Multichain Suspends Operations After Fantom Bridge Sees $122 Million Outflows

On Thursday, July 6, the multichain bridge witnessed abnormally large outflows in what seems to be a multi-million dollar exploit of the platform. A few hours later, Multichain protocol announced that they have suspended the operations.

As per reports, multi-chain assets worth a staggering $125 million residing on the cross-chain protocol Multichain outflowed several different wallets. The Fantom bridge seems to face the biggest exploit of $122 million with its entire holdings in wBTC, USDC, USDT, and other altcoins moving out.

Soon after, the Multichain Protocol announced that they are investigating the matter. Through its official Twitter handle, it noted:

The lockup assets on the Multichain MPC address have been moved to an unknown address abnormally. The team is not sure what happened and is currently investigating. It is recommended that all users suspend the use of Multichain services and revoke all contract approvals related to Multichain.

Multichain has been facing difficulties for more than a month due to technical issues and the absence of its CEO. Concerns arose on crypto Twitter when three unexplained outflows occurred from Multichain’s Fantom, Moonriver, and Dogecoin bridge contracts, leading to fears of a possible hack.

MultiChain Bridge Under Attack

Citing data from deExplorer, popular crypto analyst Colin Wu reported that users some are using DLN Trade to exchange assets on the Fantom chain for assets on other chains at a discounted rate. Recent transactions show that Fantom 1 USDC can be converted into BSC 0.9 USDC, Polygon 0.88 USDT, and more, with approximately a 10% discount.

A day before, crypto exchange Binance also suspended deposits and withdrawals for eight altcoins linked to the Multichain protocol. Binance has announced that it will stop supporting several altcoin projects including Alchemy Pay (ACH) on the BNB Smart Chain, Spell Token (SPELL) on the Avalanche C-Chain, and six other projects with lower market caps on Ethereum and Fantom.