Daily News 19

Tag: Tectonic exploit

  • Cronos Halts Blockchain After $75 Million Exploit Hits Lending App Tectonic

    Cronos Halts Blockchain After $75 Million Exploit Hits Lending App Tectonic

    Cronos halted its entire blockchain on Sunday after an attacker exploited Tectonic, its largest lending platform, in an incident estimated to have drained roughly $75 million.

    How the Tectonic attack unfolded

    Cronos was launched by Crypto.com in 2021 and remains closely linked to the exchange, which uses the blockchain to provide lower-cost transactions for its products. CRO is the token Crypto.com promotes as the centre of its ecosystem. The network also hosts a small group of lending and trading applications, led by Tectonic.

    Tectonic allows users to deposit cryptocurrency and borrow other assets against it, similar to using a house as collateral for a loan.

    One of the tokens accepted as collateral was TONIC, Tectonic’s native token. TONIC had approximately $1.34 million in liquidity and around $11,000 in daily trading volume. Tectonic’s documentation warns that assets with low liquidity can be especially vulnerable to price manipulation.

    Blockchain data indicates that this weakness may have enabled the attack. The attacker drove TONIC’s price up by roughly 100 times in about 20 minutes, deposited the suddenly more valuable tokens into Tectonic and borrowed real assets against them.

    Source: cryptonews.net

  • Cronos Halts Network After Tectonic Exploit Estimated at $75 Million

    Cronos Halts Network After Tectonic Exploit Estimated at $75 Million

    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.