The Cronos blockchain was paused after an exploit aimed at decentralized lending platform Tectonic affected an estimated $75 million, with the majority of the funds still situated on the Cronos network at the time of reporting.
On Sunday, Cronos stated that it detected a security breach involving Tectonic and suspended network operations, pledging to provide further information. In a separate message, Tectonic advised users to avoid interacting with its platform during the ongoing investigation. As of publication time, neither team had verified the root cause or total losses, and no schedule for resuming network activity had been shared.
Security researcher Weilin Li noted that the perpetrator capitalized on TONIC’s 20% collateral factor alongside its shallow liquidity, inflating the governance asset’s valuation by 100x over a 20-minute span prior to borrowing alternate tokens. Li characterized the incident as a pump-and-borrow maneuver reminiscent of Mango Markets.
Initially, Li projected the impacted amount at $66 million, explaining that the exploiter transferred roughly $6 million over to Ethereum prior to the shutdown, leaving $60 million behind on Cronos. Li subsequently located an additional wallet controlled by the attacker containing approximately $8 million, pushing his total estimated damages to around $75 million.
Kris Marszalek, the CEO of Crypto.com, confirmed that the company’s exchange and mobile application remained untouched, functioning as usual, and assured that user assets on those platforms were secure.
Neither Cronos nor Tectonic has clarified whether they intend to blacklist the exploiter’s addresses, retrieve the stolen funds, or reimburse impacted users. Cointelegraph reached out to both teams as well as Crypto.com for statements.
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Originally published at https://cointelegraph.com/news/cronos-network-halt-tectonic-exploit-75-million?utm_source=rss_feed&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss_partner_inbound.
