Cetus Protocol, Sui Community’s Largest DEX, Hacked For $223M

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Cetus Protocol Group Confirms Breach Associated Articles:

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Cetus Protocol, the largest decentralized alternate (DEX) on the Sui community, was hacked on Thursday, dropping about $223 million price of SUI tokens.

The hack focused the SUI/USDC liquidity pool, wiping out almost all liquidity on Cetus and bringing buying and selling on the platform to a halt.

The incident additionally induced a flash depegging of USDC on the Sui chain, the place it was reported to be exchanging palms for a fraction of a cent. Liquidity in some pairs fell sharply, with some swimming pools dropping as little as $143,000.

Cetus(@CetusProtocol) on #SUI was hacked and misplaced greater than $260M!
The hacker is changing the stolen funds into $USDC and cross-chaining to #Ethereum to alternate for $ETH, with ~60M $USDC already cross-chained.https://t.co/b0uGu8icXr https://t.co/0BpKSaygmr pic.twitter.com/txfxLoImOd
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) Might 22, 2025

The exploit induced the entire high 15 SUI-based tokens to plunge by over 75%.

Cetus Protocol Group Confirms Breach

The Cetus group confirmed the breach and suspended buying and selling in a bid to include harm. It’s probing the scope of the assault and making an attempt to deliver the system again to a steady state.

“Now we have confirmed that an attacker has stolen roughly $223M from Cetus Protocol,” it mentioned in a submit on X. “Now we have took fast motion to lock our contract stopping additional theft of funds.”

It added that $162 million of compromised funds have been efficiently paused, and that it’s working with the Sui Basis and different ecosystem members on next-step options, with the purpose of recovering the remaining stolen funds.

The attacker used a classy technique of assault that concerned spoof tokens reminiscent of BULLA, which had been used to control defective value computations and reserve programs within the sensible contracts of Cetus.

The attacker additionally manipulated liquidity to withdraw precise property reminiscent of SUI and USDC, exploiting vulnerabilities within the automated market maker logic of the DEX.