Multichain collapse
The cross-chain bridge Multichain saw about $130M moved out of its contracts in July 2023 in unexplained 'abnormal' transfers. The team said CEO 'Zhaojun' had been detained by Chinese police in May 2023, taking the protocol's keys with him; Multichain ceased operations.
Also known as: Multichain, Anyswap, Zhaojun
Summary
Multichain was one of the largest cross-chain bridge protocols. In early July 2023, roughly $130 million was moved out of its Fantom, Moonriver, and Dogechain bridge contracts to unknown addresses in what the team called "abnormal" transfers, and it urged users to revoke approvals. [1][2]
Background and shutdown
The outflows followed weeks of dysfunction after CEO "Zhaojun" became unreachable. Multichain later said Zhaojun had been taken away by Chinese police on May 21, 2023, along with his devices, hardware wallets, and key material, and that his sister — who had moved remaining assets for "preservation" — was also detained. With access to its multi-party-computation keys lost, Multichain ceased operations. Chainalysis characterized the episode as a possible hack or insider rug pull. [2][3]
Bracketed numbers refer to the numbered sources listed below.
Sources (3)
See also
World Liberty Financial (WLFI) — Justin Sun token freezeProjectsWLFI, a DeFi project linked to Donald Trump and his family, blacklisted/froze the wallet of major investor Justin Sun in Sept 2025 — ~540–595M unlocked WLFI tokens (~$107M) plus ~2.4B locked. Sun sued, alleging an undisclosed admin 'blacklist backdoor'; WLFI denied it and threatened a countersuit. The dispute is ongoing.
Gala Games exploitTokensOn May 20, 2024 an attacker abused a privileged minter account on the GALA token contract to mint 5 billion GALA (≈$200M+ nominal) and dumped ~600M of them for ~$22M of ETH before Gala froze the address. Gala Games called it an internal access-control failure; the attacker later returned the ~$22M.
This page was last updated on Jun 15, 2026. View revision history.
