Tectonic Protocol Hit by a $75 Million Hack After Token Price Manipulation

• The Tectonic protocol suffered a $66 million hack due to manipulation of the TONIC token price
• The attacker pumped TONIC’s price 100x in 20 minutes, using the tokens as collateral to take out loans. 
• About $6 million has already been bridged to Ethereum, while another $60 million remains on the Cronos network.

The DeFi protocol Tectonic, which operates within the Cronos ecosystem, was hit in an attack worth around $66 million. According to a preliminary assessment by researcher Weilin (William) Li, the attacker manipulated the price of the native TONIC token and then used it as collateral to borrow funds.

The core issue was TONIC’s low liquidity and its 20% collateral factor. The attacker used a scheme Li compared to the Mango Markets exploit: first artificially pumped the token price, then used the inflated collateral value to borrow other assets.

According to the researcher, TONIC’s price rose roughly 100x in about 20 minutes. The attacker then took out a large amount of loans, effectively relying on an artificially inflated valuation of the tokens. Li noted that similar schemes have been used in other attacks on DeFi protocols. Among recent examples, he cited Moonwell and reUSD on Pendle.

What Happened to the Funds?

After the attack, the attacker bridged about $6 million from the Cronos network to Ethereum.

About $60 million still remains on the Cronos network. Lee suggested that some of the funds may have been deposited into a decentralized exchange pool to make it harder to freeze them or add the addresses to a blacklist.

Amid the incident, the Cronos team halted the blockchain.

“We identified an exploit in Tectonic. The Cronos Network has been halted,” project representatives said.

Later, Cronos said the network remains halted while the team, together with security experts from across the industry, investigates the attack.

In turn, Tectonic confirmed the incident and urged users not to interact with the protocol until the investigation is complete.

Tectonic added that it will publish a verified update after receiving additional information. As of publication, the full extent of the losses and the attack mechanism are still under investigation.

As a reminder, we previously covered the results of a study according to which crypto platforms lost $3.63 billion to hacker attacks since the start of 2025.

Сообщение Tectonic Protocol Hit by a $75 Million Hack After Token Price Manipulation появились сначала на INCRYPTED.