Cetus is providing a $6 million white hat bounty in an effort to get better $220 million in stolen digital belongings, whereas emergency responses from the Sui Network have raised issues about decentralization.
Sui-native decentralized alternate (DEX) Cetus was exploited for over $220 million price of cryptocurrency on May 22. However, 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 presently frozen on the Sui blockchain.
“In alternate, you’ll be able to hold 2,324 ETH ($6M) as a bounty, and we are going to think about 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 May 22.
However, Cetus will “escalate with full authorized and intelligence sources” if these belongings 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 stop 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 belongings.
Meanwhile, the business continues to be recovering from the biggest crypto hack, which noticed Bybit alternate lose over $1.4 billion on Feb. 21, 2025.
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SUI considers emergency white record perform to override transactions
Meanwhile, GitHub exercise shows the Sui crew has thought of implementing an emergency whitelist perform that may enable sure transactions to bypass safety checks, doubtlessly to get better funds linked to the hack.
“It seems that the Sui crew requested each validator to deploy patched code so they may take away @CetusProtocol hacker’s $160 million by way of an unsigned tx,” mentioned Chaofan Shou, a software program engineer at Solayer Labs.
However, an unnamed Sui engineer informed Shou that “validators held off deploying this and presently they’re solely denying tx that includes hacker’s objects,” he mentioned in a May 22 X post.
The transfer has sparked criticism amongst decentralization advocates, who argue that the flexibility to override transactions contradicts the ideas of a decentralized permissionless community.
Despite widespread criticism within the crypto neighborhood, some noticed the speedy response as an indication of progress, not centralization.
“This is what actual world decentralization appears to be like 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 in regards to the energy to behave collectively, while not having permission.”
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