Cetus Offers $5M Bounty to Unmask Hacker as Sui Freeze Sparks Centralization Debate

Decentralization takes a hit as Cetus slaps a $5M bounty on the table—turns out ’immutable’ ledgers have a panic button after all.

When the code cracks, the suits come knocking. Sui’s emergency freeze exposes the open secret: even DeFi has its own ’too big to fail’ moments.

Bonus jab: Nothing unites crypto like a juicy bounty—except maybe the collective amnesia when VCs pull the strings behind ’trustless’ systems.

Whitehat offer sets the stage

Hours before the public bounty, Cetus used an on-chain transaction to deliver aon Sui and ethereum (ETH) blockchains. 

That note offered a $6 million retention fee, equivalent to 2,324 ETH, in exchange for the return of 20,920 ETH and all frozen amounts on Sui. 

The team said it had mapped the exploiter’s Ethereum wallets and was coordinating with US federal authorities, FinCEN, the Seychelles Police Force, selected defense-sector partners, major exchanges, and bridge operators. 

The ultimatum warned that any attempt to launder funds would trigger a global law-enforcement escalation.

Per the protocol’s May 22 incident disclosure on X, the attacker targeted a flaw in Cetus’ pricing mechanism, prompting an immediate pause of all smart-contract activity. The project’s blockchain data shows that the exploit yielded $223 million in tokens. 

Of that sum, $61 million was moved to Ethereum via bridges, while the remaining $162 million was frozen by Sui network validators.

Cetus has not revealed when normal trading will resume or whether the team will implement code changes before reactivating the contracts.

Validator action sparks decentralization debate

According to its, Sui hosts 114 active validators. On May 22, Suithat a broad plurality agreed to reject any transaction originating from the attacker’s wallets shortly after the breach.

The collective freeze prevented the remaining $162 million transfer and locked the tokens on-chain. 

Gautham Santhosh, co-founder of Polynomialfi,that the crypto community is now weighing the benefit of rapid asset protection against the implication that validators can suspend specific accounts at will.

Although he highlighted that the process demanded consensus and was not arbitrary, the episode has changed the security assumptions regarding layer-1 blockchains.