Cetus is providing a $6 million white hat bounty in an effort to get well $220 million in stolen digital property, whereas emergency responses from the Sui Community have raised considerations about decentralization.
Sui-native decentralized trade (DEX) Cetus was exploited for over $220 million price of cryptocurrency on Might 22. Nonetheless, Cetus managed to freeze $162 million of the stolen funds shortly after.
Cetus has since supplied a white hat bounty of as much as $6 million for the exploiter for returning the stolen 20,920 Ether (ETH), price over $55 million, together with the remainder of the stolen funds at the moment frozen on the Sui blockchain.
“In trade, you possibly can maintain 2,324 ETH ($6M) as a bounty, and we’ll contemplate the matter closed and won’t pursue any additional authorized, intelligence, or public motion,” Cetus wrote in a message embedded in a blockchain transaction on Might 22.
Nonetheless, Cetus will “escalate with full authorized and intelligence sources” if these property are off-ramped or despatched to cryptocurrency mixers and never returned promptly.
A white hat bounty is obtainable to moral hackers who search protocol vulnerabilities to forestall future exploits.
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Cryptocurrency hacks soared to $90 million throughout 15 incidents in April, a 124% improve from March when hackers stole $41 million price of digital property.
In the meantime, the trade remains to be recovering from the most important crypto hack, which noticed Bybit trade lose over $1.4 billion on Feb. 21, 2025.
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SUI considers emergency white listing perform to override transactions
In the meantime, GitHub exercise shows the Sui group has thought of implementing an emergency whitelist perform that might permit sure transactions to bypass safety checks, probably to get well funds linked to the hack.
“It seems that the Sui group requested each validator to deploy patched code so they might take away @CetusProtocol hacker’s $160 million through an unsigned tx,” stated Chaofan Shou, a software program engineer at Solayer Labs.
Nonetheless, an unnamed Sui engineer informed Shou that “validators held off deploying this and at the moment they’re solely denying tx that entails hacker’s objects,” he stated in a Might 22 X post.
The transfer has sparked criticism amongst decentralization advocates, who argue that the power to override transactions contradicts the rules of a decentralized permissionless community.
Regardless of widespread criticism within the crypto neighborhood, some noticed the fast response as an indication of progress, not centralization.
“That is what actual world decentralization appears like. Not simply powerless, however responsive and aligned with the neighborhood,” said pseudonymous crypto sleuth Matteo, including that decentralization “isn’t about standing by whereas folks get harm, it’s concerning the energy to behave collectively, while not having permission.”
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