Cetus DEX’s IDO oversubscribed after Sui mainnet launch

Just hours after the initial decentralized exchange offering (IDO) for Cetus began on May 8, its hard cap target of 800,000 Sui (SUI) tokens has already been surpassed, with over 6 million SUI committed worth approximately $6.85 million at the time of publication. Developers claimed that the IDO reached its initial goal in less than 30 seconds after the sale went live. 

Cetus is a DEX and liquidity protocol built on Sui and Aptos. The IDO, which is scheduled to take place from May 8 to 10, is still ongoing despite the initial target being reached. During the IDO, 20 million Cetus tokens (CETUS) are up for grabs out of a total supply of 1 billion CETUS. Users can commit SUI in exchange for CETUS at an exchange rate of 1 SUI to 25 CETUS. The rules and token metrics of the public sale, along with the price of SUI, would place the Cetus DEX at an initial valuation of $45.8 million. 

The IDO has a hard cap of 800,000 SUI. According to developers, when the total commitment surpasses this amount, “Each purchaser’s final purchase amount accepted by the Seller will be a portion of their committed amount, calculated proportional to all the respective committed amounts from all purchasers in the IDO.”

Although IDOs can surpass their initial goals due to popularity, others can also reach this outcome simply by the way their public sale is designed, i.e. “surpassed” on purpose. Like their initial coin offerings counterparts, investments in IDOs are considered to be high risk and can be subjected to rug pulls, scams, or lack of traction thereafter. 

A layer-1 blockchain created by former Meta executives, the Sui mainnet officially launched on May 3, along with listings of its Sui token. The SUI public sale took place weeks prior, with an offering price of 0.1 Tether (USDT) per SUI.

Immediately after the listing, the price of SUI opened at $4.50 apiece with a fully diluted market capitalization of $45 billion before plunging 75% to trade at $1.14 at the time of publication. Before the listing, Binance introduced Sui LaunchPools, where users could stake either BNB (BNB) or TrueUSD (TUSD) for a limited supply of SUI rewards. The LaunchPools reached nearly $4 billion in total value locked in just two days.

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