Cronos Network Halted Amid $75M Tectonic Exploit

Cronos Network has paused its blockchain operations due to an exploit on the decentralized lending protocol Tectonic, which puts $75 million in cryptocurrency at risk. The discovery was made after detecting an issue with Tectonic.

Tectonic advised users to stop using its platform until further notice, and Cronos announced that it would halt its network to investigate the exploit.

Weilin Li, a blockchain expert, explained how the hacker took advantage of Tectonic's collateral factor for the TONIC governance token being 20%, with limited liquidity. This allowed the attacker to increase the price of TONIC tokens by over 100 times in just 20 minutes and borrow other crypto assets based on the increased price.

The situation is similar to the Mango Markets attack, according to Li. He initially estimated the sum involved at $66 million but later found an additional hacker wallet containing $8 million, bringing the total to approximately $75 million.