Cronos restarts network after emergency halt over Tectonic exploit

Cronos has resumed block production after validators halted the network during an exploit targeting Tectonic and restored the chain state to a point before the attack. Summary Cronos resumed block production after validators halted the network during an exploit targeting the Tectonic protocol. The chain was restored to its state before the exploit, with block production restarting from block 90,896,189. Cronos remains under observation, while some protocols, RPC providers, explorers and bridges may take longer to return. A full postmortem covering the Tectonic exploit and the network’s response will be released soon. Cronos Network said the blockchain was fully back online after the validator set coordinated an emergency halt designed to protect users while the Tectonic incident was being contained. The restart followed a rollback of the network state, effectively returning Cronos to its condition before the exploit. The Cronos Network is producing blocks again and is fully back online. The Cronos Network halted earlier today. This was a validator-consensus emergency action to protect users from an exploit on the Tectonic protocol. The chain state was restored to before the Tectonic exploit… — Cronos Network (@CronosNetwork) August 31, 2026 Block production resumed at 23:49:01 UTC on Aug. 30 from block 90,896,189. Node operators have been instructed to restart using Cronos v1.7.8 and the latest mainnet snapshots dated Aug. 31 at 09:52 UTC. The network remains under observation while operators check its stability. Cronos warned that some protocols, RPC providers, blockchain explorers and bridges may take longer to restore their services as individual operators complete their own checks. “We will be releasing a full postmortem soon,” Cronos said. Cronos network restart follows emergency validator halt The shutdown came after an exploit hit Tectonic, a decentralized lending protocol built on Cronos. Tectonic told users on Aug. 30 that it was investigating an incident and asked them not to interact with the protocol until its team confirmed that it was safe. Cronos validators subsequently stopped block production, preventing transactions from being processed across the network while the incident was investigated. Onchain researcher Weilin Li estimated that the exploit affected roughly $75 million after initially identifying approximately $66 million connected to the attack and later finding another attacker-controlled address holding close to $8 million. Tectonic and Cronos have not confirmed the estimated loss, making the figure provisional until the promised postmortem provides a full accounting. Li linked the incident to manipulation of TONIC, Tectonic’s governance token. According to his analysis, the attacker drove TONIC’s price roughly 100 times higher within around 20 minutes and then supplied the inflated tokens as collateral to borrow other assets from Tectonic.