22287 TG followers 500K Fantom Foundation on X 380K followers of Andre Cronje on X 12,566 Discord 39K reddit
So what is dominating the conversation in all of the Fantom communities at the moment (date of writing 12 Sept 2023)? Yes, you've guessed it - it's unfortunately the Multichain scandal.
On 14 July 2023, it was confirmed that the CEO of Multichain -previously known as Anyswap- along with his sister, were arrested back in May due to a number of allegations including money laundering, fraud and running node servers on their personal cloud servers, thus negating Mutichain's claims of being decentralised. Multichain, which suffered an $8 million exploit back in 2021, was victim to another hack in July following the news of the teams' corruption with $130 million compromised. At the time of writing, many of user funds are still stuck in the bridge.
But what does this have to do with Fantom? Well, Fantom was one of the largest users of the Multichain bridge prior to its collapse and a large number of people in the Fantom community are out a lot of money. And much of Fantom's total value locked (TVL) unfortunately consisted of Multichain derivative stablecoins. So why is the community particularly upset apart from being victimised? Because employees at Fantom posted several TG messages claiming that they had hired attorneys within China to assist in the recovery process of user's funds. They also claimed that some of the Multichain funds were frozen by CEX's and stablecoin issuers and that the foundation was attempting to get these funds distributed back to victims. But then they went pretty quiet after that. In fact, Andre's last tweet on X was a re-tweet on 14 August 2023 from the Fantom Foundation about a gas monetization bonus round for dapps. But he has said very little publicly about Multichain or any effort to recover any funds, apart from stating that “Multichain was a big blow” to the network.
It's difficult to know what to award Fantom's community in this review. They are understandably upset and want answers. But I also worry that if fears and resolutions aren't reached quickly, the community and project could suffer tremendously, hence the 3 stars. Also 3 stars for a lack of more forums/groups in which to discuss the more technical aspects related of the Fantom Foundation.
One possible shining light is that Michael Kong, Fantom's CEO, is speaking this week at Token 2049. I just wonder if he will be able to address some of the tough questions that will come his way and whether he can reassure his community about the safety of the projects that Fantom partners with in the future. Show Less
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