A token with thin liquidity was raised in price and then used to lend real money—this is the script left behind by the Mango Markets incident, and it is now suspected to be repeated on the Cronos network. Cronos, a public chain related to the exchange Crypto.com, has recently suspended operations due to a suspected attack on the lending protocol Tectonic. The external estimate is that the loss is about US$75 million.
According to Li, the attacker targeted Tectonic’s extremely illiquid TONIC token, first manipulated its market price, and then lent assets to the protocol with an artificially inflated collateral value. This method is similar to the Mango Markets incident that severely damaged the Solana ecological lending agreement in 2022. It also uses weak market depth to create price illusions and then obtains excess borrowings.
The current public information is limited to Li's description of the attack method. Crypto.com and Cronos officials have not yet made official statements on the cause of the outage, whether the amount of loss has been finally confirmed, or how to handle it, and it is still unclear whether the funds have been recovered.
