Tether Holdings, the company behind the USDT stablecoin, has frozen two Ethereum addresses that received funds from a Multichain MPC address. These addresses, flagged as Multichain suspicious addresses, reportedly hold approximately 2.53 million USDT tokens.

The decision by Tether follows an incident on July 7th where a significant amount of multichain assets, valued at around $130 million, flowed out of the Multichain cross-chain protocol under suspicious circumstances. The incident involved a substantial outflow of assets from Multichain's Fantom Bridge and Moonriver Bridge, as well as from a Multichain address connected with Dogecoin (DOGE).

Multichain acknowledged the abnormal movement of lockup assets and advised users to stop utilizing its services and revoke any associated contract approvals. As a result, Multichain suspended its services indefinitely, leaving users uncertain about the platform's future.

Following the footsteps of Circle, Tether has taken action to freeze two addresses associated with the suspected breach of Multichain. Circle, which issues the USD Coin (USDC), had previously blocked three transactions, amounting to $27.65 million, $30.1 million and $5.5 million in efforts towards preventing the suspected exploiter from withdrawing stolen funds.

Both Tether and Circle have a track record of intervening in hacking incidents to hinder bad actors from cashing out their ill-gotten gains. Currently, the frozen USDT and USDC cannot be moved, but it remains uncertain whether Tether and Circle will return the funds to Multichain. 

Sources:

https://crypto.news/tether-freezes-usdt-addresses-linked-to-the-130-million-multichain-exploit/

https://cointelegraph.com/news/circle-tether-freezes-over-65m-in-assets-transferred-from-multichain