Cetus Protocol, the largest decentralized alternate (DEX) on the Sui community, was hacked on Thursday, shedding about $223 million price of SUI tokens.

The hack focused the SUI/USDC liquidity pool, wiping out practically all liquidity on Cetus and bringing buying and selling on the platform to a halt.

The incident additionally induced a flash depegging of USDC on the Sui chain, the place it was reported to be exchanging fingers for a fraction of a cent. Liquidity in some pairs fell sharply, with some swimming pools dropping as little as $143,000.

Cetus(@CetusProtocol) on #SUI was hacked and misplaced greater than $260M!

The hacker is changing the stolen funds into $USDC and cross-chaining to #Ethereum to alternate for $ETH, with ~60M $USDC already cross-chained.https://t.co/b0uGu8icXrhttps://t.co/0BpKSaygmr pic.twitter.com/txfxLoImOd

— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) Might 22, 2025

The exploit induced all the prime 15 SUI-based tokens to plunge by over 75%.

Cetus Protocol Staff Confirms Breach

The Cetus group confirmed the breach and suspended buying and selling in a bid to comprise injury. It’s probing the scope of the assault and attempting to deliver the system again to a steady state.

“We’ve confirmed that an attacker has stolen roughly $223M from Cetus Protocol,” it mentioned in a put up on X. “We’ve took fast motion to lock our contract stopping additional theft of funds.”

It added that $162 million of compromised funds have been efficiently paused, and that it’s working with the Sui Basis and different ecosystem members on  next-step options, with the aim of recovering the remaining stolen funds.

The attacker used a classy technique of assault that concerned spoof tokens resembling BULLA, which had been used to control defective worth computations and reserve programs within the good contracts of Cetus.

The attacker additionally manipulated liquidity to withdraw precise belongings resembling SUI and USDC, exploiting vulnerabilities within the automated market maker logic of the DEX.

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