The Sui validator community quickly took action, successfully freezing stolen funds valued at approximately $162 million, but this also sparked a new round of discussions on 'on-chain governance' and 'fund recovery' mechanisms.
Sui validators exercised autonomy and quickly locked down the attack addresses.
The Sui Foundation stated that each validator node on the Sui blockchain possesses an important setting authority: to specify which transactions from specific addresses to ignore through their profiles. This feature was originally designed to allow nodes to autonomously choose whether to process transactions from certain addresses based on their risk tolerance or legal compliance needs.
In this incident, more than a third of Sui validators (by stake proportion) collectively decided to ignore transactions from two addresses suspected to be related to the attack, successfully 'freezing' the cryptocurrency assets that had not yet been transferred by the attackers.
Non-special function, Sui Foundation: the fastest response.
In fact, this feature of 'choosing to ignore transactions from specific addresses' is not unique to Sui; theoretically, validators on any blockchain network have similar capabilities. However, in this attack incident, the Sui Foundation stated that the Sui validator community reacted extremely quickly, successfully freezing approximately $162 million in funds before the hacker could transfer them across chains.
This emergency measure, while unable to recover all funds, has created negotiation space for the victims. Unfortunately, as of now, the attackers have not responded to the Cetus team's outreach.
Freezing is not the ultimate solution; Cetus proposed initiating a community vote.
After the freezing action, the Cetus team called for the community to vote on a special proposal: to return the frozen funds to users through a protocol upgrade, without rewriting on-chain history or rolling back transactions.
This proposal received initial support from the Sui Foundation, but also set two key conditions:
Maintain neutrality and transparency: The Sui official team will not participate in the vote itself but will focus on designing and executing a governance process that reflects the community's will, and promises to publicly share relevant designs and code.
Cetus promises full compensation: Cetus must publicly commit to using all its financial resources to ensure that every affected user can ultimately retrieve their funds.
This article is about the Sui Foundation collaborating to freeze hacker funds! $162 million in cryptocurrency assets urgently stopped the bleeding, with Cetus proposing no rollback. It first appeared in Chain News ABMedia.