- July 11, 2023
- Posted by: [email protected]
- Category:
Multichain’s operations have come to a halt following an unexplained transfer of millions of dollars’ worth of crypto assets on July 6. In response to suspicious activity involving the cross-chain router protocol Multichain, stablecoin issuers Circle and Tether have frozen over $65 million in connected assets. The incident involved significant outflows from the Multichain MPC bridge, prompting the freezing of three addresses that received at least $63.2 million in USD Coin (USDC) and two addresses that held over $2.5 million in Tether (USDT). Cryptocurrencies totaling more than $125 million were withdrawn from various wallets, affecting Multichain’s Fantom bridge, as well as ecosystems such as Dogechain, Moonriver, Kava, and Conflux.
Multichain announced its suspension of services on Twitter, advising users not to employ the bridging service and warning that all bridge transactions would be stuck on the source chains. The cause behind the abnormal asset transfer remains unclear, and investigations are ongoing. Although Multichain has faced technical and operational difficulties since its leadership vanished a few weeks ago, the transfer of funds appears to be atypical, as the assets were not further transferred from the alleged attacker’s wallets.
Bridges like Multichain have become prime targets for crypto hackers due to their vulnerabilities, with numerous incidents reported in 2022. A recent report by blockchain security firm SlowMist highlights 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. Specifically, exchange hacks constituted 118 incidents, Ethereum ecosystem hacks totaled 217, BNB Smart Chain ecosystem hacks reached 162, EOS ecosystem hacks accounted for 119, and nonfungible token (NFT) hacks amounted to 85. Over the past decade, crypto exchange hacks alone have resulted in a loss of over $10 billion.
