It turned out that the head of a cryptocurrency platform worth $ 250 million was behind a large-scale hack

Chainalysis analysts doubt that the Multichain platform has fallen victim to hackers and believe that only one person is involved in the incident. The head of the project may be responsible for the hacking of Multichain, which currently has $ 242 million in losses.

According to experts, the Multichain development team tweeted in late May that they could not contact the project’s head Zhao Jun. Due to the disappearance of the CEO, the developers cannot access the project’s servers to make changes to the security system.

Chainalysis analysts reported that there are rumors about the arrest of Multichain’s head in China. However, Chainalysis did not specify the source of such information. According to the researchers, local authorities confiscated about $ 1.5 billion in cryptocurrency related to Multichain from Zhao Jun. At the time of writing, Chinese law enforcement officials have not commented on the alleged arrest.

Chainalysis believes that the Multichain hack is the result of theft of private administrator keys, not a code-level exploit. This is supported by numerous audits (including by Trail of Bits), which did not find any technical vulnerabilities in the project.

Over the past 12 hours, $ 117 million has been withdrawn from the Multichain protocol. The abnormal outflow of assets affected such networks as Arbitrum, Avalanche, Polygon, Optimism, and Fantom. All funds were transferred to one address. According to MetaSleuth, $ 125 million was previously distributed to 6 addresses, and some of them were «burned.»