Nostra Protocol Suspends Money Market Following Price Oracle Manipulation

Nostra, the Stargate lending protocol, suspended its money market on Thursday after one account exploited a manipulated price oracle to borrow approximately $3.5 million using NSTR as collateral.

All lending, borrowing, withdrawals, and liquidations are currently halted while asset settlements are processed. Recovery of funds remains unclear.

According to BitInfoCharts, Nostra's (NSTR) market capitalization stands at $546,751, making it vulnerable to significant price movements with minimal capital.

The account deposited NSTR as collateral and withdrew Ethereum (ETH), Stargate (STRK), USDC, USDT, Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), and DAIv1. The withdrawn amount was approximately six times the market value of the collateral tokens.

Security firm PeckShield reported that the account bridged $1.92 million in Ethereum, including 234.57 ETH and $1.3 million in DAI.

Total protocol deposits on DefiLlama dropped from around $4 million as of September 16 to approximately $71,632 by the time of writing.

Nostra is not the only Stargate protocol affected this month. On September 4, incorrect pricing was posted across multiple Stargate feeds due to a flaw in Pragma's issuance pipeline, causing 47 liquidations among 42 borrower wallets on Money Market Bves. Pragma reported recovering 95% of assets by September 13.

However, the causes differ: Pragma's incident stemmed from a posting error, while Nostra involved intentional collateral price manipulation.

Nostra continues to assess the extent of damages and urged users to be cautious of impersonation accounts. The protocol confirmed it will not send direct messages or request wallet connections during recovery.

September has proven costly for the industry. DefiLlama recorded that crypto losses exceeded $326 million this month, primarily from a $320 million incident involving Liquid Network. This trend has persisted throughout the year, with PeckShield reporting 50 hacks in August—a monthly high since 2026—resulting in $13.63 million in losses despite a 49.5% decrease compared to July.