Circle, Tether freeze over half of the $126M assets stolen from Multichain breach

Circle and Tether have blacklisted five addresses containing $67.5 million worth of assets stolen from Multichain on July 7.

USD Coin (USDC) issuer Circle froze three accounts holding $65 million worth of stolen assets, including 63 million USDC, PeckShield tweeted. Tether, which issues USDT stablecoin, froze another two accounts containing 2.53 million USDT, Fantom Foundation announced.

Furthermore, Daniele Sestagalli of the ICE crypto project said the protocol will burn the $1.85M of its ICE tokens stolen in the Multichain hack. Fantom Multichain users will be made whole and receive WAGMI tokens in an airdrop to replace the burned ICE tokens, he said.

With the blacklisting and burning of tokens, the exploiter is still likely to have access to the remaining stolen assets, worth over $56 million.

Massive breach

On July 7, Multichain halted operations after discovering a massive breach. The protocol reported that assets locked on its MPC smart contract had been “abnormally” transferred.

To move assets from one blockchain to another, users have to lock up assets on the MPC smart contract of the Multichain bridge. Once locked up, a wrapped version of the asset is minted on the blockchain the assets were transferred to. The exploiters of Multichain targeted and stole these assets that are locked up for transfer to other chains.

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

The Multichain team said it was “not sure” of the details of the events and is “currently investigating” the incident. PechShield estimated the value of the assets stolen in the exploit to be around $126 million.

At the time of writing, Multichain operations have remained shut for over 30 hours with “no confirmed resume time.”

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