Multichain Developers Confirm Exploit, Caution Users to Suspend Services and Revoke Contract Approvals

Multichain Developers Confirm Exploit, Caution Users to Suspend Services and Revoke Contract Approvals

In an announcement made early on Friday, developers strongly advised all users to suspend the utilization of Multichain services and revoke any contract approvals associated with the platform. This cautionary statement came after the confirmation of an exploit that resulted in the impact of approximately $130 million worth of user-supplied tokens, as stated in Friday’s tweets. The developers also mentioned that they are presently conducting an investigation into the matter.

The developers emphasized, “It is recommended that all users suspend the use of Multichain services and revoke all contract approvals related to Multichain. The Multichain service is currently halted, and all bridge transactions will be stuck on the source chains. There is no confirmed timeline for resuming the service.”

Following this announcement, the value of Multichain’s MULTI tokens experienced a decline of 13% within the past 24 hours.

Bridges like Multichain serve as crucial components in the crypto ecosystem, enabling the transfer of tokens across different networks. However, they are also highly vulnerable, with bridge-based exploits leading to losses of approximately $2.66 billion over recent years, according to DefiLlama.

Late on Thursday, Multichain encountered outflows totaling nearly $130 million in various tokens across its bridges on blockchain networks such as Fantom, Moonriver, and Dogechain.

Lookonchain, an on-chain analytics firm, estimated that the largest stolen amounts consisted of $62 million worth of USD coin (USDC), $31 million in wrapped bitcoin (wBTC), and $13 million in wrapped ether (wETH), based on blockchain data.

As of Friday afternoon in Asia, the stolen tokens had not been sent to exchanges or passed through mixing services like Tornado Cash.

Simultaneously, related tokens experienced a decline in value over the past 24 hours amidst a broader market downturn.

Fantom (FTM) witnessed a drop of 9.9%, despite developers addressing concerns raised by community members. The Fantom Foundation clarified via a tweet, stating, “For the avoidance of doubt, FTM was never issued or managed by Multichain, so wFTM, FTM ERC-20, and FTM on Opera are not affected.”