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Story: DeFi Platforms Tectonic and Moonwell Lose $84 Million to Price Manipulation

By Jean-Luc Maracon

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Moonwell's MAMO Market Cracked First. Days before Tectonic, Moonwell's MAMO lending market on Base got hit with essentially the same…

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A Playbook That Goes Back to Mango Markets. Neither of these attacks came out of nowhere. Back in 2022, Avraham Eisenberg ran a nearly…

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Two DeFi lending platforms just took a combined hit of more than $84 million. The culprit in both cases: price manipulation targeting thinly traded tokens used as collateral.

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The bigger of the two blows landed on Tectonic, a lending protocol running on the Cronos blockchain.

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$6 million already gone before Cronos could react.

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The root problem at Moonwell was straightforward, if painful: the protocol priced MAMO collateral using an illiquid market.

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Pretty much the same story at Tectonic. Different chain, different token, same structural weakness.

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Neither of these attacks came out of nowhere. Back in 2022, Avraham Eisenberg ran a nearly identical operation against Mango Markets, manipulating MNGO token prices to pull out…

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Related: Cronos Network Freezes After $75 Million Tectonic Exploit — Can Crypto.com Recover?

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The core vulnerability hasn't changed: DeFi lending protocols that let thinly traded tokens serve as collateral will automatically adjust borrowing limits when those token prices…

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That's the gap. It's been known for years. It's still being exploited.

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Broader DeFi lending markets have grappled with oracle-related risks since at least the early 2020s, and the industry has developed various approaches — time-weighted average…

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Read also: Bitwise Moves $15.4 Million in XRP as Price Dips to $1.30

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The Moonwell and Tectonic attacks didn't require sophisticated zero-day exploits or novel cryptographic tricks.

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Cronos's network remains halted as of the latest available information, with no public statement on when normal operations resume. Tectonic hasn't published a full damage report.

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