Multichain hack: Circle and Tether freeze stolen assets worth $63M

Circle and Tether have taken action against five addresses that were found to contain stolen assets worth $67.5 million from the Multichain hack on July 7. Circle, the issuer of USD Coin (USDC), froze three accounts holding $65 million in stolen assets, including 63 million USDC, as reported by PeckShield. Additionally, Tether, the issuer of the USDT stablecoin, froze two accounts holding 2.53 million USDT, as announced by the Fantom Foundation.

In response to the hack, Daniele Sestagalli from the ICE crypto project stated that the protocol would burn the $1.85 million worth of ICE tokens that were stolen from Multichain. To compensate affected users, Fantom Multichain plans to distribute WAGMI tokens through an airdrop, replacing the burned ICE tokens.

Although measures have been taken to blacklist and burn the stolen tokens, it is important to note that the exploiter may still have access to the remaining stolen assets, which are valued at over $56 million.

Massive breach

Multichain experienced a significant security breach on July 7, which led to the suspension of its operations. The breach involved the abnormal transfer of assets from the locked MPC smart contract on the protocol.

In order to transfer assets from one blockchain to another, users must lock up their assets on the Multichain bridge's MPC smart contract. Once locked, a wrapped version of the asset is created on the target blockchain. The exploiters targeted and stole these locked-up assets intended for transfer to other chains.

According to Web3 Knowledge Graph Protocol 0xScope, the exploit impacted several blockchains, including Fantom, Dogechain, Moonriver, and Conflux.

The Multichain team has acknowledged the incident but has limited details at this time. They are actively investigating the breach. PeckShield estimates the value of the stolen assets in the exploit to be approximately $126 million.

As of now, Multichain operations have been suspended for more than 30 hours, and there is no confirmed timeframe for when operations will resume.