Nostra Exploit Pushes September Crypto Losses Past $326M

On Thursday, the Starknet-based lending protocol Nostra suspended its money market. The move followed a price oracle manipulation that enabled a single account to borrow about $3.5 million using NSTR as collateral.

Lending, borrowing, withdrawals and liquidations are all still disabled as the team reconciles every asset. It remains unclear what recovery measures might be possible.

Nostra Suspends Money Market Amid September Oracle Exploit

According to BeInCrypto Markets data, Nostra (NSTR) has a market capitalization of $546,751. Such a small token is easy to move with little capital.

The account used NSTR as collateral and borrowed Ethereum (ETH), Starknet (STRK), USDC, USDT, Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), and DAIv1. The total value of the borrowed assets was about six times the entire market value of the collateral token.

PeckShield, a security firm, reported that the account moved $1.92 million to Ethereum. That transfer included 234.57 ETH and 1.3 million DAI.

After the exploit, deposits dropped sharply. The total value locked in Nostra declined from roughly $4 million on September 16 to about $710,632 at press time, according to DefiLlama.

Starknet Faces Second Oracle Failure in Two Weeks

Nostra is not the only Starknet protocol affected in September. On September 4, an erroneous price from Pragma's publishing pipeline appeared on multiple Starknet feeds.

That incorrect price caused 47 liquidations among 42 borrower wallets on the Vesu money market. In a September 13 update, Pragma said it had recovered 95% of the assets.

But the two incidents have different causes. Pragma's issue stemmed from a publishing error, whereas Nostra's involved intentional manipulation of a collateral price.

Nostra, meanwhile, continues to assess the damage.

“We are reconciling the impact on each asset and tracing the funds. The final loss and potential recoveries are not yet known,” Nostra said.

The team also cautioned users against impersonators. Nostra stated that it will never send direct messages or ask holders to connect a wallet during the recovery process.

September has been expensive for the crypto industry. Before the Nostra event, DefiLlama had recorded over $326 million in crypto losses this month. The largest portion of that comes from the $320 million Liquid Network incident.

This pattern has persisted throughout the year. PeckShield recorded 50 hacks in August, the most of any month in 2026, though losses fell 49.5% to $136.3 million. Nostra matches that trend of frequent, smaller-scale thefts.