Ontology mainnet remains down from 'malicious attack activity' as Cronos, Injective recover

Ontology’s blockchain will remain down for at least the next 24 hours, per a September 1 update after mainnet was temporarily paused as part of a containment process that started on August 31 in response to what project developers now say is due to targeted “malicious attack activity.”

While Ontology remains down, two other chains that entered the news over block production halts around the same time, Cronos and Injective, have already come back online.

Ontology insists that users don’t have to worry about fund safety even while the network remains dark.

What happened to Ontology?

Ontology’s security incident started on August 31 as a precautionary shutdown after a daily check turned up a “potential security concern.” The project’s core team quickly pulled the plug on block production to allow validators run a proper review.

As in the Zcash case earlier in the year, Ontology also insisted that it has not seen any evidence of tampering reaching its ONT, ONG, or other assets.

After one day of assessing the situation, the project’s communication has now blamed the episode on “malicious attack activity targeting the network.”

As for the way forward, Ontology said the mainnet would not be returning online for at least the next 24 hours. Even that commitment is contingent on remediation, testing, and a third-party security review confirming that the security response and network upgrade have plugged the leaks.

Cronos is back after its $74 million Tectonic drain

Unlike Ontology, Crypto.com-linked chain, Cronos, has already moved on from its own network halt, which it initiated to contain a price inflation attack that grew as large as $74 million on Tectonic’s TONIC token, as Cryptopolitan reported.

However, Cronos’ “validator-consensus emergency action” contained the losses to $6 million in Ethereum, according to the blockchain security firm PeckShield.

Through it all, Crypto.com chief executive Kris Marszalek insisted that the incident never expanded to the exchange or its app. Tectonic took most of the hit as value locked on the DeFi protocol collapsed from about $122 million to under $3 million on August 31. It has since recovered to above $121 million as of this report.

Injective’s three-hour halt and unproven hack talk

Injective’s outage was the shortest and the murkiest. Pulling from archive nodes, on-chain analyst Rarma said the chain stalled for 3 hours and 42 minutes on August 31, with the last block, 181,027,006, timestamped 16:10:02 UTC and the next arriving at 19:52:14. Rarma noted the height climbed by exactly one across the gap, meaning nothing on the chain was reversed.

That undercuts louder speculation. A separate X user, MoneyStack9, floated that the halt and a coinciding Upbit deposit suspension “might actually be due to an exploit,” pointing to on-chain data that suggested roughly $2.79 million had been drained and an on-chain message sent to a suspected attacker.

Neither Injective nor the exchange has confirmed a breach, and the claim comes from a small account with single-digit engagement, so it should be read as an open question rather than a finding. INJ was trading near $4.83 on September 1, per CoinMarketCap.

The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter. Want in? Join them.