Cronos validators halted the blockchain and restored it to an earlier state after an attacker drained Tectonic, the network's largest lending market. The attacker pushed the price of Tectonic's TONIC token up about 100-fold in roughly 20 minutes, deposited it as collateral, and borrowed real assets against it.

Irregular activity was flagged at 13:25 UTC, and validators stopped block production at 14:32:47 UTC at block 90,907,150. Node operators then agreed to restore the chain to block 90,896,188, the last block before the suspicious activity, removing 10,961 blocks. Production resumed at 23:49:01 UTC.

Follow-up reporting put total borrowing across nine Tectonic markets at about $120.4 million. The rollback reversed about $111.2 million, while about $9.19 million had already left the chain before the halt and remains unrecovered. Crypto.com chief executive Kris Marszalek said the Crypto.com exchange was not affected.

The recovery prevented most of the loss, but it also reversed nearly two hours of activity for every application and user on the chain. That raises questions about how decentralized Cronos is in practice. Tectonic's price-feed safeguards and any compensation plan for the unrecovered funds are the next issues.