Sui Network releases post-mortem on $260M Cetus hack

The Sui network has released a post-mortem report regarding the cause of the $260 million Cetus hack that shook up its ecosystem last week. 

According to the post-mortem report, the main reason for the Cetus incident was a problem in a math library used by Cetus, not a weakness in Sui or Move. 

Move is a programming language for creating smart contracts on various blockchain platforms, and Sui is a Layer-1 blockchain project.

However, based on the report, the effect on users is still the same. As a result, Sui Network revealed that they needed to adopt a more effective approach and improve their efforts to support the ecosystem’s security. 

Apart from this, the report also highlighted that the network was designed to allow for safer smart contract development, making the first significant incident for a dApp a “deeply sad” moment for the team. 

Sui team takes effective measures to strengthen the network’s security

Last week, the $223 million crypto hack hit the network’s largest decentralized exchange and liquidity provider, Cetus Protocol. Luckily, the network managed to freeze $162 million while Cetus put out a $6 million bounty to reclaim the other $60 million of stolen funds.

The Cetus team earlier stated that they were collaborating with the Sui Foundation and other groups in the ecosystem to recover the remaining funds. The Sui Foundation confirmed that many validators had identified the addresses linked to the stolen funds and were blocking transactions on those addresses until further notice. The Cetus team was looking for ways to recover those funds and return them to the community.

In addition, to enhance the network’s security, Sui has decided to invest an extra $10 million in security efforts. The network will use this money for audits, bug bounty programs, and formal verification. The team also aims to work with the developer community to finalize these security strategies. 

Concerning the incident, the team mentioned that it marks a coming-of-age experience, which, according to them, is something every major blockchain has unfortunately faced. They further supported their claim with the argument that no design or programming language can prevent humans from creating bugs. 

Therefore, the Sui team has urged community members to use this incident as a lesson to learn from it to strengthen vital code on the network and assist builders in taking the necessary steps to come back stronger. 

Following the CoinMarketCap report, SUI’s price currently trades at $3.49, reflecting a 3.07% decrease in the past 24 hours.

Growing cases of cybersecurity raise serious concerns in the crypto world

On May 22, the Cetus DEX experienced a hack that was thought to have happened due to a smart contract code issue, resulting in the loss of around $223 million in user funds. 

Based on the information from the Extractor Web3 security notification tool team, $63 million of the stolen money was moved to the Ethereum network. They also reported a wallet address ending in “AF16” that the hackers used to launder 20,000 Ether worth about $53 million. 

The recovery efforts and the freezing of assets, organized by various projects, platforms, and validators in the Sui ecosystem, received mixed reactions from the crypto community. 

Following this, one user commented that the action was good news for the victims. However, according to the user’s argument, if the 114 validators could freeze wallets whenever they wanted, it raised serious concerns about the network’s ability to resist censorship. The user then concluded that Sui was far from decentralized.

Notably, the Cetus hack is the latest incident affecting crypto and Web3 in the first half 2025. On top of that, cybersecurity still remains a big concern in the crypto world, with many leaders in the industry urging the sector to self-regulate and strengthen defenses to avoid more regulatory attention. 

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Original reporting: cryptopolitan.com