Its software malfunctioning and CEO missing, moribund blockchain bridge Multichain suffered the additional indignity of a $120 million hack and announced that it would not resume operations.

The team behind the bridge announced in late May that it was unable to contact its CEO and co-founder, who goes by the single name Zhaojun, after rumors of his arrest in China appeared on Twitter. Zhaojun, who founded the company alongside DJ Qian, held the only access codes required to fix technical issues with the protocol.

Multichain said it was experiencing unusual activity on Thursday evening and added that assets had “been moved to an unknown address abnormally.” Blockchain security firm Peck Shield found that the stolen funds included several stablecoins, including tether, Circle’s U.S. dollar coin (USDC
USDC
) and dai and tokens like chainlink (LINK
LINK
), wrapped bitcoin and wrapped ether, the latter two of which are versions of those coins that represent the value of each coin in a different chain. The funds were transferred into six different addresses, three of which were subsequently blacklisted by Circle, according to PeckShield.

The cross-chain bridge connects blockchains, including Ethereum
ETH
, Bitcoin and even Dogechain to each other. Most impacted were tokens going from the Fantom
FTM
 blockchain into either Ethereum or the Binance Smart Chain. That liquidity pool on the Mulitchain bridge suffered the largest exploit as about $118 million were transferred out of it. Transfers out of the Dogechain and Moonriver blockchains also were affected.

Multichain currently has $1.26 billion worth of cryptocurrencies locked into its system, according to DeFi Llama. All bridge transactions are currently stuck on source chains as the company halted operations. Multichain did not respond to Forbes’ request for comment.

Previously known as Anyswap, Multichainwas first hacked in 2021 when attackers siphoned $8 million worth of stablecoins out of the protocol. The road for the bridge protocol has not been easy since. In May, days before Multichain announced it could not reach Zhaojun, Binance said it would halt deposits into Binance Smart Chain from 10 Multichain-associated bridged tokens after users reported delayed and stuck transactions.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, said that the latest hack did not impact Binance users, citing May’s decision to close deposits and adding in a Tweet that the exchange had already swapped all assets associated with Multichain bridges

Multichain’s token is down 6% to $2.81 a piece since the hack was first reported by the team. It traded above $7.50 in the days before the company lost contact with Zhaojun.

Cross-chain bridges were a once-popular way to connect two blockchains. The bridge would hold the token from one chain and create a wrapped token of the second chain, each transaction temporarily worth double. The high amount of liquidity held in bridge protocols make them extremely susceptible to hacks, and in 2022 accounted for nearly $2 billion worth of stolen funds,70% of all crypto hacks in the year.

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