Sui community passes governance vote to recover stolen Cetus funds blocked by validators in $223M heist

Cetus, a Sui-based decentralized exchange, received overwhelming support for its plan to unlock tokens stolen and later blocked during a massive $223 million exploit last Thursday.Of the total stolen amount, about $162 million worth of tokens were blacklisted and frozen on Sui by validators and currently sit in two attacker addresses. An onchain governance vote to unfreeze the assets reached early approval on May 29, with 90% of voters backing the proposal, according to a Friday announcement. Under the plan, Sui network validators will transfer frozen funds to a multisignature trust jointly controlled by Cetus, blockchain security firm OtterSec, and the Sui Foundation via a network upgrade.The DEX also plans to deploy a dedicated compensation contract to manage the distribution of recovered funds and introduce an emergency pool recovery feature within its Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker (CLMM) infrastructure.“Cetus is aiming to complete its full recovery and restart in approximately one week, which will include data restoration, restarting the upgraded CLMM contract, and fully resuming all paused product functions, including LP functions. Etc,” an update from the team said.The exploit, which occurred on May 22, targeted a vulnerability in Cetus’ CLMM model and drained about $223 million from its liquidity pools. The protocol later patched a bug in the open-source library code used in its smart contracts and offered a $6 million white-hat reward to recover 20,920 ETH ($56.3 million) that the attacker had bridged to Ethereum. The incident adds to more than $5.3 billion lost to DeFi hacks to date, including the $600 million Ronin breach and the $323 million Wormhole exploit, according to The Block’s data dashboard.Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.© 2025 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.