Stablecoin issuers Circle and Tether have taken action to freeze assets totaling more than $65 million in connection with a suspected exploit of the cross-chain router protocol Multichain.
The decision came after a series of large outflows from the Multichain MPC bridge on July 6 left many questions unanswered.
0xScope, a knowledge graph protocol, has identified three addresses that received at least $63.2 million worth of USD Coin (USDC) from Multichain, and these addresses 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 as “Multichain Suspicious Addresses” on Etherscan.
READ MORE: Investors Chase Second Coming of Popular Coins, Such As Pepe 2.0 and Floki 2.0
On July 6, a total of over $125 million worth of cryptocurrencies was withdrawn from multiple wallets, affecting the ecosystems of Multichain’s Fantom bridge, Dogechain, Moonriver, Kava, and Conflux.
The reason behind this abnormal transfer of assets remains unclear.
Multichain took to Twitter to announce the suspension of its services, without specifying when they will be reinstated.
The company urged users not to utilize the Multichain bridging service, cautioning that all bridge transactions would be stuck on the source chains.
According to Fantom protocol CEO Michael Kong, the fund transfer does not appear to be a typical hack, as the assets sent to the alleged attacker’s wallets have not been moved elsewhere. Investigations into the incident are ongoing.
Multichain is a platform that enables the transfer of tokens between different networks.
However, it has encountered technical and operational difficulties since its leadership vanished a few weeks ago.
Such bridge protocols like Multichain are highly susceptible to attacks by crypto hackers, with numerous incidents reported in 2022.
A recent report from blockchain security firm SlowMist disclosed that since 2012, more than $30 billion in crypto assets has been hacked in hundreds of incidents.
The most common types of hacks include smart contract vulnerabilities, rug pulls, flash loan attacks, scams, and private key leaks.
Out of the total incidents, there were 118 exchange hacks, 217 hacks in the Ethereum ecosystem, 162 hacks in the BNB Smart Chain ecosystem, 119 hacks in the EOS ecosystem, and 85 hacks involving nonfungible tokens.
Over the past decade, crypto exchange hacks alone have resulted in losses exceeding $10 billion.
