Cetus Exchange on Sui Sues Hack, Takes Offline
Date: 2025-05-23 Author: Henry Casey Categories: BUSINESS
On the morning of May 22 at 11:34 UTC, the Cetus Protocol team posted a message on the X social network, announcing the incident and the suspension of the smart contract. The developers emphasized that the decision was made for security purposes, and further details will be provided after the completion of an internal investigation. Similar notices about temporary suspension of service were published twice more.
According to Coinpedia, the attack completely emptied the SUI/USDC liquidity pool, which dealt a serious blow to trading on the platform. Crypto Briefing supplemented the information, noting that the attack affected other liquidity pools as well. At the height of the incident, the USDC rate on Sui dropped to a few cents. Some trading pairs lost most of their liquidity — its volume fell to $143,000. Tokens related to the Sui ecosystem lost 70% to 90% in value.
Cetus has long been positioned as a reliable decentralized platform with open source code and a non-custodial governance model, where users retain control over their assets. This incident calls into question its resilience to external threats.
The project team expressed concern and recommended that users refrain from any transactions with the platform until the investigation is completed and the protocol is fully restored.
It is worth noting that this is not the first case of a serious attack on a DeFi platform in recent times. Earlier, PeckShield experts reported an attack on Abracadabra Finance, during which the attackers stole 6260 ETH, which is equivalent to $13 million. Such events raise the question of the need to strengthen security measures in decentralized protocols.
