Trader exploits Multichain unlock to turn $280k into $1.9M; The inner workings of community suspects

A wallet address worth nearly $280,000 FTM turned into $1.9 million for temporarily exploiting the long-frozen multichain bridge, prompting insider speculation among the crypto community.

The Multichain Bridge, which had been frozen since July 2023, was temporarily reopened and closed again on November 1. The wallet took advantage of the momentarily open bridge to make millions of dollars in profit.

Looks like someone managed to withdraw ~$1MM from @MultichainOrg in the last ~3 hours, though it may have been frozen.

Withdraw 1.2MM$FTM from binance on @FantomFDN

— devops199fan ⌐◨-◨ (@devops199fan) November 1, 2023

Many fixed assets such as WBTC are worth less on the Phantom network than their original value on the Ethereum network. The wallet used the unlock to temporarily exchange their FTM tokens on the Fantom network for assets that had been compromised and transfer them to the Ether network, regaining their total value.

The wallet address starting at 0x4372 first withdraws 1.9 million FTM tokens from Binance, converts them to Bitcoin (BTC) on the Phantom Network, and then uses the BTC via Multichain Bridge to Ethereum and receives it.

28.4 WTC ($977,000) 357 ETH ($642,000) 298 thousand USDT

The wallet address later merged the assets and transferred them to Binance. However, beyond the mentioned wallet address, the crypto community focused on the “Multichain Implementer”.

Multichain Fantom Bridge was mined for over $126 million in July earlier this year. At the time, several ERC-20 assets, 7,214 bundles of Ether (WETH) tokens worth $13.6 million, 1,024 bundles of Bitcoin (WBTC) worth $31 million and $58 million in US Dollar Coin (USDC) were poured.

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Many questioned the timing of the trade at X (formerly Twitter), questioning whether the wallet was an insider since it was the only user of the bridge opening. A user wrote that Multichain, which had been closed for more than 120 days, has been reopened for a limited period of time for the benefit of its owner to execute only these special transactions.

Here's the thing.

The multi-chain breakdown bridge is closed so this cannot be done

Magically the bridge opened today so this guy was able to buy BTC for phantom cheap and resell it for eth.

— CryptoDinduz (@CryptoDinduz) November 1, 2023

However, OxScope, an on-chain analysis firm, told Cointelegraph that there is currently no concrete evidence of insider dealing by the trader.

“When we checked Multichain, we noticed that it still has some active chains like KCC, Moonriver, and Moonbeam. Maybe the team behind Multichain is trying to restart their operations.”

There was no official statement from Fantom Network or Multichain at the time of publication

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