On Thursday, a judge in New York temporarily prolonged the asset freeze on wallets containing approximately $63 million in stolen USDC stablecoins, aligning with a request from liquidators in Singapore overseeing the collapsed crypto bridge, Multichain. Judge David S. Jones instructed Circle to maintain the freeze on three Ethereum wallets and to protect the dollar reserves associated with the stolen USDC. This decision aims to prevent ‚potential immediate and irreparable harm‘ if the state court were to lift the freeze, allowing the assets to be transferred or claimed elsewhere, as warned by the liquidators. Additionally, this ruling pauses a separate class action where a group of U.S. investors was attempting to gain control over the same $63 million through litigation against Circle. Last Friday, that case was transitioned from New York state court to the Southern District of New York after Circle invoked the Class Action Fairness Act, which permits large class actions with diverse participants to be adjudicated in federal court. The order is provisional under Section 1519 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, which allows courts to provide temporary protection for assets before formally recognizing a foreign case. If deemed a ‚foreign main proceeding‘ under Chapter 15, recognizing the Singapore liquidation would enable the liquidators to take action in the U.S. to locate, preserve, and recover Multichain’s assets under coordinated judicial oversight. Decrypt has reached out for comments from Circle, attorney Joel H. Levitin, and the three liquidators from KPMG Singapore. Once known as Anyswap, Multichain was a significant player in the crypto space, connecting networks like Binance Chain, Avalanche, Polygon, and Ethereum through its cross-chain asset bridge. This bridge functioned by locking tokens on one chain while issuing corresponding tokens on another, facilitating asset movement across otherwise separate networks without the need for selling or converting. At its peak in early 2022, the bridge secured a total value of approximately $9.2 billion, according to DefiLlama data. However, difficulties emerged in May 2023 when transaction freezes began and reports indicated that CEO Zhaojun had been arrested in China. By July of the same year, over $125 million in assets had been transferred from Multichain’s wallets in what the team described as ‚abnormal‘ transfers to unidentified addresses, leading to a prompt halt of its bridge operations.