Cronos Network Disrupted by Mango-Style Attack, $75M Assets at Risk

Cronos Network Paused After Lending Protocol Exploit, $75 Million in Assets Affected

The Cronos blockchain was halted on Sunday following an exploit that targeted Tectonic, its largest lending protocol. The incident is estimated to have affected approximately $75 million in assets.

No timeline has been provided for when the network will resume operations, and the blockchain has not yet detailed the fate of assets linked to the attacker once the chain is restarted.

Kris Marszalek, CEO of Crypto.com, confirmed the security breach and stated that the Cronos team is investigating the incident. He asserted that the Cronos app and exchange were unaffected and continued to operate normally, with all user funds remaining secure.

On-chain tracking platform LookonChain reported that the attacker managed to bridge only $6.29 million to the Ethereum network. These funds were subsequently swapped for 2,592 ETH after the network was halted. The remaining $68.7 million is currently stranded on the Cronos Network.

Researcher Weilin Li suggested the attack was connected to Tectonic’s TONIC governance token, which reportedly has a 20% collateral factor despite very low liquidity. Li explained that the attacker executed a price manipulation strategy, similar to the Mango Markets incident, causing TONIC’s price to surge by 100-fold within 20 minutes.

This type of price manipulation attack has recently impacted other decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms. Last week, Moonwell, a lending protocol on the Base network, lost over $8 million after an attacker manipulated the collateral price of MAMO, a low-liquidity, small-cap token. In response, Moonwell significantly reduced borrow caps for all Core Markets on Base to 1 wei, effectively halting new borrowing. Supply caps for MAMO and WELL were also reduced to 1 wei, while others remained unchanged.

Another recent incident involved a low-liquidity Pendle market, where price manipulation led to approximately $36 million in liquidations of leveraged PT-reUSD positions on Morpho.

Following the exploit, Tectonic’s total value locked (TVL) has plummeted. According to DefiLlama, the lending protocol held around $121 million in assets on August 29. Two days later, this figure had dropped to approximately $3 million.