The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has called on the operators of the cross-chain swap protocol THORChain to halt the movement of assets linked to the theft of funds from the Binance exchange. The agency’s request came as the network continues to suspend trading on 10 blockchains, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, following a technical failure on Oct 31. While a co-founder of THORChain cited the availability of public data for identifying these theft-linked addresses, he stopped short of pledging that the network would block the transactions.
The outage was triggered by an Ethereum chain reorganization that caused the network to erroneously issue a double refund of 10 ETH, leading to an emergency pause. This halt inadvertently blocked transactions by North Korean agents seeking to launder the stolen Binance funds, but it also interrupted service for all users on most bridges. Node operators are currently developing a code update and will vote on restoring service, at which point the system will process the current backlog of pending transactions.