Sui passess vote on Cetus’ $162M frozen from exploit

Sui validators have approved a governance proposal to return $162 million in frozen assets linked to a recent exploit of the decentralized exchange Cetus, marking a key step toward full user repayment.

Decentralized exchange Cetus was exploited for over $220 million worth of digital assets on May 22, but validators managed to freeze $162 million of the funds shortly after the incident occurred.

In a governance vote concluded on May 29, Sui validators passed the recovery proposal with 90.9% voting in favor, 1.5% abstaining and 7.2% not participating, according to the network’s official governance page.

“With this result, the impacted funds will be moved to a multi-sig wallet and held in trust until they can be returned to users according to the plan led by Cetus,” Sui said in a May 29 X post.

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The decision follows debate within the crypto community over the role of validators in freezing onchain funds.

While some decentralization advocates criticized validators’ ability to freeze the funds, other industry watchers praised the rapid response as a step forward against growing crypto industry exploits.

The community vote is part of a broader recovery plan that includes using Cetus’ treasury and an emergency loan from the Sui Foundation.

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Cetus aims for restarts, full recovery within a week

Cetus expressed gratitude for the rapid community support, sharing its recovery roadmap after the vote concluded.

First, Sui validators will implement the upgrade to transfer the frozen funds to Cetus’ multisignature wallet before Cetus can initiate the upgrade for its emergency recovery pool and full data restoration.

“Cetus is aiming to complete its full recovery and restart in approximately one week,” the protocol wrote in a May 29 X post, adding:

“A dedicated compensation contract is under development and will undergo auditor review before deployment.”

After the full protocol restart, all liquidity providers in the affected pools will regain access to their recovered liquidity, while remaining losses will be “claimable through the compensation contract,” it added.

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