SUI Volume Drops 42% After $223M Cetus Hack Sparks Market Selloff

SUI has experienced a sharp 42.82% drop in trading volume following a major exploit on Cetus, the top decentralized exchange and liquidity hub on the SUI blockchain. The breach, which occurred on May 22, 2025, led to an estimated $223 million being drained from the Cetus Protocol. Although $162 million was quickly frozen, the remaining funds — including 20,920 ETH — are still unrecovered. In response, Cetus has offered a $6 million white hat bounty to incentivize the attacker’s cooperation.

The hack triggered widespread panic within the SUI ecosystem, severely impacting liquidity pools and causing a cascade of token price collapses. Tokens such as Lombard Staked BTC (LBTC) and AXOLcoin (AXOL) plummeted over 75%, with the top 15 affected assets all losing more than three-quarters of their market value on Cetus.

SUI itself fell 5.22% and is now trading at $3.64, reversing a portion of the 23% gain it saw earlier in May, which was fueled by bullish momentum from growing institutional partnerships and real-world asset tokenization initiatives. However, renewed tariff fears across global markets and the fallout from the breach have weighed heavily on sentiment.

Technically, SUI’s failure to hold above the key $4.25 resistance level led to profit-taking, driving the price below its 20-day EMA at $3.70. If bearish momentum persists, the token risks sliding toward its 50-day SMA near $3.00. While long-term fundamentals remain intact, the short-term outlook is clouded by the security incident and deteriorating technical indicators.

The Cetus hack underscores the importance of robust security for DeFi protocols and may influence investor behavior across the broader SUI ecosystem in the coming weeks.