Sui Mainnet Hit Twice by v1.72 Gas Logic Bug, SUI Drops as Trading Halts
Sui mainnet suffered two outages within 48 hours after a bug introduced in the v1.72 upgrade disrupted transaction processing and epoch transitions. Sui said the issue was a gas accounting conflict tied to the new “Address Balances” feature, which prevented validators from finalizing transactions during epoch changes.
The first full stall began around 7:15 a.m. PT on May 28, 2026 and lasted 5 hours 55 minutes. After emergency validator coordination, the network resumed, but halted again on May 29 during another epoch transition when validators could not reach a consistent network state. Sui described the May 28 fix as temporary, with the second outage driven by the same underlying Sui mainnet gas logic bug.
User balances were reportedly intact, but new on-chain actions were delayed or blocked, including token transfers, DeFi activity, and NFT/trading transactions. Exchange data showed SUI trading around $0.91–$0.92 on May 29 (about a 7%–8% daily decline), after earlier weakness during the downtime.
Sui confirmed full recovery after emergency fixes on May 30 and will publish a post-incident review. The review will focus on whether Address Balances needs redesign or gas accounting should be decoupled from consensus/epoch transition logic.
For traders, the key risk is Sui mainnet reliability. Expect volatility to react quickly to downtime headlines, while DeFi activity may gradually normalize if validator performance stabilizes.
Bearish
The outages directly impaired Sui mainnet throughput during epoch transitions, and SUI fell sharply during the disruption. Even though user balances were reportedly intact, delayed/blocked transfers, DeFi execution, and NFT/trading can amplify sell pressure and reduce near-term confidence in network reliability.
In the short term, the immediate takeaway is elevated event-risk: any further v1.72-related issues or Address Balances/gas accounting regressions could trigger renewed trading halts and additional downside volatility for SUI. In the longer term, the post-incident review and potential redesign/decoupling could improve resilience, but until fixes are proven across epochs and validator upgrades, the market is likely to price in a reliability discount.
Given this was the second outage within 48 hours (following prior major disruptions), traders may treat similar validator/epoch transition incidents as a recurring risk factor, keeping sentiment pressured near-term.