A TOKEN TRADING JUST $11K A DAY HELPED BRING DOWN AN ENTIRE BLOCKCHAIN.
TONIC, the governance token of Tectonic, had only $1.34M in liquidity. Someone pushed its price 100x in just 20 minutes.
The oracle accepted that price as real. Suddenly, the attacker’s TONIC looked like it was worth $375M.
He then used that inflated value as collateral and borrowed $54M USDC, $45M USDT, 95 wrapped BTC and 39M CRO.
But the damage didn’t stop there.
The fake price triggered liquidations across Tectonic. 752 users lost $8.71M, even though many of their loans were healthy just an hour earlier.
Then Cronos itself stopped producing blocks. Transfers, wallets and contracts on the network were frozen.
Around $6M escaped to Ethereum, while another $60M remained stuck on a chain that had stopped running.
The bigger problem? Tectonic held 46% of all deposits in Cronos DeFi.
One thinly traded token, one bad price signal, and a problem at one protocol quickly became a problem for the entire chain. $NVDAB
TONIC, the governance token of Tectonic, had only $1.34M in liquidity. Someone pushed its price 100x in just 20 minutes.
The oracle accepted that price as real. Suddenly, the attacker’s TONIC looked like it was worth $375M.
He then used that inflated value as collateral and borrowed $54M USDC, $45M USDT, 95 wrapped BTC and 39M CRO.
But the damage didn’t stop there.
The fake price triggered liquidations across Tectonic. 752 users lost $8.71M, even though many of their loans were healthy just an hour earlier.
Then Cronos itself stopped producing blocks. Transfers, wallets and contracts on the network were frozen.
Around $6M escaped to Ethereum, while another $60M remained stuck on a chain that had stopped running.
The bigger problem? Tectonic held 46% of all deposits in Cronos DeFi.
One thinly traded token, one bad price signal, and a problem at one protocol quickly became a problem for the entire chain. $NVDAB
