Blockaid Announces Partnership with the Sui Foundation to Enhance Sui Ecosystem Security

According to the announcement, Blockaid will add protection to Sui wallets and respond to smart contract exploits, offchain threats and operational faults

The Sui Foundation has partnered with web3 security firm Blockaid to enhance the security of the Sui ecosystem, the two firms announced Thursday (Jan. 25).

Blockaid will be adding protection to Sui wallets and responding to smart contract exploits, offchain threats and operational faults on Sui.

The Sui Foundation supports the growth of Sui, a layer-1 blockchain launched in May 2023 with the goal of decentralized network that can manage a high volume of transactions with minimal delay. The total number of accounts on the blockchain reached 67.3 million in 2024, according to a blog post by the firm. As of March 11, Sui had $1.1 billion in total value locked, down from $2 billion on Jan. 6, according to DefiLlama.

Blockaid, which in February announced a $50 million Series B funding round, provides security tools in the web3 space to clients like Stellar, Avalanche and Coinbase. In November 2024, Blockaid partnered with Backpack to prevent $26.6 million in potential losses from decentralized finance attacks on Solana.

Users on the Sui network had been recently targeted by malicious actors. On Jan. 26, crypto sleuth ZachXBT reported an attack that led to a $29 million loss for a user on the Sui network, with the stolen funds later mixed using Tornado Cash. The investigator noted that current limitations in the Sui blockchain explorer and analytics tools made the theft hard to trace. In June 2023, Sui issued a $500,000 bounty to blockchain security firm CertiK for discovering another threat to the network.

Programming Language Reduces Threats, But Audits Still Needed — SlowMist

In a September 2024 post on Medium, blockchain security firm SlowMist did a detailed analysis of the Sui network, writing that there is still a need for coding audits even though Move, the Sui programming language, mitigates many of the problems facing blockchains that use other languages.

“Compared to other blockchain platforms, the Move language excels at preventing common smart contract vulnerabilities, […] making Sui more robust and reliable from a technical standpoint,” SlowMist wrote. “However, developers must still pay attention to business logic security, particularly in areas such as permission management, object type usage, and token consumption, to avoid asset loss due to coding errors or improper design.”

According to Sui, while the Move design can prevent many common vulnerabilities seen in other networks, it could still be vulnerable to protocol-level attacks, including “threats like timestamp dependence, logic errors, insecure randomness, and gas limit vulnerabilities.”