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

Cetus Protocol, the largest decentralized alternate (DEX) on the Sui community, was hacked on Thursday, dropping about $223 million value 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 triggered a flash depegging of USDC on the Sui chain, the place it was reported to be exchanging fingers 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/b0uGu8icXrhttps://t.co/0BpKSaygmr pic.twitter.com/txfxLoImOd

— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) Could 22, 2025

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

Cetus Protocol Workforce Confirms Breach

The Cetus workforce confirmed the breach and suspended buying and selling in a bid to include harm. It’s probing the scope of the assault and attempting to convey the system again to a secure state.

“We’ve got confirmed that an attacker has stolen roughly $223M from Cetus Protocol,” it stated in a submit on X. “We’ve got took instant 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 objective of recovering the remaining stolen funds.

The attacker used a complicated methodology of assault that concerned spoof tokens corresponding to BULLA, which have been used to govern defective value computations and reserve programs within the sensible contracts of Cetus.

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

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