Stablecoins to the rescue of Multichain. Last week, the DeFi bridge protocol Multichain was the target of a hack. In total, 126 million dollars were stolen on several blockchains. Now, the protocol has surrounded itself with several prominent players in the ecosystem to try to track down the hacker and save some of the funds.
$62.5 million saved
Following his attack, the hacker recovered several million dollars in stablecoins. Thus, the latter had more than $60 million in USDC as well as several more millions of dollars in USDT.
In front of this situation, Circle And Tetherthe companies behind the two stablecoins reacted quickly.
Indeed, on July 7, the Fantom Foundation announced that the company Circle had frozen over $60 million in USDC on the hacker’s address.
The next day, it was Tether’s turn to do the same. Thus, the company for its part froze 2.5 million USDT.
As a result, half of the assets stolen by the hacker could be secured by Circle and Tether. This brings the damage to just over $60 million.
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The origin of the hack still opaque
Despite this rescue in extremis from Circle and Tether, the situation is far from being good.
Since the hack, Multichain teams have had minimal to insufficient communication. Thus, the causes of the hack are still uncertain and this does not work in favor of Multichain.
Indeed, after analysis of the transactions, many observers suggested that the hacker had been able to directly control the addresses of the protocol. This leads to two theories:
- A flaw in the infrastructure’s back-end allowed an attacker to access the protocol’s private keys;
- One of the members of the protocol took advantage of his place to extort the protocol.
Either way, the community is eagerly awaiting Multichain’s explanation of this disaster.
Unfortunately, this is not a first for Multichain. In October 2021, the protocol then still known as Anyswap had suffered $7.9 million in losses in a first hack. A few months later, in January 2022, the protocol was the target of a second attack during which more than 400 ETH were stolen.
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