Multichain Confirms CEO’s Arrest, Shuts Down Operations
Chinese police are said to have detained the CEO of Multichain and his sister.
Multichain, a cross-chain router protocol that was recently breached, declared that it is ceasing operations, claiming a lack of operational funding and knowledge of its CEO Zhaojun, who is being held by Chinese police. The team’s most recent update verified the reports that the executive had been arrested.
On July 14, Multichain announced on Twitter that Zhaojun has not been in touch with the team since being taken into custody by Chinese authorities at his residence. His sister was also arrested and put into custody.
Multichain terminates
The team was informed that their operational access keys to MPC node servers had been withdrawn after getting in touch with the MPC node operators. They clarified that the CEO was the only one with access to the cloud server account that was used to host the MPC node servers in question.
The team also discovered that Zhaojun’s phones, hardware wallets, mnemonic phrases, and PCs had all been seized by the law.
“Since the inception of the project, all operational funds and investments from investors have been under Zhaojun’s control. This also means that all the team’s funds and access to the servers are with Zhaojun and the police.”
According to the Multichain team, they followed the lawyers’ advice and refrained from leaking confidential information about the case to the public.
Daily operations were carried out with the aid of Zhaojun’s sister, who reportedly transferred the last of the user assets in the router pool and then informed the team and several project parties of this asset preservation action. Other servers’ access that had not been revoked also provided assistance.
The condition of the preserved assets is still unknown, according to the Multichain team, as Zhaojun’s sister is also unreachable.
Exploit and Unravelling $130M
An $8 million exploit affected Multichain, formerly Anyswap, in 2021.
However, issues with first became apparent in late May of this year when there were speculations that the protocol’s management team had been detained in Shanghai as a result of the CEO being missing. After the $130 million fraud earlier this week, this subsequently got worse.
