On the afternoon of May 22, the leading DEX liquidity protocol on the Sui chain, Cetus Protocol, saw a sudden and significant drop in the price of its token CETUS, which nearly "crashed." Additionally, multiple token trading pairs on Cetus experienced sharp declines. Subsequently, many KOLs posted on X, indicating that the Cetus protocol's LP pool had been attacked by hackers.

According to on-chain monitoring, the Cetus attacker seems to have controlled all LP pools priced in SUI, with the amount stolen exceeding $260 million as of the time of writing. The hacker has begun converting the funds to USDC and cross-chain transferring to the Ethereum mainnet to exchange for ETH, with approximately $60 million in USDC already completed in cross-chain transfers.

The hacker's on-chain address is: 0xe28b50cef1d633ea43d3296a3f6b67ff0312a5f1a99f0af753c85b8b5de8ff06. Currently, the main assets in this address are still primarily SUI and USDT, but it also includes mainstream tokens from the Sui ecosystem such as CETUS, WAL, and DEEP, indicating the extensive scope of this hacker attack.

The Cetus team has not provided a clear response to this incident, but a team member stated in the project's Discord chat that the Cetus protocol was not hacked, but rather there was a "oracle bug." The Sui official team has indicated that they will actively support the Cetus team in ongoing investigations and will provide further updates as soon as possible.

Of course, on-chain data does not lie. According to statistics, the Cetus protocol's LP pool has suffered losses exceeding $260 million in this incident, with the stolen amount surpassing the protocol's TVL ($240 million) and market cap ($180 million). As of the time of writing, the price of CETUS has dropped from $0.25 in the afternoon to $0.17, with the project's prospects remaining unclear.

Community Public Opinion Points to Team's "Theft History"

Interestingly, as Cetus triggered a crash in the SUI ecosystem, many community members pointed out on Twitter that Cetus was developed by the same team behind the previous Solana ecosystem DeFi protocol Crema Finance, which had also experienced a theft incident.

On July 3, 2022, Crema Finance was similarly attacked by hackers using a Solend flash loan, draining the LP funds and resulting in losses exceeding $8 million. Subsequently, on July 7, the hacker returned $7.6 million worth of stolen cryptocurrency after negotiating with the team. According to the negotiation agreement, the hacker was allowed to keep 45,455 SOL ($1.65 million) as a bounty.

Currently, there is no public information proving that Crema and Cetus are indeed developed by the same team, but it appears that the reasons for the thefts in both cases are indeed consistent.

Ecosystem Market Share Exceeds 60%, Can the Sui Ecosystem Recover?

According to DeFiLlama data, Cetus had previously been the leading DEX and liquidity hub in the Sui ecosystem, accounting for over 60% of the entire ecosystem's trading volume. This "liquidation-style" attack has undoubtedly directly damaged the liquidity center of the ecosystem, which would be a devastating blow for any "second-tier public chain."

Since March of last year, the trading volume on the Sui ecosystem chain has shown an overall upward trend, with the prices of mainstream ecosystem tokens such as CETUS, DEEP, and WAL also soaring, widely regarded by the community as the public chain with the highest potential for returns in this cycle and "the next Solana."

However, interestingly, according to Dune data, there has been a significant amount of wash trading on the Sui chain, with the ecosystem's liquidity toxicity (Flow Toxicity) remaining close to 50% for a long time. This is also part of the reason why the community has reported that the Sui ecosystem "has nothing, yet the price keeps rising."

Illustration: The radius of the circles in the image below shows the total trading volume of a single address. It can be seen that the wallet with the highest trading volume also has a high trading frequency, indicating possible wash trading; data source: Dune Analytics

According to CoinGecko data, currently, SUI and mainstream ecosystem tokens such as DEEP and WAL have all been affected by this incident and have seen declines, but there seem to be signs of a stop in the downward trend.

However, Sui's "strong market maker" persona has been established in the minds of traders for quite some time. In the past month, during the resurgence of altcoins, Sui has also been one of the most outstanding performers among mainstream public chains. In the face of this significant ecosystem theft, can the foundation provide an effective response to further reinforce its "strong market maker" persona?

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