Cronos Network Halted After Tectonic Lending Protocol Attack

Cronos, the layer-1 blockchain developed by Crypto.com, suffered an attack on its largest lending protocol, Tectonic. The attacker manipulated TONIC's price, inflating it to 100 times higher in just 20 minutes, despite its low trading liquidity of $1.34 million.

The attacker then used the inflated token value as collateral to borrow other assets from Tectonic's pools, resulting in an estimated loss of around $75 million before the network was halted.

Validators froze the network to contain the attack and prevent further losses. They restored the chain state to a snapshot taken before the exploit, effectively rolling back the blockchain to a point before the attack occurred.

The Cronos Network team confirmed that block production resumed at 23:49 UTC on August 30, starting fresh from block 90,896,189. However, the recovery is not uniform across the ecosystem, with some protocols and services taking longer to come back online.