$11M Drained from Cetus DEX on Sui After Alleged Exploit

In Brief:

Cetus, the main liquidity provider on Sui, was allegedly hacked, draining $11 million in $SUI.

Most tokens in the SUI/USDC pool dropped over 75% as liquidity dried up.

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Cetus, the leading decentralized exchange and liquidity provider on the Sui blockchain, has reportedly fallen victim to a major exploit, with an estimated $11 million in $SUI drained from its SUI/USDC pool. The incident has triggered panic across the ecosystem, causing most tokens paired with SUI to crash between 70% to 90% as liquidity pools were emptied.

The news was first reported by Mario Nawfal’s Roundtable, citing Cointelegraph as the source. According to real-time trading data, tokens like $AUXL, $haqu, $BUKAWK, and $WIF took some of the steepest hits, with price drops ranging from -78% to -94% as the exploit unfolded.

Cetus is a core DeFi protocol within the Sui ecosystem and powers most decentralized trading activity on the network. The DEX uses concentrated liquidity models similar to Uniswap V3, which makes it highly efficient—but also sensitive to rapid liquidity movements. The attacker is believed to have targeted a vulnerability within the pool's architecture, leading to the swift drain of funds and destabilization of token pairs.

So far, neither the Cetus team nor the Sui Foundation has released an official post-mortem. Community members have urged the developers to pause affected pools and begin tracing the stolen funds using on-chain analytics tools. Security firms and whitehats are expected to get involved in the coming hours.

The exploit comes at a time when Sui was gaining traction among developers and DeFi users due to its low fees and Move-based architecture. This incident could now slow momentum and raise questions about audit standards across the ecosystem.

As of this writing, the broader Sui ecosystem is in damage control mode. Some protocols have disabled swaps temporarily, while traders are scrambling to exit positions or move to other chains.

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