SUI Network Adds Whitelist and Restore Privileges—Is a Hacker Fund Return Incoming?

Delving into this, we found that $162 million of the stolen money had been frozen. The remaining amount transferred to Ethereum and other chains through cross-chain bridges is reported to be unrecoverable since they have left the Sui ecosystem.

Soon after the incident, Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) disclosed that they are doing everything in their power to help. At that time, he hinted that he had received a prompt response from the SUI team. He also hinted that many security teams are working around the clock to get to the bottom of this.

Based on the preliminary report, the hacker used fake tokens to manipulate price data and reserve balance. With this, they were able to extract real assets from several liquidity pools, including SUI/USDC. Initially, this was thought to be a bug. However, it was later found to be a hack, forcing the team to pause the smart contract to prevent further losses.

Despite the recovery effort, some SUI community members have raised concerns about the networks decentralized position. According to one user, the ability of just 114 Validators to freeze wallets undermines the network resistance.

Good news for the victims, but if validators, 114 only in total, can freeze wallets when they want, it raises a major question about the networks censorship resistance. Sui is anything but decentralized.

Similarly, KookCapitalLLC has highlighted in an X post that the decisive intervention demonstrates that most blockchain platforms, except Bitcoin, have some level of centralized control.

Hacking Occurrences and SUI Price Reaction

Hacking incidents have over the years been witnessed in large quantities with crypto firms becoming the main targets. As detailed in our recent blog post, this has led to a 30% decline in Decentralized Finance‘s (DeFi) Total Value Locked from its peak in December 2022. Meanwhile, we also examined in our last update that North Korea’s Lazarus Group hacked software developers to attack Solana and Exodus wallets.

Following this report, the price of SUI declined to $3.6. At press time, the asset had reduced its daily loss to pushing the price up to $3.8. Also, traders interest seems to have returned as the daily trading volume surged by with $3.4 billion changing hands.