In an X post, Cetus confirmed that it has suffered a loss of $223 million from the protocol, and further wrote that the majority of impacted funds have been paused and the team is working actively on the issue.
Following this hack, Cetus negotiated asking hackers to return the stolen amount while keeping $6 million.
In the most recent X post, the hacked Protocol noted that it has identified the hacker’s Ethereum wallet and made a ‘whitehat settlement’ to recover the stolen amount.
Dear Sui community, thank you for your patience while our team works on the incident investigation and resolution. Since taking the actions indicated in our previous announcement, we have also done the following:1. We engaged the broader ecosystem, Sui team, and related… https://t.co/Gs1EWXZ6AD
— Cetus (@CetusProtocol) May 22, 2025
Terming this offer as time sensitive, Cetus said it might end if the funds are ramped off or mixed. Nowadays, mixing cryptocurrencies after looting has become one of the most convenient ways to obscure being tracked.
The post also notes, “ We identified the root cause of the exploit and fixed the related package, and informed ecosystem builders as fast as we could with help from ecosystem members to prevent other teams from being affected.”
It is worth noting that Cetus is engaged with an anti-cybercrime organization to support their fund tracking and is negotiating a deal with the hackers to return the stolen funds.
A quick brief of the Cetus Protocol
Cetus is a decentralisation exchange and concentrated liquidity protocol based on SUI and the Aptos blockchain. It utilizes its CLMM model, which is inspired by Uniswap V3 and similar others.
By leveraging CLMM (Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker), Cetus enables more precise trading and higher returns for liquidity providers, making it a compelling option for DeFi participants seeking an optimized trading experience.
With the help of the Wormhole SDK, Cetus integrates a cross-chain bridging interface that makes it easy to move assets between more than 20 blockchains, such as Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, and Solana.
How was the Cetus Protocol hacked?
According to available information, Cetus Protocol was hacked after bad actors succeeded in targeting a vulnerability in the Cetus smart contract, especially within CLMM.
It is crucial to note that hackers used spoof tokens such as BULLA to exploit flaws in pricing and reserve calculation logic. This helped them to drain a substantial amount of real assets, including SUI and USDC, with a few others.
The preliminary investigations suggest the theft was caused not by a traditional smart contract but rather the failure to validate tokens added to pools, which allowed the spoof tokens to disrupt the price mechanism.
Crypto market price updates
Until publishing, the crypto market was at $3.57 trillion, and the crypto fear and greed index was at 76, indicating greed.
Bitcoin seems to be stuck at $110k, and when writing, it was exchanging hands at $110,406. Over the weeks, its prices have shown a greater bullish momentum with helping it to establish its all-time high just below the $112k mark.
Ethereum is trading at $2,659 with an intraday addition of 1.40%. At the same time, it traded at its highest of $2,731 and lowest of $2,606.
