Cetus DEX Offers $6M Bounty to the Hacker in a Bid to Recover Stolen Funds

Cetus, the native decentralized exchange (DEX) on the Sui blockchain

Cetus, the native decentralized exchange (DEX) on the Sui blockchain (CRYPTO: SUI) is offering $6 million in white bounty to the hacker, in a bid to recover the $220 million stolen funds. The DEX faced a major exploit on Thursday, May 22, and it managed to freeze $162 million of the stolen funds in a short time after the hack.

In a recent announcement, Cetus disclosed an attempt to contact the hacker on May 21. The goal is to negotiate the return of 20,920 Ether (ETH) (CRYPTO: ETH), valued at over $55 million, along with other stolen funds.

For this act of good faith, Cetus is prepared to pay a white hat bounty of $6 million, which will be credited to a new address. To finalize the matter, Cetus will not pursue any further legal, intelligence, or public action.

However, Cetus issued a strong warning. If the hacker tries to move these assets off-ramp or sends them further to crypto mixers, they will escalate with full legal and intelligence resources to identify and locate the hacker.

This development comes as the SUI team deployed an emergency measure to allow certain transactions to bypass standard security checks, potentially facilitating the recovery of funds from the recent SUI hack.

According to GitHub activity, it appears that the team has deployed a special function which allows an unsigned transaction to be executed if all validators agree to apply a patched code version. This measure is being undertaken to recover funds that are currently frozen on the SUI chain.

A software engineer at Solayer Labs, Chaofan Shou, provided further insight, stating that the "Sui team asked every validator to deploy patched code so they could take away @CetusProtocol hacker's $160 million via unsigned tx."

An unnamed Sui engineer confirmed this information to Shou in a May 22 post on X. However, validators have yet to deploy this patch, and they are currently only capable of blocking transactions involving the hacker's objects.

This decision has sparked criticism from decentralization advocates, who contend that the ability to override transactions in a decentralized, permissionless network is a serious breach of its principles.

Despite this, others in the crypto community view the swift action taken by the SUI team to mitigate the hack and recover stolen funds as a positive sign of progress.

Following this development, SUI price has come under strong selling pressure after being rejected at $4.2. It is currently being sold off and now trades at $3.85, with daily trading volume up 45% to $3.4 billion. A price recovery seems unlikely until the team manages to recover the funds.

Just last week, SUI outperformed XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) and ADA (CRYPTO: ADA) in terms of institutional inflows, showcasing significant institutional interest in the token. However, despite this bullish sentiment, SUI is now down 10%, indicating broader market uncertainty.