Glossary
Multichain Collapse
The July 2023 disappearance of Multichain (formerly Anyswap) and the apparent detention of its founder in China — leaving ~$1.5B in bridged assets stranded.
Multichain was one of the largest cross-chain bridges, holding locked assets across dozens of EVM chains. In July 2023 the project's communications went dark, withdrawals began failing, and roughly $1.5 billion in assets stopped moving.
It later emerged that the project's founders had been detained by Chinese authorities, with their hardware-signing keys held by police. Operational continuity was impossible. The disappearance shaped the industry's growing preference for trust-minimized bridge designs (LayerZero, Across, native rollup bridges) over externally-validated multisig bridges.