Sui’s Cetus DEX Is Back Online After $223M Exploit

Sui-based decentralized exchange (DEX) Cetus Protocol is back online following a 17-day outage spurred by last month's $223 million exploit.

The protocol recovered around $162 million worth of stolen funds and is continuing legal action against the attacker, who did not respond to the DEX's requests to negotiate.

Sui stepped in to compensate Cetus for the initial losses, issuing a loan to reimburse impacted users on May 28. DefiLlama data shows that Cetus' total value locked (TVL) was $284 million before the exploit and is now down to $124 million.

The attacker exploited a flaw in Cetus' shared math library contract, tricking the protocol into believing that one token was worth millions of dollars.

Despite attempts to negotiate and come to a settlement, the attacker began laundering funds through coin-mixing service Tornado Cash.

Cetus has refilled the liquidity pools with between 85% to 99% of their initial liquidity, meaning that users can now trade on the platform without exceptional slippage.

The Cetus token (CETUS) has lost 44% of its value over the past month and is down around 1% over the past 24 hours, CoinMarketCap shows.