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The attacker deployed contracts and pushed the price of TONIC, Tectonic’s own token, roughly 100-fold in minutes against thin DEX liquidity, according to Cronos. A single transaction borrowed $120.4 million across nine markets using the inflated collateral. Validators halted the network around two hours later, eventually and restoring the chain to the last block before the suspicious activity. Block production resumed around 11 hours after the exploit.
The rollback involved reversing 1 hour and 54 minutes of chain history, or 10,961 blocks. Every transaction in that window was reversed, regardless of whether it touched the exploit. Cronos acknowledged the disruption this caused and said open positions on live apps repriced when trading resumed.
That matters for users and developers beyond Tectonic. A trade, transfer or smart-contract action on Cronos may need to be reconciled if a later validator decision removes it from the chain’s history. The issue is particularly acute for bridges and other applications that act on a Cronos transaction before a rollback is carried out.
“It was a hard decision, taken together with the validators, weighing the finality users expect from a chain against the funds at risk,” the post-mortem said. The alternative was to restart the network without restoring its earlier state, leaving the borrowed assets in the attacker’s control, Cronos said.
