$65M Frozen in Multichain Exploit: Circle and Tether Clamp Down

• Circle and Tether have frozen $65 million in assets tied to a suspected exploit of Multichain, a cross-chain router protocol.
• Multiple ecosystems have been affected by the incident on July 6, which involved the withdrawal of over $125 million worth of cryptocurrencies from multiple wallets.
• Multichain has suspended services amid uncertainty as investigations are ongoing to uncover what caused the abnormal asset transfers.

Suspected Exploit Affects Multiple Ecosystems

Stablecoin issuers Circle and Tether have taken action by freezing more than $65 million in assets related to a suspected exploit of Multichain, a cross-chain router protocol. The decision was made after significant unexplained outflows occurred from the Multichain MPC bridge on July 6th, resulting in over $125 million worth of cryptocurrency being withdrawn from multiple wallets across various ecosystems including Dogechain, Moonriver, Kava and Conflux.

$63.2 Million USD Coin Frozen

0xScope, a knowledge graph protocol identified three addresses that received a substantial amount of $63.2 million in USD Coin from Multichain and these addresses have now been frozen. Additionally, two addresses labeled as “Multichain Suspicious Addresses” on Etherscan had over $2.5 million in Tether frozen by Tether itself following the incident.

Multichain Suspends Services

As investigations are still ongoing to uncover what caused the abnormal asset transfers, Multichain took to Twitter to announce their temporary suspension of services with no specified return date while advising users against utilizing their bridging service as all transactions would be stuck on source chains for an indefinite amount of time.

Unclear Cause for Abnormal Asset Transfers

Fantom Foundation CEO Michael Kong has stated that it does not appear that this situation is typical hack behavior as nothing further has been done with the assets sent to the alleged attacker’s wallets . Ongoing investigations aim to shed light on this perplexing situation in order to determine who is responsible for this exploit and how they managed it in such an effective way.

Action Taken by Circle and Tether

Circle and Tether have acted quickly by freezing more than $65 million dollars in assets related to this exploit due to its potential impact on multiple ecosystems across different blockchains if left uncorrected or unnoticed any longer . This incident serves as evidence that despite developments within blockchain security , there is still room for improvement if we want our financial systems secured against future attacks.