Cronos Halts Blockchain After Tectonic Exploit Estimated at $75 Million

Cronos halted its blockchain after an exploit targeting decentralized lending protocol Tectonic involved an estimated $75 million, with most of the funds still on the Cronos network at the time of writing.

Cronos said on Sunday that it had identified an exploit in Tectonic and paused the network while investigating the incident. Tectonic separately warned users not to interact with the protocol. Neither project has confirmed the cause of the exploit or the amount lost, and no timeline for restarting the network had been announced at publication.

Attacker exploited TONIC collateral factor and liquidity

Researcher Weilin Li said the attacker exploited TONIC’s 20% collateral factor and limited liquidity. According to Li, the attacker drove the governance token’s price up 100-fold within 20 minutes before borrowing other assets. Li described the incident as a “Mango-market style” pump-and-borrow attack.

Li initially estimated that $66 million was affected. He said the attacker bridged approximately $6 million to Ethereum before Cronos halted the network, leaving about $60 million on Cronos.

Li later identified another attacker-controlled address holding approximately $8 million, raising his estimated loss to roughly $75 million.

Crypto.com says its services were unaffected

Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek said the company’s app and exchange were operating normally and were not affected by the exploit. He added that funds held on those services were safe.

Cronos and Tectonic have not said whether they will restrict the attacker’s addresses, recover the assets or compensate affected users. Cointelegraph contacted both projects and Crypto.com for comment.