Tether has frozen $2.53 million worth of USDT on two Ethereum addresses that were linked to a recent hack of the Multichain protocol.
Etherscan is investigating two addresses for suspicious activity.
Tether’s move comes after $130 million worth of assets were mysteriously withdrawn from Multichain on July 7.
Multichain confirmed that there was an unauthorized withdrawal of funds from its MPC address and that the funds were transferred to an unknown address.
Multichain urged its users to take immediate action to protect their funds by stopping using the protocol and revoking any contract approvals. The platform then suspended services indefinitely, which left many users in limbo.
Tether has joined Circle in taking action against the alleged thieves of $130 million in cryptocurrency by blocking two addresses that received payments from the breach.
Circle made a move to block 3 transactions worth $27.65 million, $30.1 million, and $5.5 million on July 7, which prevented the suspected exploiter from withdrawing a significant amount of the money they had stolen.
Tether and Circle have a track record of stepping in to prevent hackers from cashing out stolen funds. The two companies have frozen USDT and USDC that were stolen from Multichain, but it is not yet known if they will return the funds to the protocol.
Multichain is a token bridge that allows users to transfer tokens between different networks, has been in turmoil since its leadership vanished a few weeks ago. This has left the protocol vulnerable to attack, as several incidents have been reported in 2022.
SlowMist, a blockchain security firm, released a report that found that over $30 billion in crypto assets have been hacked in hundreds of incidents since 2012.
Crypto hacks have become increased in recent years. In 2022 alone, there have been over 1,000 incidents resulting in over $1 billion in losses. The top five most common types of hacks are exchange hacks, Ethereum ecosystem hacks, BNB Smart Chain ecosystem hacks, EOS ecosystem hacks, and hacks involving nonfungible tokens.
