Cronos Hit with $120M Lending Protocol Exploit

A recent exploit on the Tectonic lending protocol left Cronos with significant financial losses. On August 30, an attacker manipulated the price of TONIC, a thinly traded governance token, to borrow $120.4 million across nine markets.

The attack was detected by Cronos about 36 minutes after it began, but $9.19 million in assets had already been transferred off-chain and could not be recovered through the subsequent rollback.

Validators halted block production at block 90,907,150 and rolled the blockchain back to block 90,896,188, restoring most affected balances. The rollback erased 10,961 blocks, reversing nearly 1 hour and 54 minutes of transactions, including unrelated activity.