Cronos has confirmed that $9.19 million remains unrecovered after an attacker borrowed $120.4 million from lending protocol Tectonic using manipulated collateral. Validators rolled back 10,961 blocks to restore roughly $111.2 million, but funds already moved off-chain remain beyond reach.
Cronos published a post-mortem on Monday confirming that $9.19 million out of $120.4 million borrowed from Tectonic remains unrecovered, equal to 7.6% of the affected funds. The attacker moved that portion off the network before validators halted the chain, putting it beyond the reach of a subsequent rollback.
Rollback restored $111.2 million
According to the post-mortem, the attacker manipulated the price of TONIC, Tectonic's governance token, then supplied the inflated asset as collateral to borrow across nine markets on Aug. 30. Cronos validators halted the Layer 1 blockchain at block 90,907,150 before agreeing to restore the network to block 90,896,188, the last block produced before the exploit began.
The rollback discarded 10,961 blocks, representing one hour and 54 minutes of transaction history, and reversed approximately $111.2 million of the $120.4 million involved. Every transaction completed during that window was reversed, regardless of whether it connected to the attack. Cronos resumed block production from block 90,896,189 around 11 hours after the attack began, instructing node operators to restart on Cronos v1.7.8 with updated mainnet snapshots.
TONIC price manipulation opened the door
Cronos identified the malicious activity roughly 36 minutes after the attacker began manipulating TONIC's price. Onchain analysis had found the token's reported price rose approximately 100-fold within around 20 minutes, and TONIC carried a 20% collateral factor on Tectonic, letting the inflated deposit support large borrowing. Tectonic held roughly $121.7 million in total value locked and about $82.7 million in active loans before the exploit.
RedStone co-founder Marcin Kazmierczak has said the incident was not an oracle failure. He argued the oracle correctly reported TONIC's market price while Tectonic accepted that price without accounting for available liquidity, and pointed to borrow caps tied to executable liquidity, dynamic collateral factors and price-impact limits as safeguards that could have limited the damage.
Losses dwarf prior estimates
The final accounting sharply raises the scale of the incident compared with initial estimates. Blockchain security firm PeckShield had counted 50 major crypto hacks in August with total estimated losses of $136.3 million, a figure that placed the Tectonic incident at roughly $74 million before the final numbers came out. Cronos said reconciliation work with exchanges, bridges and other platforms remains underway, though the block explorer, public RPC endpoints, indexers and subgraphs have returned to operation.
Source: crypto.news
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