Multichain Officially Shuts Down, Confirms CEO Zhaojun's Arrest
Multichain, the prominent cross-chain protocol, has officially announced that its CEO, Zhaojun, has been arrested by Chinese authorities.
Source: Coin68 Twitter
According to Multichain, the police have confiscated Zhaojun's computers, phones, hardware wallets, and access codes. Despite the project's reliance on a multi-signature key protection mechanism, the servers were operating under Zhaojun's management account. Consequently, his arrest has rendered the project unable to authenticate transactions, exacerbating existing technical issues.
The project further revealed that all operational funds and user assets are under Zhaojun's control and are now being overseen by the Chinese police.
1. On May 21, 2023, Multichain CEO Zhaojun was taken away by the Chinese police from his home and has been out of contact with the global Multichain team ever since. The team contacted the MPC node operators and learned that their operational access keys to MPC node servers had…
— Multichain (Previously Anyswap) (@MultichainOrg) July 14, 2023
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On June 4th, Multichain engineers managed to partially address the technical issues after accessing historical information on Zhaojun's home computer. However, on July 7th, a substantial amount of funds was suspiciously moved off the network. Cloud computing logs indicated that the IP address used for this action originated from Kunming, China. Two days later, Zhaojun's sister transferred the remaining $220 million of user assets (mainly stablecoins and ETH) to a new wallet under her control.
By July 13th, Chinese authorities had also detained Zhaojun's sister, leaving Multichain unclear about the current status of the assets.
"Due to the lack of information and updates on the current status of the project's operational funds, the team has been forced to officially cease operations," Multichain stated.
The Multichain team explained that they refrained from disclosing Zhaojun's arrest for several weeks due to local legal constraints. Initially, when rumors began to circulate, the team used the term "force majeure" to describe their inability to contact the CEO.
