Cronos rolled back the blockchain to recover 111 million USD in stolen funds

Cronos confirmed in a post-mortem report that the attack on the lending platform Tectonic on August 30 involved $120.4 million in borrowing activities. The validators made the "difficult decision" to roll back the on-chain history, successfully recovering approximately $111.2 million (about 92% of the affected funds), while about $9.19 million flowed out before the network was paused and could not be recovered. The attacker leveraged weak DEX liquidity to inflate the price of Tectonic token TONIC by about 100 times within minutes and borrowed $120.4 million through a single transaction across nine markets. The validators paused the network about two hours later, restoring the chain to the last block before the suspicious activity, with block production resuming approximately 11 hours after the attack. The rollback involved reversing 1 hour and 54 minutes of on-chain history, totaling 10,961 blocks, with all transactions within that window being canceled, regardless of whether they were involved in the attack. Cronos stated that the alternative would have been to restart the network without restoring the previous state, which would have left the stolen assets in the hands of the attacker. This rollback closely followed Harmony's announcement of a similar plan, while Flow abandoned its rollback proposal last December due to community opposition. The validator cap for Cronos is 100, which facilitated quick coordination for the pause and restart, but also indicated that the network's finality in emergencies depends on validator consensus.