Bartek Kiepuszewski, a researcher at L2Beat, discussed with The Defiant the situation where in July 2021 Multichain transferred millions in user funds from escrow to provide liquidity elsewhere in its network. This was first shared in a tweet thread Bartek posted which can be found here.
According to Bartek “That’s users’ money, so either this is agreed with users in this chain, or they broke a social contract with users”.
Michael Lewellen, head of solutions at OpenZeppelin contributed his point of view “If there is not a clear way to identify that the assets the bridge claims to back are not present somewhere that’s publicly verifiable, I would definitely state that as a specific concern for the bridge”.
If you prefer to read the post by The Defiant, you can find it at https://thedefiant.io/questions-on-multichain-funds
For the benefit of the doubt, Multichain did provide a response to Bartek’s initial questioning of the funds transferred and it can be found at https://multichainorg.medium.com/go-deep-into-multichain-cross-chain-mechanism-4a47836be250