Kostas Chalkias, co-founder and chief cryptographer of Mysten Labs, the company behind the Sui blockchain, has announced Havenex, an exchange designed for institutional clients.

 

Announcing Havenex, which is currently in the development and pre-launch stage, Chalkias said the exchange is not intended to become another Coinbase, Binance, Bybit, or Kraken.

 

According to the Sui co-founder, Havenex is designed to enable financial institutions to offer digital and traditional financial assets to their customers while meeting high standards of regulation, security, and transparency.

 

 

Giving a hint about the exchange's infrastructure, Chalkias said Havenex will have multisig enabled by default, quantum safe keys, hardware 2FA wallets, 100% multichain support, verifiable custody, as well as self custody and key loss protection mechanisms.

 

Despite Havenex still being in the development stage, the exchange is currently undergoing the necessary authorization process with Austria's Financial Market Authority (FMA). Once it receives the green light from the FMA, Havenex will have the legal basis to offer regulated financial services, including institutional custody, trading, and other related digital asset services.

 

Havenex is also currently conducting its first Series A funding round. 

 

Although details regarding how much is being raised and the investors involved remain undisclosed, several reports have speculated that the round could be oversubscribed, particularly given Chalkias’ involvement as a co-founder of Mysten Labs, which raised $336 million to support the development of the Sui blockchain.

 

Volo Protocol, a decentralized finance protocol built on the Sui blockchain, has suffered a security breach that led to the loss of approximately $3.5 million in digital assets.

 

In an effort to maintain transparency, the team in an X post on Wednesday publicly announced the security breach. According to the team, the attack only affected assets in selected vaults, including Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), Matrixdock Gold XAUm, and USDC (USDC).

 

 

On detecting the breach, the team said it acted quickly to contain it and minimize further damage. It stated, “We detected the attack, immediately notified the Sui Foundation and ecosystem partners to contain the damage, and froze the vaults to prevent any further exposure.”

 

As of the time of its first reporting on the incident, the Volo team said that the $28 million in total value locked across other vaults was safe, adding that all vaults on the protocol were temporarily frozen pending a full postmortem and remediation. The team also said it was in damage control mode and was actively working with on chain investigators and ecosystem partners to recover the stolen funds.

 

The team released updates on the hack

Since the hack happened, the Volo team has, in three separate updates, transparently informed the community about the efforts being made to recover the stolen funds.

 

In the first two updates, the team said it was already working with ecosystem partners and had successfully frozen approximately $500 million of the stolen funds, while also intercepting and blocking the hacker’s attempt to bridge 19.6 WBTC. According to the Volo team, these funds were no longer under the hacker’s control.

 

In a third update, the team said it had already frozen $2 million of the stolen funds, and that together with ecosystem partners and security teams, it had flagged the hacker’s EVM addresses across the majority of centralized exchanges, swappers, and KYC tools.

 

The Volo protocol hack came shortly after the KelpDAO exploit and the Drift Protocol exploit, which led to a combined loss of over $570 million, and are currently the largest DeFi hacks that have occurred this year. So far, over $770 million has been lost to DeFi hacks this year.

 

 

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), the world’s largest financial derivatives marketplace, has announced plans to launch Avalanche (AVAX) and Sui (SUI) futures contracts on May 4, pending regulatory review by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

 

The launch of these contracts, the company says, will allow market participants and traders the option to choose between micro-sized and larger-sized futures contracts, including AVAX futures sized at 5,000 AVAX and micro AVAX futures sized at 500 AVAX, as well as SUI futures contracts sized at 50,000 SUI and micro SUI futures contracts sized at 5,000 SUI.

 

According to Giovanni Vicioso, CME Group Global Head of Cryptocurrency Products, the launch of this new set of futures contracts is aimed at providing clients and market participants with greater flexibility and more market options, as well as improved capital efficiency across the deeply liquid CME derivatives market.

 

"We continue to see strong volumes as market participants turn to our markets to manage risk and pursue opportunities, with March average daily volume up 19 percent year over year and nearly $8 billion in average notional value traded daily,” Vicioso said.

 

The nearly $8 billion in average notional value traded is not insignificant, as CME is one of the most liquid derivatives exchanges. According to a February trading report, the CME derivatives trading platform recorded an all-time daily trading peak of 29.6 million futures contracts in January of this year, a 15 percent year over year increase compared with January of the previous year.

 

The launch of the Avalanche and Sui contracts comes shortly after CME Group launched Cardano (ADA) futures, Chainlink (LINK) futures, and Stellar (XLM) futures contracts on February 9 of this year, as part of the firm’s ongoing strategy of providing trusted, regulated crypto products to all kinds of market participants.

 

Crypto Derivatives Market Continues to Boom

The crypto derivatives trading market, primarily the futures and options market, has continued to boom. In the first quarter of this year, crypto derivatives trading accounted for almost 90 percent of the total $20.57 trillion traded in that period, reaching $18.63 trillion, while spot trading accounted for $1.94 trillion.

 

There has also been an increase in the number of large institutions in recent times, including traditional finance institutions that have moved to tap into this vast section of the crypto market.

 

In October 2025, the global investment bank Goldman Sachs, in collaboration with DBS Bank, launched the first-ever over-the-counter interbank cryptocurrency options trade. In December last year, JPMorgan Chase, America’s largest bank, also began exploring the launch of crypto spot and derivatives trading services for its institutional clients.