Cetus, Sui's largest on-chain exchange, experienced a major attack on May 22, 2025. The attack resulted in losses ranging from $200M to $1B in digital assets. Sui originally claimed $223M was stolen, but experts believe $260M was taken from liquidity pools.
The price of SUI fell 8% in three hours, wiping out almost $1B in market capitalization. Sui-based tokens and stablecoins fell even more, with some liquidity pools losing more than 99% of their holdings.
Cetus worked with the Sui Foundation, protocols, and validators to trace the stolen monies. Validators censored transactions to slow down the laundering process. They released code that allowed an unsigned transaction to be validated via a specific override, effectively locking the compromised cash remotely.
Third-party firms such as Binance and Arkham aided with the inquiry. To evade censorship on Sui's blockchain, the attacker converted stolen SUI and USDC into ether (ETH). Despite the onslaught, some SUI supporters cheered the company's resiliency as its stock price recovered. Skeptics questioned the ease with which the ostensibly decentralized network collaborated with validators to freeze assets and overturn consensus checks in minutes.
