Sui Community Launches Vote on Recovering $162,000,000 in Stolen Crypto From Hacker

The Sui (SUI) community appears poised to greenlight a recovery plan to return $162 million worth of crypto stolen from the decentralized exchange Cetus Protocol last week.

Last week, a hacker hit Cetus with a sophisticated smart contract exploit targeting the decentralized exchange’s (DEX) concentrated liquidity market maker (CLMM) pools, purloining approximately $223 million worth of assets from the platform.

The DEX quickly froze $162 million worth of the stolen assets. Now, the Sui community is currently voting on a proposal that enables a special transaction to return those frozen assets from two attacker addresses back to Cetus.

If passed, the vote would approve a one-time authentication of two special transactions hard-coded with the two attacker addresses, stolen asset objects, and their destination.

The votes are weighted by validator stake, but the Sui Foundation’s stake is excluded to maintain neutrality. The vote passes if more than 50% of the total stake participates and there are more “yes” votes than “no” votes.

The voting period ends next week, but early passing could happen as early as Thursday if the remaining unvoted stake cannot change the outcome. That appears poised to happen, with 71% of the validators having already voted “yes” at time of writing, compared to 0.3% for “no,” 1.5% abstaining and 27.2% who had yet to vote.

Cetus also announced this week that it is in a position to fully cover the remaining losses via cash, token treasuries and a loan from the Sui Foundation, pending the vote’s passage.

“Because full recovery is dependent upon the results of the community vote, we humbly ask for the Sui community’s full support to recover the funds via the upcoming vote. We recognize that this is an extraordinary ask forced by our actions, however we think it is the right decision especially for those affected.”

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