Can a decentralized chain only … freeze your funds?

“Well, why literally everyone and their mother are talking about Sui at this time?”

If that is you, hey, you know we have you. Let’s put an end to the pain of not being aware:

Yesterday, the Sui Blockchain experienced the greatest 2025 hack.

Cut stole $ 223m of CetusThe largest Dex aggregator in Sui.

FYI: That is approximately 94% of what the platform had in the total blocking value (TVL) the previous day. So yes, quite much.

“But … how?”, Maybe you, maybe.

As I said, don’t worry, we have you.

The attacker A defect exploded in Cetus’s smart contracts – And according to HACKEN ALEX HORLAN CTO CTOThis is how everything came out:

Step 1. Make a garbage card look valuable

The attacker made his own file, just a useless currency called noise.

Now, in most DEXS, prices are established in how many coins are in a pool. If there is a lot of noise and only a small sui (a legitimate file), the system assumes that noise must be really valuable, because it believes that a lot of noise is needed to buy some sui.

Then, the hacker threw tons of bulla into the pool and added some sui. Now the price of the pool was fooled: he thought that 1 bulla was worth a lot of sui, when it really was garbage.

Step 2. Settings of a false liquidity pool

Next, the hacker used noise to create a new liquidity group, this time adding almost nothing, enough to configure it.

When someone starts a new liquidity pool, they get tokens LP in return. These LP tokens are like a receipt that shows what percentage of the group it possesses, and then can exchange them to obtain their part of the real chips in the group.

But the system still thinks that the false token is super expensive, so when the attacker adds a little in the pool, he treats that as a massive deposit. As a result, the hacker gets a lot of LP tokens, much more than they really deserve.

Step 3. Out Cash

Now armed with those LP tokens, the hacker begins to eliminate liquidity, exchanging its LP tokens for real chips from the pool.

Because system mathematics are broken by the previous trick, allows them to continue taking real money, again and again, although they barely put something real to start.

I know. Crazy things.

And the result was a disaster:

CRAAAAZY THINGS.

Cetus hastened to answer:

• Paused all intelligent contracts To avoid more damage;

• He associated with the Sui Foundation and Froze around $ 162 million of hacker funds. Unfortunately, the hacker had already united around $ 60 million to Ethereum;

• Offered a generosity of white hat – Up to $ 6 million – if the attacker returns the ether.

That sounds like a fairly solid response.

But many people were like, “Uhhh … pause. Can sui freeze funds?”

Yes, if someone can stop transactions, it looks a lot like the traditional banking system. And for a network that is called decentralized, that is a great red flag.

On the other hand, people like Sleuth Crypto Matteo said What happened was not centralized control, was decentralization in action.

According to him, SUI validators from all over the world coordinated independently to stop a well -known malicious wallet. No one gave orders, nobody had to ask permission. They simply chose to act.

That, he said, is how the true decentralization looks: not be impotent, but to be able to respond together as a network.

And probably was The correct choice. If you can prevent someone from stealing, why would you not?

But even if this made sense, he left a crack in the idea that Sui was completely decentralized.

So yes. And that, friends, that’s why everyone is driving up for Sui. The pain of lack of consciousness has been released.