Cetus Relaunch Incoming: Recovery Plan and the Road Ahead

5 min readJun 7, 2025

Dear Cetus Community,

Over the past two weeks, our team has worked around the clock to respond to the recent security incident that affected Cetus CLMM pools. While the journey has been challenging, we’re truly grateful for the patience and trust from the community. Today, we’re ready to share the final recovery plan that will lead us to a full relaunch of the Cetus Protocol at 3:00 UTC on June 8, 2025.

What Happened

Cetus CLMM pools were targeted in a sophisticated hack, resulting in the loss of a large amount of tokens. The attacker exploited a vulnerability in a CLMM-dependent open source library, drained assets from our major pools, and conducted a large number of on-chain swaps, severely disrupting pool prices and balances.

Our Response

Since the incident, we’ve taken decisive steps to ensure the security of the protocol, recover assets, and prepare for a safe relaunch:

Identified and patched the vulnerability to prevent similar attacks across the Sui ecosystem.
Worked with the Sui validators and the community to vote on and successfully retrieve quarantined assets on Sui from the attacker.
Secured a dedicated recovery loan from the Sui Foundation.
Fixed all affected pool data to restore correct pricing based on current market conditions and pre-attack benchmarks.
Carefully rebalanced assets and prepared pool refills.
Developed a new compensation contract to fairly address user losses.
Completed thorough security audits on all code fixes, contract upgrades, and compensation systems.

Now, we are ready to move forward.

Relaunch Details

The Cetus Protocol is planned to be restarted at 3:00 UTC on June 8, 2025. After relaunch, all users will be able to access the full functionality of Cetus — including swaps, managing LP positions, adding/removing liquidity, claiming fees & rewards and more.

We have completed the following steps as part of the restoration:

Pool Refill & Liquidity Recovery

We’ve replenished the affected CLMM pools using three key sources:

Recovered assets from the attacker: These assets were returned after a successful on-chain vote by Sui validators. Since the attacker conducted disruptive swaps, the team conducted necessary rebalancing among these assets with minimal slippage using a combination of on-chain swaps with OTC and CEX trades. Transaction records are available here.
Cetus team’s treasury funds: Cetus has committed 100% of its available cash reserves (~$7 million USD in mainstream assets) to cover liquidity shortfalls. These funds were used to acquire key missing coins such as SUI, WAL, DEEP, NS, USDY, and more via direct market purchases.
Dedicated loan from the Sui Foundation: A 30 million USDC loan was applied to support the recovery.

After recovery and refilling, all affected pools are now back to a healthy state. Users will regain access to their previous position liquidity at relaunch.

If your LP position is from an unaffected pool, your liquidity remains completely unchanged.
If your LP position is from an affected pool, the liquidity recovery rate for each pool now ranges between 85% and 99%, depending on the degree of attack on each pool. You can check the list of affected pools and their corresponding recovery rates here. LP functions will also resume as normal for positions in affected pools. The particular position NFT of an affected position will serve as a certificate that can be used by the LP to claim corresponding CETUS compensation. For an affected position, even if its liquidity is fully withdrawn in the future, its position NFT will not be burned due to its proof attributes.

Compensation via CETUS

Due to asset limitations, we’re unable to restore all affected pools to 100% liquidity immediately. As part of our commitment, we will use CETUS tokens to compensate for the liquidity loss.

We are allocating 15% of CETUS supply to the compensation contract (including the entirety of the team’s remaining unvested tokens, accounting for 10% of the total supply). These compensation tokens will be vested following the schedule below:

5% will be immediately claimable at relaunch.
10% will be linearly unlocked every month over the next 12 months (which has no change to the previous team’s vesting schedule), with the first claim starting from June 10, 2025, UTC.

Compensation Claim Page: https://app.cetus.zone/compensation

Under the entire plan, there is no additional inflation to the total supply. The overall vesting schedule in our tokenomics will be slightly adjusted accordingly to adapt to the plan. You can view the updates here. The updates will be submitted to CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko to update their information as well.

In taking these actions, it is our hope this token redistribution will transform CETUS into a more community-driven ecosystem going forward, a positive outcome from an incredibly challenging time for all of us.

Compensation claiming page will be published upon the relaunch.

The Continuous Pursuit of the Hacker and Unrecovered Funds

The relaunch does not mark the end of our pursuit of justice. Legal action has already been initiated in multiple jurisdictions, and several law enforcement agencies are actively involved.

The attacker ignored our previous whitehat offer and has begun attempting to launder assets — a futile and traceable act. We are highly confident that successful arrest and recovering the remaining assets is only a matter of time.

If there are new funds recovered in the future,

recovered funds will be used to give users an option to forfeit remaining CETUS in exchange for USDC if the compensation period is ongoing and repay any outstanding loan amounts to Sui Foundation.
if the compensation period is over, the remaining recovered funds will be used for extensive CETUS buybacks and then stored into the community treasury.

Looking Forward

The attack on Cetus was a painful moment for our protocol, our community, and the whole Sui ecosystem. To everyone affected: we want to express our sincerest apologies.

We are not leaving this behind lightly. Here’s what’s next:

Initiate an additional round of comprehensive audits across all Cetus-associated codebases following the recently completed audit review, further strengthening the security foundation of our protocol.
Upgrade the protocol monitoring system, leveraging tools for real-time monitoring to detect and respond to threats and vulnerabilities
Improved configurations for risk management and controlled rate-limiting of asset flows
Move towards being fully open sourced and initiate a newly-structured whitehat bounty program to encourage collective technical and security contributions
New product development will be accelerated, with exciting new offerings and a revised roadmap coming soon.

This restart signifies more than just a relaunch, but a renewal.

We’re rebuilding — more secure, more resilient, and more dedicated than ever to delivering secure, powerful and user-friendly DeFi infrastructure for the Sui ecosystem.

Legends are not defined by their successes; they are defined by how they bounce back. Thank you for walking this path with Cetus. Together, we’ll push beyond limits, rewrite the future, and claim new heights. The journey restarts now. Let’s fly further than we ever imagined. 🌊

Yours,

Cetus Protocol