Cetus offers $6M bounty after $220M hack as Sui faces decentralization debate

Cetus is offering a $6 million white hat bounty in an effort to recover $220 million in stolen digital assets, while emergency responses from the Sui Network have raised concerns about decentralization.

Sui-native decentralized exchange (DEX) Cetus was exploited for over $220 million worth of cryptocurrency on May 22. However, Cetus managed to freeze $162 million of the stolen funds shortly after.

Cetus has since offered a white hat bounty of up to $6 million for the exploiter for returning the stolen 20,920 Ether (ETH), worth over $55 million, along with the rest of the stolen funds currently frozen on the Sui blockchain.

“In exchange, you can keep 2,324 ETH ($6M) as a bounty, and we will consider the matter closed and will not pursue any further legal, intelligence, or public action,” Cetus wrote in a message embedded in a blockchain transaction on May 22.

However, Cetus will “escalate with full legal and intelligence resources” if these assets are off-ramped or sent to cryptocurrency mixers and not returned promptly.

A white hat bounty is offered to ethical hackers who seek protocol vulnerabilities to prevent future exploits.

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Cryptocurrency hacks soared to $90 million across 15 incidents in April, a 124% increase from March when hackers stole $41 million worth of digital assets.

Meanwhile, the industry is still recovering from the largest crypto hack, which saw Bybit exchange lose over $1.4 billion on Feb. 21, 2025.

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Meanwhile, GitHub activity shows the Sui team has considered implementing an emergency whitelist function that would allow certain transactions to bypass security checks, potentially to recover funds linked to the hack.

“It appears that the Sui team asked every validator to deploy patched code so they could take away @CetusProtocol hacker’s $160 million via an unsigned tx,” said Chaofan Shou, a software engineer at Solayer Labs.

However, an unnamed Sui engineer told Shou that “validators held off deploying this and currently they are only denying tx that involves hacker’s objects,” he said in a May 22 X post.

The move has sparked criticism among decentralization advocates, who argue that the ability to override transactions contradicts the principles of a decentralized permissionless network.

Despite widespread criticism in the crypto community, some saw the rapid response as a sign of progress, not centralization.

“This is what real world decentralization looks like. Not just powerless, but responsive and aligned with the community,” said pseudonymous crypto sleuth Matteo, adding that decentralization “isn’t about standing by while people get hurt, it’s about the power to act together, without needing permission.”

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