Decentralized crypto platform Cetus hit with $223 million hack

About $223 million was stolen from the Cetus decentralized cryptocurrency exchange in an attack on Thursday morning. 

The company initially announced an incident early in the day, telling customers on social media they paused the platform for safety reasons and were investigating the issue before confirming later that an attacker had stolen the funds.

“We took immediate action to lock our contract preventing further theft of funds,” the company said, adding that $162 million of the compromised funds have been successfully “paused.” 

Cetus, which operates on the Sui blockchain, did not respond to requests for comment about what they meant by “paused” but said they are “actively pursuing paths to recover the remainder” of the stolen funds and are working with the Sui Foundation and others. Officials at the company pledged to provide a full incident report at a later date. 

Multiple cryptocurrency security experts and companies said blockchain data showed that about $50 million of the stolen funds have already been transferred to a new wallet.

There was significant debate about the cause of the incident, with some pointing to messages in Cetus’ Discord channel as evidence the hacker exploited a vulnerability in the protocol that allowed them to steal the funds. Other experts told news outlets like Bloomberg the hacker likely manipulated the price of the coin as part of the attack. 

Cetus said in April that it had handled $50 billion in total trading volume.

The attack comes three months after more than $1.4 billion was stolen from cryptocurrency exchange Bybit in an attack that was attributed to hackers from North Korea. 

There have already been multiple attacks on cryptocurrency platforms this year that costing users millions of dollars worth of high-value coins. One of the biggest U.S. platforms, Coinbase, announced an incident last week that saw scammers siphon millions from nearly 70,000 customers after getting sensitive data from paid-off employees at the company.

More than $2 billion worth of cryptocurrency was stolen from crypto platforms in 2024, according to blockchain research firm Chainalysis.