Stablecoin issuers Circle and Tether have frozen over $65 million in assets suspected of being related to a vulnerability in the cross-chain router protocol Multichain.
On July 6, there were unexplained large outflows from the Multichain MPC bridge.
According to the 0xScope knowledge graph protocol, three addresses that received at least $63.2 million in USD Coin (USDC) from Multichain are currently frozen.
Two addresses listed by Etherscan as “Multichain Suspicious Addresses” had over $2.5 million in Tether (USDT) frozen, according to a separate report from the Fantom Foundation.
On July 6, over $125 million worth of cryptocurrencies were withdrawn from multiple wallets, affecting the ecosystems of Multichain’s Fantom Bridge, Dogechain, Moonriver, Kava, and Conflux. Unknown is the reason for the abnormal transfer of assets.
Multichain announced on Twitter that it was suspending current services without providing a return date.
“Please do not use the Multichain bridging service at this time,” the message read, adding, “All bridge transactions will be stuck on the source chains.”
According to Fantom Protocol CEO Michael Kong, the transfer of funds “does not appear to be a normal hack” because the assets sent to the alleged attacker’s wallets were not sent elsewhere.
The investigation is ongoing.
Multichain facilitates the transfer of tokens between networks. Since its leadership vanished a few weeks ago, it has faced technical and operational difficulties.
Multiple incidents involving Multichain-like bridges were reported in 2022, making them among the most susceptible targets for crypto hackers.
A recent report by blockchain security company SlowMist revealed that over $30 billion in crypto assets have been compromised in hundreds of incidents since 2012.
Smart contract vulnerabilities, rug pulls, flash loan attacks, scams, and private key leaks are the top five most common types of cyberattacks.
One hundred eighteen exchange hacks, 217 Ethereum ecosystem hacks, 162 BNB Smart Chain ecosystem hacks, 119 EOS ecosystem hacks, and 85 hacks involving nonfungible tokens (NFTs) comprised the total number of incidents.
In the past decade, crypto exchange hacks have resulted in the loss of over $10 billion.