Overview
- The exploit unfolded on Sunday when an attacker pushed Tectonic’s TONIC token about 100x in roughly 20 minutes, deposited the repriced tokens as collateral, and borrowed an estimated $66 million to $75 million from Tectonic.
- Cronos validators stopped block production within minutes, which trapped roughly $60 million of exploit-linked funds on the chain and left about $6 million bridged to Ethereum.
- Before the attack Tectonic held about $121.7 million in total value locked and roughly $82.7 million in active loans, while TONIC traded on very thin markets with about $1.34 million liquidity and roughly $11,000 in daily volume.
- Tectonic told users not to interact with the protocol and has not published a postmortem or restart plan, and Crypto.com’s centralized exchange services were reported as unaffected.
- The incident highlights how accepting low-liquidity governance tokens as collateral and relying on live price feeds can enable pump-and-borrow attacks, and it mirrors the 2022 Mango Markets playbook with uncertain recoverability and possible forensic or legal follow-up.