Crypto.com blockchain resumes operations after protocol attack

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Crypto.com blockchain resumes operations

How the Tectonic attack happened

The network was halted after Tectonic was exploited. Tectonic is one of the largest DeFi lending protocols in the Cronos ecosystem. On August 30, the project’s team said it was investigating an incident and asked users not to interact with the protocol temporarily.

Cronos validators then stopped block production, effectively halting transaction processing across the entire network.

Onchain researcher Weilin Li estimated that losses may have reached around $75 million. He initially identified roughly $66 million in assets linked to the exploit and later found another attacker-controlled address holding nearly $8 million. Cronos and Tectonic have not yet officially confirmed the figure.

The attack was reportedly linked to manipulation of Tectonic’s TONIC governance token. According to Li, the attacker pushed TONIC’s price roughly 100 times higher in about 20 minutes and then used the inflated tokens as collateral to borrow other assets.

Tectonic had assigned TONIC a 20% collateral factor. The researcher identified about 364.6 trillion TONIC in the attack position. To support roughly $75 million in borrowing, the tokens would have needed to carry a temporary valuation of around $375 million.

Before the network was halted, the attacker reportedly managed to bridge about $6 million to Ethereum. Most of the assets linked to the exploit are believed to have remained on Cronos.

Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek said the company’s app and exchange were not affected. Crypto.com’s security team is assisting with the investigation.

Cronos rolled the network back to a pre-exploit state

When Cronos restarted, it did not simply continue from the block where production had stopped. Instead, validators restored the blockchain to a point before the Tectonic exploit.

As a result, transactions linked to the attack that had been recorded after the selected restoration point are no longer part of the restarted chain’s history. Cronos described the shutdown as an “emergency action based on validator consensus to protect users.”

Technical details of the rollback have not yet been disclosed. In particular, it remains unclear how validators agreed on the restoration point and the procedure used to return the network to its earlier state. More details are expected in the project’s postmortem report.

Before the attack, Tectonic had around $121.7 million in total value locked and approximately $82.7 million in active loans. The protocol remains one of the key DeFi projects in the Cronos ecosystem alongside VVS Finance, Orby Network and Veno Finance.

AI is speeding up vulnerability discovery

The rapid development of AI has made the work of attackers significantly easier. Models are already being used to analyze code, identify weaknesses in smart contracts, prepare exploits and automate attacks. According to TRM Labs, the use of AI in crypto-related crime has increased by around 40% over the past year. Chainalysis has also highlighted a rise in attacks on unaudited smart contracts: at least $36.7 million was stolen from such protocols in just six months, while analysts believe AI is helping attackers identify vulnerabilities more quickly even when source code is not publicly available.

At the same time, the overall scale of crypto hacks is growing. Between January 2025 and July 2026, crypto platforms lost around $3.63 billion across 245 recorded attacks. AI did not invent these attack methods, but it has sharply reduced the time and technical expertise needed to carry them out. Tasks that once took experienced specialists hours or days can now be partially automated. In 2026, Google Threat Intelligence reported what it described as the first case in which an attacker apparently used AI to help develop an exploit for a previously unknown vulnerability.

Cronos fell more than 10% following the attack.

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