🚨 $120 million stolen!
Cronos urgently rolled back the blockchain for nearly 2 hours, but the $9.19 million—can it really never be recovered?
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点击进入玖玖的粉丝群In this latest Cronos Tectonic vulnerability incident, the final loss amount turned out to be far larger than the number initially disclosed. According to Cronos’s newest post-mortem report, the attacker used a manipulated TONIC price to treat the inflated tokens as collateral, borrowing about $120.4 million across multiple Tectonic markets.
What’s most shocking is that the TONIC price surged by roughly 100x in a short time.
But what really stunned the market wasn’t just the vulnerability itself—it was the decision Cronos made afterward. Validators directly stopped block production and rolled back 10,961 blocks, equivalent to about 1 hour and 54 minutes of transaction history. Through this rollback, roughly $111.2 million of the affected value was restored.
However, the question is:
$9.19 million has already been transferred out of the Cronos network. This portion of funds can’t be recovered by rolling back on-chain state, which also means the $9.19 million is still currently in an “unrecovered” status. The most值得关注 (most worth paying attention to) in this incident is actually the attack method. It isn’t a simple “oracle error.” The attacker manipulated TONIC’s market price itself, and Tectonic previously allowed this kind of low-liquidity asset to be used as collateral. In other words, the price looks very high, but that doesn’t mean the market truly has enough liquidity to sell the assets at that price.
This exposes a very real problem in DeFi lending protocols:
Price ≠ Liquidity. If a token has extremely low liquidity but can still obtain large loans at a price that gets pushed up in a short time, then once the price is manipulated, the entire collateral system can quickly fall out of balance. Even more intriguing is that while Cronos’s rollback successfully recovered most funds, it also means that many ordinary users’ transactions during those nearly two hours were wiped out along with it.
This may be the most realistic conflict yet between “blockchain finality” and “asset safety.”
If there were no rollback, the attacker might have taken even more funds;
but by choosing to roll back, the transaction history of ordinary users was erased as well.
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