Sui validators freeze majority of stolen funds in $220M Cetus hack

Cetus, a decentralized crypto exchange (DEX) built atop the Sui blockchain network, said $162 million of over $220 million stolen in a May 22 hack has been frozen.

According to the Cetus team, the DEX is working with the Sui Foundation and other entities within the ecosystem to recover the remainder of the funds. The Sui Foundation also confirmed:

The Cetus hack is the latest in a string of such incidents impacting crypto and Web3 in the first half of 2025. Cybersecurity continues to be a major issue in crypto, with many industry executives calling for the sector to police itself and establish more robust defenses or risk increased regulatory scrutiny.

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On May 22, the Cetus DEX was hacked in what is believed to be a smart contract code exploit that saw the DEX drained of approximately $223 million in user funds.

According to the team behind the Extractor Web3 security notification tool, $63 million of the stolen funds were bridged to the Ethereum network.

The Extractor team also identified a wallet address ending in "AF16" used by the threat actors to launder 20,000 Ether (ETH), valued at roughly $53 million.

The recovery efforts and the asset freeze coordinated by different projects, platforms, and validators in the Sui ecosystem drew mixed reactions from the crypto community.

"Good news for the victims, but if validators, 114 only in total, can freeze wallets when they want, it raises a major question about the network's censorship resistance. Sui is anything but decentralized," one user wrote in response.

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