Cronos stopped its entire blockchain on Sunday after an attacker exploited Tectonic, its biggest lending platform, in an attack estimated at roughly $75 million.
Cronos is a blockchain launched by Crypto.com in 2021 and closely tied to the exchange, which uses it to run cheaper transactions for its own products. Its CRO token is the one Crypto.com holds up as the centre of its ecosystem, and the chain hosts a small set of lending and trading apps, of which Tectonic is the largest.
Tectonic lets users deposit crypto and borrow other assets against it, much like putting up a house as collateral for a loan.
One of the assets it accepted as collateral was TONIC, its own token, which had about $1.34 million of liquidity and roughly $11,000 of daily trading volume. Tectonic’s own documentation warns that low-liquidity assets can be particularly susceptible to price manipulation.
That appears to have provided the opening, blockchain data shows, as an attacker pushed TONIC’s price up roughly 100-fold in about 20 minutes, deposited the suddenly much more valuable tokens into Tectonic and borrowed real assets against them.
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