Multichain shut down after Fantom, Moonriver and Dogechain bridges hacked

New incident for the cross-chain protocol Multichainwhich putstop its services the July 7th following suspicious transactions. The team has since confirmed a hack at an estimated cost of 127 million dollars.

Since May, Multichain has continued to operate at sight. At that time, transactions were frozen and several interchain gateways rendered inaccessible. To explain these failures, the company invoked force majeure.

At the end of last week, the protocol was alerted by blockchain security startup PeckShield to a suspicious activity on his bridge Fantom. Asset disposals totalling an estimated $102 million.

127 million in misappropriated tokens

On Friday, Multichain’s developers said they were investigating. In order to carry out these analyses, they put shut down the.

All users are advised to suspend use of Multichain services and revoke all Multichain-related contract approvals,” they recommended.

Several protocol bridges were affected, including Fantom, Moonriver and Dogechain. Numerous tokens were transferred to other addresses for a total of around $130 million.

Multichain has since confirmed the hack of its services. Lookonchain, a specialist in on-chain analysis, details the transfers made from Multichain.

According to the data collected, these include 62 million in USDC, 31 million in wBTC and 13 million in wETH were misappropriated.

Approximately $127M of locked assets on #Multichain were abnormally moved to 6 addresses about 7 hours ago,” Lookonchain wrote in a tweet published on July 7.

Bridges, a persistent flaw in the ecosystem

On the same day, the stolen tokens had not yet been transferred to exchanges or mixers such as Tornado Cash. Nevertheless, the tokens affected by the hack recorded significant declines. Fantom (FTM) lost almost 10%.

The Fantom Foundation took its distance from Multichain. “For the avoidance of doubt, FTM has never been issued or managed by Multichain, so wFTM, FTM ERC-20, and FTM on Opera are not affected.”

The Dogechain developers responded by stating that the network was not directly impacted. They recommended that users revoke access authorizations to Multichain’s Dogechain bridge.

This episode once again highlights the vulnerability of bridges, essential components for transferring tokens between different networks. DefiLlama estimates more than 2.5 billion dollars the damage caused by successful hacks on bridges.