Binance Suspends Deposit for Bridged Tokens, Seeking Clarity from the Multichain Team

In the last few hours, there has been intense turmoil in the crypto market as several users reported transactions of being stuck since Sunday, executed through Multichain’s cross-chain bridge. In response to the growing concerns, crypto exchange Binance has taken a bold move as the exchange recently announced the suspension of deposits of bridged tokens amid the abnormal delay in cross-chain assets.

Binance Suspends Deposit For 10 Bridged Tokens

Due to ongoing problems with the Multichain bridge project, Binance, a centralized cryptocurrency exchange, has temporarily stopped deposits for 10 tokens. This affects users who have these tokens on BNB Smart Chain, Fantom, Ethereum, and Avalanche blockchains. The tokens include AVA-ETH, SPELL-AVAXC, and FTM-ETH, according to Binance. Deposits of these tokens on other networks are not affected, and users can check Binance’s deposit page for more details.

Binance said, “We are temporarily suspending deposits for the following bridged tokens-network while we await clarity from the Multichain team.”

Multichain users have been facing a crisis for five days, which has affected the processing of transactions and caused many of them to get stuck. Some of Multichain’s cross-chain bridges — such as Kava, zkSync, and Polygon zkEVM — are still not working.

The Multichain project first blamed the problem on technical issues. But as users became more unhappy, the explanation changed to a vague “force majeure.”

There are also unconfirmed rumors on Twitter that the Multichain team may have been arrested in China. The team has not commented on these rumors yet. This leaves the platform’s users and the crypto community in doubt and worries as they wait for clear information.

The project’s Discord server and Telegram groups have not given any significant updates to the community so far.

Multichain Remains Silence

Meanwhile, crypto projects are reacting to the team’s silence. The Fantom Foundation took out 450,000 MULTI tokens ($2.4 million) from liquidity on SushiSwap, a decentralized exchange. Yesterday, HashKey Group, a crypto investment firm, moved $250,000 to Gate.io, a crypto exchange, and Justin Sun, the founder of Tron, took out 470,000 USDD stablecoins from the Multichain protocol itself.

On the same day, Lookonchain, a blockchain analytics firm, revealed that smart money accounts had moved out at least $3 million worth of MULTI. The multichain protocol was launched in July 2020 in Singapore to enable communication between different blockchains. It quickly grew to a whopping $10.5 billion in total value locked (TVL) in early 2022 before the crypto market turned bearish. It still has $1.59 billion in TVL as of now.

Multichain also raised a massive $60 million in a seed round led by Binance Labs, the venture arm of crypto exchange Binance, in December 2021. And just this month, Multichain announced a $100-million ecosystem fund to boost native multichain projects.