Cronos resumed block production after validators halted the network during a $75 million exploit on the Tectonic lending protocol, then restored the chain to its state before the attack. The network says it is fully back online but still under observation, with a full postmortem to come.
Cronos is fully back online after validators halted the chain and then restored its state to before the Tectonic exploit. Block production resumed at 23:49:01 UTC on Aug. 30 from block 90,896,189, with node operators told to restart on Cronos v1.7.8 using mainnet snapshots dated Aug. 31 at 09:52 UTC.
Emergency halt followed a Tectonic exploit
The shutdown came after an exploit hit Tectonic, a decentralized lending protocol built on Cronos, which told users on Aug. 30 not to interact with the protocol until it confirmed doing so was safe. Cronos validators then stopped block production across the network while the incident was investigated.
Onchain researcher Weilin Li estimated the exploit affected roughly $75 million, after initially identifying about $66 million and then finding another attacker-controlled address. Neither Cronos nor Tectonic has confirmed the figure. Li linked the attack to manipulation of TONIC, Tectonic's governance token, saying the attacker drove its price roughly 100 times higher within around 20 minutes and then used the inflated tokens as collateral to borrow other assets from Tectonic.
Rollback erases the exploit from chain history
Instead of restarting from the point where validators halted block production, Cronos rolled the network back to its state before the attack, meaning transactions from the exploit no longer form part of the restarted chain's history. Li estimated that only about $6 million had been bridged to Ethereum before the halt, leaving most of the affected assets on Cronos. Before the exploit, Tectonic held approximately $121.7 million in total value locked and around $82.7 million in active loans, according to data cited by The Block.
Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek said the exchange's app was not compromised and continued operating normally, with the company's security team assisting the investigation. Cronos has not yet published a root-cause analysis. According to Cronos: "We will be releasing a full postmortem soon."
The Tectonic incident follows a string of emergency blockchain halts this month. Cosmos EVM chains were advised to halt validators on Aug. 25 after a separate security incident, and MANTRA had frozen its own network days earlier while investigating a different issue.
Sources: crypto.news, CryptoSlate
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