Multichain collapse — what creditors were owed and recovered (2023)

Multichain operated a cross-chain bridge that held user assets in custody across Ethereum, BNB Chain, Fantom, Polygon, Arbitrum, Moonriver, Dogecoin and other networks, secured by multi-party computation keys. On 6 July 2023 large unauthorised withdrawals began draining the bridge contracts. Chainalysis recorded more than US$125 million taken that day, roughly US$120 million from the Fantom bridge alone, plus US$6.8 million from Moonriver and US$666,000 from the Dogecoin bridge, which was about 85 percent of its deposits. Subsequent tallies across all affected chains put the total at more than US$210 million, the figure later used in the Singapore proceedings.

On 14 July 2023 the team announced it was ceasing operations, saying chief executive Zhaojun had been detained by Chinese police on 21 May and that servers, cloud accounts and operational keys were held under his personal accounts and had been confiscated. His sister moved remaining user assets to addresses under her control on 9 July and was detained on 13 July, leaving those assets' status unclear. Chainalysis noted the incident is consistent with either a key compromise or an insider rug pull and did not conclude which.

On 9 May 2025 Justice Kwek Mean Luck of the Singapore High Court granted Sonic Labs, formerly the Fantom Foundation, an order winding up Multichain Foundation, appointing KPMG Singapore as joint liquidators.