Multichain token price drops 20% as claimed bridge upgrade delays transactions

The price of the Multichain (MULTI) token has fallen 20% from $7 to $5.63 amid user complaints over stuck transactions on the cross-chain bridge protocol.

Users have been complaining about stuck transactions since as early as May 21. Multichain, for its part, claims that the difficulties stemmed from an ongoing upgrade and the delayed updates to nodes for cross-chain routers.

"The upgrade of the back-end node is taking longer than expected. Most of the routes are working as usual, as some routes (Kava, zkSync, Polygon zkEVM) are suspended temporarily for now. All the affected transactions will arrive once the upgrade is complete," said Multichain on May 23.

"Only one router left in the upgrade progress. Other 6 routers work fine now," said an admin in Multichain's Telegram channel. "We are working on the last router. Everything will be back to normal once it's finished." The admin added that all funds are safe and transactions will go through when the upgrades have happened.

In the meantime, analysts at Lookonchain have identified multiple entities that have been involved in the potential sale of Multichain tokens on both centralized and decentralized exchanges in recent days.

One noteworthy transaction involved an address that sent 494,200 tokens, with a value of $2.75 million at the time, to the Gate.io exchange. Moreover, Lookonchain revealed another trade from an address with the ENS name “hwg.eth.”  This person sold 36,200 tokens, amounting to $200,000, just yesterday.

Beyond this, the Fantom Foundation has removed 450,000 tokens ($2.4 million) from liquidity on the decentralized exchange SushiSwap.

Multichain has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Updated with further information from Lookonchain.