• May 22, 2025 Hacker Attack Incident: CETUS encountered a smart contract vulnerability attack, resulting in approximately 223 million USD of user funds being stolen. Among them, 63 million USD was transferred to the Ethereum network via bridging. After the incident, Sui validation nodes quickly added the hacker's address to the 'Denial of Service Blacklist' to freeze funds.

  • Recovery and Compensation Mechanism: On May 26, Sui initiated on-chain governance voting, with results announced on May 29 (over 2/3 of validation node weights supported), and the protocol upgrade took effect from May 30 to early June, allowing the hacker's assets to be legally transferred away. CETUS announced it would initiate a community vote to decide whether to use protocol funds and the Sui foundation's loan to fully compensate victims, promising to start compensation procedures immediately regardless of the voting outcome.

  • Market Impact: After the incident, the price of CETUS plummeted by 50% to 0.12 USD, and its market cap shrank to 100 million USD. As of July 2025, its price had rebounded to 0.15 USD, but the market remains divided on its long-term prospects.

II. Core Features and Innovations

  • Concentrated Liquidity Mechanism: Adopts an algorithm similar to Uniswap V3, allowing liquidity providers (LPs) to provide liquidity within a specific price range, rather than the full price range in traditional AMM models, thus improving capital efficiency. For example, LPs can provide liquidity within a specific range, reducing idle funds.

  • Active Liquidity Management: Dynamically manages liquidity through algorithms, optimizing trading slippage and fee income, enhancing platform efficiency.

  • Cross-chain Support: As the largest DEX in the Sui and Aptos ecosystems, CETUS supports multi-chain trading, currently integrating 21 DEXs in the ecosystem, providing functions such as Swap, Limit, and DCA (Dollar-Cost Averaging).

III. Technical Vulnerabilities and Fixes

  • Attack Principle: The hacker utilized a flash loan to borrow approximately 10 billion haSUI, constructing overflow data to trigger contract vulnerabilities. Specifically, this manifested as: input values greater than 2^(256-64) but less than 0xffffffffffffffff << 192, leading to a failure in left shift overflow detection, ultimately adding significant liquidity at very low cost.

  • Vulnerability Fix: The CETUS team fixed the vulnerability through two GitHub PRs: the first was not fully resolved, and the second corrected the mask value (mask = 1 << 192 = 2^256), ensuring effective overflow detection. It is recommended that the project undergo cross-audits by multiple auditing firms before going live.

IV. Market Positioning and Development

  • Ecological Status: CETUS is the DEX with the highest TVL and trading volume in the Sui ecosystem, with official data showing a total of 15 million accounts and a historical trading volume of 57 billion USD. It is positioned as the 'King of Aggregators' on SUI and APT, similar to 1inch on ETH and Jupiter on SOL.

  • Financing and Investment: Completed seed round financing in May 2023, led by OKX Ventures and KuCoin Ventures, with participation from institutions like AC Capital. The funding is used for platform development, market share enhancement, and user base expansion.

  • Future Challenges: After the incident, CETUS faces a crisis of trust and needs to rebuild user confidence through security audits and bounty programs for vulnerabilities. Whether it can regain its position in the highly competitive DEX market depends on technical security and ecological activity.

V. Market Perspectives

  • Bullish Perspective: Some analysts believe CETUS is the 'favorite child' of the SUI ecosystem, and the Sui Foundation may provide support. Its technical model (CLMM) is superior in capital efficiency compared to traditional AMMs, and if the vulnerabilities are successfully fixed, it may see a rebound.

  • Bearish Perspective: The incident exposed its security risks, and as an emerging protocol, its risk resistance is weaker than established DEXs (like Uniswap). Some investors suggest avoiding it, believing its long-term value is questionable.

The future development of CETUS needs to balance technological innovation and security protection. Its ability to recover from the crisis will depend on protocol governance, technological iteration, and the rebuilding of market confidence.

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