Assets linked to the alleged exploitation of the cross-chain router system Multichain have been blocked for over $65 million by stablecoin issuers Circle and Tether. The action was taken in response to huge, unexplained outflows from the Multichain MPC bridge on July 6. Three addresses that received at least $63.2 million in USD coin from Multichain have been locked, according to the knowledge graph protocol 0xScope. More than $2.5 million in Tether was also frozen from two addresses flagged by Etherscan as “Multichain Suspicious Addresses,” according to another report from the Fantom Foundation.
On July 6, about $125 million worth of cryptocurrencies were taken out of numerous wallets, damaging the ecosystems of Dogechain, Moonriver, Kava, and Conflux as well as Multichain’s Fantom bridge. Uncertainty surrounds the origin of the anomalous asset transfer.
Multichain tweeted that it was suspending its present services without providing an ETA. It stated, “Please don’t use the Multichain bridging service now,” adding that “all bridge transactions will be stuck on the source chains.”
According to reports, Michael Kong, the CEO of Fantom Protocol, stated that the movement of money “does not appear to be a normal hack” because the resources supplied to the accused attacker’s wallets were not moved to another location. Investigations continue to be conducted.
Users can move tokens between networks thanks to multichain. Since its leadership disappeared a few weeks ago, it has been dealing with technical and operational issues. With multiple cases documented in 2022, bridges like Multichain are among the most vulnerable targets for cryptocurrency hackers.
Over $30 billion in cryptocurrency assets have been stolen in hundreds of events since 2012, according to a recent report from the blockchain security company SlowMist. Smart contract weaknesses, rug pulls, flash loan assaults, frauds, and private key breaches are the top five most often hacks.
The overall number of events included 85 attacks involving nonfungible tokens, 118 exchange hacks, 217 Ethereum ecosystem hacks, 162 BNB Smart Chain ecosystem hacks, and 119 EOS ecosystem breaches. Over the previous ten years, hacking on cryptocurrency exchanges have resulted in a total loss of over $10 billion.