2026 has seen 32 price manipulation attacks, impacting a nearly $50 billion crypto lending market
Odaily News: Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs reports that 32 price manipulation attacks have been recorded in 2026, surpassing the total of any previous full year; 2025 saw 12 incidents throughout the year. Such attacks account for roughly one-eighth of hacker incidents, up from one-seventeenth in 2022.
Attackers typically first inflate the price of low-liquidity tokens, then use them as collateral to borrow other assets from lending protocols. Subsequently, they cause the collateral price to plummet and abandon the collateral, potentially leading to bad debt in the lending pools.
According to DeFiLlama data, the total value locked in crypto-collateralized lending protocols has grown by approximately 56% over the past two years, approaching $50 billion, with active loan volume nearing $29 billion. The sector currently hosts over 570 lending protocols.
Recently, Tectonic suffered losses exceeding $70 million after the TONIC price was artificially inflated, with the attacker ultimately extracting approximately $6 million in assets after the Cronos chain was rolled back; Moonwell also previously incurred losses of around $8.7 million due to manipulation of the MAMO oracle price. (Bitcoin.com News)
