The bounty offer to acquire stolen funds from SUI-based decentralized Exchange (Dex) Cetus is comparable to a successful strategy that’s utilized by a Solana project three years ago.
It seems that Cetus was the identical development team as Crema Finance, a defi project based in Solana that suffered a hack of $ 9 million in 2022, but regained most funds through negotiations together with his hacker. Now Cetus relies on the identical strategy.
Cetus asks the hacker to return all the stolen means to take legal motion as much as $ 6 million or older ether older (Eth) of the stolen means in exchange for a promise. The protocol lost 223 million US dollars to an exploit on May twenty second.
The size of the bounty has triggered the setbacks of users, and plenty of demanded a proper remuneration plan as a substitute. Several community members argue that the majority of the damage has already been arranged when the funds are reclaimed -especially for the owner of the Cetus token, which have decreased to value after the incident.
In the meantime, SUI validators are also under fire because they freeze the funds when freezing the funds. The move goals to support recovery, but critics say that they uncover centralization risks within the network.
Cetus immediately fell by 35%after the hack. Source: Coingecko
Suis Cetus developers have a phantom exchange against Solana
The same negotiating strategy that the Cetus team applied to SUI was successfully used years ago to attribute funds for Crema. The Solana project has not released on its X account since March 2023, and its trading platform now sees negligible volume, however it still didn't end well for the hacker.
Crema suffered a hack of about $ 9 million in 2022. Similar to the Cetus case, the Crema hacker was offered a deal to return the funds, while the attack of law enforcement was retained $ 1.6 million.
It is believed that the hacker was caught and sent to prison. In April 2024, the US public prosecutor's office of the Southern District New York Shakeeb Ahmed sentenced to 3 years in prison because he had chopped two separate cryptocurrency exchanges. One was identified as Nirvana Finance while the opposite was not named.
The details of the case of the unnamed Exchange correspond to the hack of Crema, including the precise date of the exploit and the conditions of the agreement.
Norbert Bodziony, founding father of Nightly App, claims that the Cetus team is behind Crema Finance.
Bodziany rejected it to reveal as he learned from the connection with CoinTelegraph, but added that the connection to Suis developer circles is “generally known”.
CoinTelegraph turned to Cetus to verify the connection between the 2 projects, however the team had not answered by publication.
CoinTelegraph has learned individually that each projects were founded by Henry Du.
Save cetus; Centralize SUI
The Suis validators jointly blocked transactions from the hacker's addresses and effectively frozen 162 million US dollars of the stolen funds for SUI. Around 63 million US dollars had already been bridged to Ethereum before implementing these controls.
Although the coordinated efforts were effective to stop the cash from being washed, the Sui cryptocurrency community has criticized to be too centralized.
“Suis Validators are currently colliding to censor the hacker's TXS! Is the Sui centralized? Justin Bons, founding father of Cyber ​​Capital, wrote about X.
As Bons emphasized, Sui only has 114 validators – far lower than the more established colleagues for intelligent contract. Ethereum has over 1 million validators while Solana has 1,157.
In the meantime, members of the SUI community defended the move and argued that decentralized real chains should work in this fashion.
“Decentralization is just not about standing by while individuals are injured. It is concerning the power to act together without having permission,” said a member of the SUI community.
After the hack, the SUI developers have set code for a proposed function that might have made specific transactions possible to bypass all signing and security controls by adding a whitelist.
While the function might have been used to revive stolen means, it also made concerns about centralized control and erosion of decentralization. In the top, the code was not fused and is just not lived within the network.
Sui and Cetus Backlash contrasts the youngest hacks
The Cetus Exploit has spent on the continuing security challenges in Defi and raised deeper questions on who held the reins in allegedly decentralized networks corresponding to SUI.
The team's 6 million dollar offer for the hacker reflects the sport book that it used with Crema-but this time the crypto community is just not so forgiving. With Cetus Tanking, Trust Bractured and Validators who freeze funds, critics ask whether the decentralization of SUI is more appearance than reality.
The debate about decentralization is just not just for SUI. When Bybit lost 1.4 billion US dollars in February in February, which was connected to the North Korean state actors, security experts and users urged platforms corresponding to Thorchain and stock exchanges to dam the funds.
In this case, Thorchain received a counter response since it didn’t occur. This is strictly the alternative of what SUI is criticized for now.
The hacker didn’t accept the cetus offer. Two Ethereum money exchanges sure to the exploitation still hold over 60 million US dollars in ETH, without not moving on the time of writing. The SUI addresses remain paralyzed.
