Cronos Network Halted as Tectonic Suffers Mango-Style Price Manipulation Attack
Cronos halted its blockchain on Sunday after an exploit hit Tectonic, its largest lending protocol. An estimated $75 million in assets were affected by the attack.
The network has yet to provide a timeline for when it will resume operations or what will happen to the attacker's assets once the chain is restarted.
Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek confirmed the security breach and stated that the Cronos team was investigating the incident. He emphasized that all funds were safe, and the Cronos app and exchange continued operating as usual.
According to on-chain tracking platform LookonChain, the attacker bridged $6.29 million to Ethereum before halting the network. These funds were then swapped for 2,592 ETH ($2,438.44). The remaining $68.7 million is stuck on the Cronos Network due to the halt.
Researcher Weilin Li attributed the attack to Tectonic's TONIC governance token, which has a 20% collateral factor despite having thin liquidity. Li described the attack as a Mango Markets-style pump-and-borrow price manipulation attack that caused TONIC's price to surge 100-fold within 20 minutes.
A similar attack occurred on Moonwell, a lending protocol on the Base network, where an attacker manipulated the collateral price of MAMO, resulting in over $8 million lost. Another case involved Pendle, where price manipulation led to about $36 million in liquidations of leveraged PT-reUSD positions on Morpho.
Tectonic's locked assets dropped sharply following the exploit, from around $121 million on August 29 to roughly $3 million just two days later.