Cetus reported that it will borrow money from the Sui Foundation to mitigate the damage while waiting for the community to vote on how to handle the $160 million that is frozen.
Cetus borrows money from Sui, striving to compensate 100% of the losses for users. Photo: CryptoSlate
In the early hours of May 28, 2025, the DeFi project that was attacked last week, Cetus Protocol, announced that it has prepared a compensation plan for affected users.
On May 22, the leading AMM DEX platform in the Sui ecosystem, Cetus Protocol, was attacked by hackers, draining all liquidity from multiple trading pools, causing the prices of many tokens to plummet by 80-90% in a short time. It is estimated that the hack resulted in losses of up to $223 million, with about $60 million having been lost to Ethereum and difficult to recover, while the remaining $160 million is temporarily frozen on Sui.
According to the initial investigation, the cause of the incident stemmed from an overflow error in the liquidity calculation function of Cetus. The project has proposed negotiations with the hacker to recover the funds withdrawn to Ethereum, but received no response and had to consider other options to mitigate the consequences.
In the latest announcement, Cetus said that if it uses all the remaining funds and takes an additional hot loan from the Sui Foundation, the project is confident it can cover 100% of the losses for all users while waiting for the vote on unfreezing the $160 million that has not been siphoned off by hackers. The loan from Sui represents more than $60 million that has been transferred to Ethereum and cannot be recovered. #CETUS🔥🔥🔥
For now, the Sui community is still in the process of voting on a protocol upgrade proposal to unfreeze the remaining $160 million on-chain and reimburse affected Cetus users from the attack. This voting will last for 7 days from 03:00 AM on May 28 to 03:00 AM on June 4, 2025.
As of the time of writing, out of a total of 114 validators across the Sui network, 23 entities have voted with a proposal approval rate of up to 100%. The proposal will only pass if more than 50% of the total amount of staked SUI participates in the vote (excluding blank votes) and the approval rate is higher than the opposing votes.
Voting situation as of the morning of May 28, 2025. Source: Suiscan
CETUS price is up more than 30% after the project announced it would borrow money from Sui to mitigate losses, as well as starting the voting period to stop freezing assets.
CETUS price fluctuations in the last 24 hours, screenshot from CoinGecko at 10:40 AM on May 28, 2025