Price-manipulation exploits have become a persistent threat to decentralized finance lending, with blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs recording 32 incidents through August 2026—more than double the previous annual record of 12 set in 2025 and roughly one in eight crypto hacks, compared with about one in 17 in 2022. Attackers often use flash loans, which are repaid within one transaction, to inflate the reported value of thinly traded collateral, borrow liquid assets and leave protocols with bad debt when prices normalize, although not every incident uses a flash loan. On August 30, an attacker drove Tectonic’s Cronos-based TONIC token roughly 100 times higher in about 20 minutes and borrowed close to $75 million, while TONIC had generated only about $305,000 in trading volume during the prior week. Cronos halted block production and rolled back the chain, reversing approximately $68.7 million that remained on-network, while roughly $6 million had reached Ethereum. Three days earlier, Moonwell suffered an approximately $8.7 million MAMO-related exploit without a rollback. The incidents come as lending-protocol total value locked approaches $50 billion and active loans near $29 billion across more than 570 protocols, increasing the importance of liquidity-aware collateral limits, multiple oracle sources, time-weighted prices and circuit breakers.