Crypto network Cronos halts itself after a $75M hack

An attacker found a $75 million hole in a small lending app. The whole Cronos blockchain had to stop and deal with it. Cronos powers a major crypto exchange's network. It halted Sunday after someone manipulated TONIC, a thinly traded token on its lending app Tectonic. They pushed the price up roughly 100-fold. Then they borrowed real crypto against it as fake collateral.

This is an old trick in a new spot. Manipulate the price. Then borrow against the fake value. DeFi hackers have run this play for years, usually against smaller, less-guarded lending markets. TONIC was exactly that kind of target. It was thinly traded and easy to move, yet still accepted as collateral anyway. Onchain researchers estimate the damage at $66 million to $75 million. Tectonic itself hasn't confirmed the exact number, or said how the attacker got in.

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Can Cronos get its network running again without losing more funds? Halting an entire blockchain is a drastic move. It stops all activity, not just the attacker's. Most of the drained money reportedly never left the network. It got frozen there when validators paused things. Whether the network can recover the funds isn't clear yet. It might just mean the money is stuck in limbo.