Sui-Based Volo Protocol Suffers $3.5M Exploit, Freezes Vaults to Limit Losses
Volo Protocol, a liquid staking platform on the Sui network, disclosed a security incident that resulted in roughly $3.5 million in losses from its vaults, according to a team statement.
The exploit affected three vaults holding WBTC, XAUm, and USDC. Volo said it identified the attack and moved quickly to alert the Sui Foundation and ecosystem partners, while freezing the impacted vaults to stop further outflows. As a precaution, the protocol has temporarily frozen all vaults while an investigation and remediation work are underway.
Volo said the issue was confined to the three compromised vaults and that the remaining vaults—representing about $28 million in total value locked—were not affected and remain secure, with no shared attack vector.
The team said it is working with onchain investigators and partners to recover the funds and will publish a full postmortem after the investigation concludes. In follow-up updates, Volo reported freezing about $500,000 in assets tied to the exploit and said it blocked an attempt to bridge 19.6 WBTC out of the attacker’s control. The protocol said it is coordinating with ecosystem participants on the appropriate process to return the intercepted assets.
Volo added that it is prepared to absorb the financial hit and aims to avoid passing losses on to users. "We are in damage control mode now, but once that's done, we will work out a remediation plan, and a full breakdown will be shared shortly."
April has also seen a wave of major DeFi exploits. Attackers siphoned around $285 million from Solana-based Drift Protocol in about 12 minutes, with most funds bridged to Ethereum shortly after; onchain activity linked to the incident reportedly began as early as March 11. Separately, NEAR’s Rhea Finance lost an estimated $7.6 million in an oracle-manipulation attack. KelpDAO suffered the year’s largest DeFi hack, with about $292 million stolen from its crosschain bridge built on LayerZero Labs infrastructure.
