Fantom (FTM) Founder Andre Cronje Says Multichain Hack Was a ‘Big Blow’ to Ethereum Rival’s Ecosystem

Fantom (FTM) creator Andre Cronje says that the recent exploit of cross-chain bridge Multichain was a massive setback for the Ethereum (ETH) rival.

Writing in the community’s forum, Cronje says that the Fantom team was misled about the true security level of Multichain.

Cronje also says that he and his team plan to seek solutions that will make all victims of the Multichain hack whole.

“Multichain was a big blow, we had a lot of assurances from the team around the server decentralization, access, and geolocation distribution. Don’t trust, verify (saying this to myself).

We are exploring all options at this point, working with relevant organizations to try and recover assets. Beyond that also looking into other backstops or helping recovery, even using foundation treasury. Until we have more data we just can’t give any hard confirmations. We won’t leave this as is though, we will do everything in our power to make everyone whole. We are also continuing to engage with Circle, Tether, TrueUSD, Binance, etc. for native issuance, and reviewing roll-ups for native bridge infrastructure. When we have more verifiable information we will propose an action plan. As you can imagine, the foundation and all of our staff had exposure to these assets as well.”

Multichain’s Fantom bridge was exploited for at least $126 million as bad actors were able to steal a number of coins, including crypto assets such as Chainlink (LINK), Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC), Wrapped Ethereum (wETH) and a trio of stablecoins.

According to market analytics tool DefiLlama, Fantom’s total value locked (TVL) has fallen drastically, from $200 million before the incident to $67 million today.

Multichain has since shuttered its operations, saying that its CEO was arrested by Chinese authorities in May and has not been in contact with the blockchain’s team ever since.