Nostra Halts Starknet Money Market After $3.5M NSTR Oracle Exploit
Starknet (STRK)
Editor:
Eugene Serbin
cryptotimes.io reports that Nostra Finance has paused its money market on Starknet after an oracle price manipulation allowed one account to borrow $3.5 million in assets against inflated collateral. The exploit occurred on September 17, 2026, when the NSTR token’s price feed printed a value higher than the true market rate, enabling the attacker to withdraw ETH, STRK, USDC, USDT, WBTC, and DAIv1. Nostra disabled lending, borrowing, withdrawals, and liquidations while the team reconciles pool balances and traces the stolen funds.
Security firms PeckShield and CertiK confirmed the $3.5 million loss, noting that approximately $1.92 million had been bridged to Ethereum mainnet as 234.57 ETH and 1.3 million DAI, while $1.55 million remained on Starknet. The borrowed amount exceeds the NSTR token’s circulating market capitalization of roughly $590,000 by more than five times, highlighting the severity of the oracle-to-collateral mismatch. This incident follows a March 2025 event where xSTRK and sSTRK feeds inflated three times, though that was a feed error rather than active manipulation.
Nostra announced the integration of Chainlink Price Feeds in May 2026, but it remains unclear if the NSTR feed was routed through Chainlink or a different provider at the time of the attack. The protocol warned users against phishing attempts during the recovery process and stated that a detailed post-mortem will follow. Nostra has not yet confirmed the exact Ethereum receiving address or the final loss figures. The incident is classified by DefiLlama as spot-price manipulation on Starknet.
How the market reacted
Whalio's own Binance spot order flow for STRK, measured when this story was written up on 18 September 2026. Not the outlet's figures.
STRK is trading at $0.02899 with a 24-hour spot volume of $1,958,569 and 38,793 trades. Buy pressure is fading, as the 1-hour buy ratio of 44.3% and the 4-hour ratio of 41.4% are both higher than the 24-hour average of 39.7%. Volume delta is negative across all timeframes, with -$9,237 in the last hour, -$173,152 over four hours, and -$398,439 over 24 hours. Cumulative Volume Delta (CVD) closed at -$556,050, indicating that sellers have been more aggressive than buyers over the day. Net buying occurred in only 6 of the 24 hours, suggesting that selling pressure dominated the trading session.
The latest daily buy ratio of 45.1% sits at the 9th percentile of the last 324 days, against a median of 48.6% - among the weakest buying days it has had.
Was that an ordinary day?
The same Binance spot measurements for STRK, averaged over the days leading up to the story.
Over the preceding week, the 7-day average buy ratio was 49.1%, making today’s 24-hour ratio of 39.7% a significant drop of 9.4 percentage points. While 24-hour volume was 1.06 times the weekly average, the 8-day volume delta was -$620,664, showing a consistent outflow of capital. The price changed by only +3.7% over eight days, with net buying occurring in just 3 of the 7 days. This indicates that today’s trading activity is an unusual day for the coin, characterized by a sharp decline in buying interest relative to the weekly norm.