$3.5 Million Against $550,000 of Collateral: How to Check Which Tokens Your DeFi Lending Market Accepts

If you have funds sitting in a decentralised lending market, your risk is not decided by the interest rate but by the list of tokens the protocol accepts as collateral. On September 17, 2026, an attacker on Starknet exploited exactly that list and borrowed around 3.5 million US dollars from the Nostra Finance money market. The collateral was the protocol's own token NSTR, whose entire circulating market capitalisation stood between 550,000 and 590,000 US dollars at the time. The borrowed amount exceeded the market value of the posted collateral by more than five times. This article explains what is technically new about the incident and what is not — and above all, which four figures you can look up in the documentation of your own lending market before you next put money into it. The check takes about ten minutes and requires no expertise in blockchain programming. What happened on Starknet on September 17: $3.5 million against $550,000 of market value Nostra Finance runs a money market on the Ethereum scaling solution Starknet. That is a protocol where users deposit tokens and other users take out loans against posted collateral. The protocol reported the incident on September 17...