba Crypto Today are just a few of the many crypto coins which have been affected by these hacks.