The Block: Multichain team's silence sparks further uncertainty for users

The silence coming from the Multichain's leadership team is causing further uncertainty for users of the cross-chain protocol with $1.5 billion in total value locked.

The protocol has had five days of stuck transactions and it still has multiple cross-chain bridge pathways — Kava, zkSync, Polygon zkEVM — that are not yet online. The first purported cause was that this was due to an upgrade that was getting fixed, but the explanation was changed yesterday to an ambigious " force majeure. "

This comes alongside unverified rumors on Twitter that the core leadership team may have been arrested in China.

Multichain co-founder DJ Qian, who no longer works with the project, said on Twitter today that he asked the current Multichain CEO Zhaojun and its founding partner Xu Guochang to see if they could provide any technical help. When asked what the situation is with Zhaojun, he replied that he's "not available yet."

In a group Telegram message with the Multichain team, Multichain’s VP of Strategic Partnerships, who goes by Mog, replied that he didn’t know whether the leadership team had been detained by Chinese authorities. Zhaojun did not reply in the group, nor to a direct message through the same app.

On the project's Discord server and Telegram groups, there have similarly been no updates, with community members told to wait for further updates.

In the meantime, the price of Multichain's native token MULTI has continued to slide and is now down to $ 4.98, having declined 23% in the last 24 hours.

Projects reacting to the silence Conflux Network is the latest entity to respond to the situation. It has suspended Multichain’s co-mint privileges as a precaution. This prevents Multichain from minting tokens on its blockchain. It added that it will help to work with users if there are any losses that arise.

Yesterday, crypto investment firm HashKey Group moved $250,000 to crypto exchange Gate.io and Tron founder Justin Sun withdrew 470,000 of the USDD stablecoin from the protocol itself.

The Fantom Foundation also withdrew $2.4 million in liquidity of the protocol's native MULTI tokens on decentralized exchange SushiSwap. According to data from The Block Research, 38% of the total-value locked on the Fantom blockchain is held within Multichain. Plus, tokens issued on Multichain make up 78% of the market cap of tokens on Fantom.

Added further details about the tokens on Fantom.

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