Sui is a cryptocurrency and operating system for decentralized applications. Sui originates from Meta’s Libra cryptocurrency project. Sui is a blockchain that uses Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), a popular variant of the Proof of Stake consensus.
The native token of the Sui blockchain is SUI. Sui is an exciting newcomer in the smart contract platform category.
Table of Contents
What is Sui (SUI)?
Sui is a cryptocurrency and operating system for decentralized applications. Sui belongs to the smart contract platform category, where its competitors include Ethereum and Solana.
Sui’s roots go back to Meta’s failed cryptocurrency project Libra, later renamed Diem. Sui uses the technology developed in the Diem project, and its founding members are former Meta employees.
Sui’s native token is also called Sui (ticker: SUI). It is used for staking and paying transaction fees in the Sui ecosystem.
You can find the basic information about Sui in the table below.
| Feature | Info |
|---|---|
| Founder | Evan Cheng, Adeniyi Abiodun, Sam Blackshear, George Danezis, and Kostas Chalkias |
| Category | Smart contract platform |
| Ticker | SUI |
| Circulating supply | 2.6 billion SUI |
| Max supply | 10 billion SUI |
| All-Time High (date) | $2.18 (March 27, 2024) |
| All-Time Low (date) | $0.36 (October 19, 2023) |
Check the real-time price of the SUI token here: Sui (SUI) price.
Although Sui has only been on the market since May 2023, it has already entered the top 30 list of cryptocurrencies. Sui is trying to gain market share through its exceptional scalability. Based on tests, Sui’s blockchain can process up to 300,000 transactions per second.
Sui competes closely with Aptos. Like Sui, Aptos was born from the ruins of the Diem project. Both are highly scalable blockchains, and the projects have received hundreds of millions of dollars from the industry’s biggest VC firms.
The word “sui” means water in the Japanese language.
The history of Sui
Sui originates from Meta’s Libra cryptocurrency project. Libra was announced with great fanfare in the summer of 2019. It was a stablecoin designed by Meta (then still Facebook). Global payment companies such as PayPal and Mastercard were involved in the project.
Libra was immediately attacked by regulators, especially in the US, which scared the companies involved in the project. Meta tried to save the project by rebranding it to Diem in 2020. Eventually, Diem was also shut down in early 2022.
The Diem team began to dissolve at the end of 2021 when the project’s end was evident. Diem team members Evan Cheng, Adeniyi Abiodun, Sam Blackshear, George Danezis, and Kostas Chalkias founded Mysten Labs in September 2021. Mysten Labs began developing the Sui blockchain based on Diem’s technology.
Below is an image from the Mysten Labs website.
The Sui Foundation, located in the Cayman Islands, coordinates the project’s development.
Sui raised $36 million from the famous investment firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) in December 2021. The project launched a testnet in August 2022, after which Sui received as much as $300 million in additional funding. At this stage, Coinbase Ventures and Binance Labs also joined as investors.
The Sui project reached a significant milestone in May 2023 when its MainNet was released.
🌊After Devnet, multiple Testnet waves, Frenemies, #CapyHolidays, Builder Houses, and much more – what a monumental moment for the Sui community: Sui Mainnet has launched!💥
Let’s dive into what that means for all of you and why you should #BuildOnSui!
— Sui (@SuiNetwork) May 3, 2023
Simultaneously, the SUI token also entered the market. The largest cryptocurrency exchanges immediately listed SUI.
Sui announced just one month later that he had signed a deal with the F1 team Red Bull Racing. Sui is Red Bull’s official blockchain partner.
Sui is ranked 15th among smart contract platforms when measuring total liquidity in the DeFi sector. Its TVL is 560 million dollars, but at its best, it has been almost 700 million. This is an excellent achievement, considering the project’s short time on the market.
Sui is only a few places away from the popular TON and Optimism platforms. In addition, Sui’s biggest competitor, Aptos, is five places lower.
In May 2024, Sui broke the 10 million user mark. At its peak, the platform had more than 2.4 million daily active users.
The technology behind Sui
Sui is a blockchain that uses Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), a popular variant of the Proof of Stake consensus. Its main characteristic is a limited number of validators. In Sui’s case, there are 106 validators.
The list of validators is not static so that a validator can lose its status through a separate voting process. Validators receive a slightly more than three percent annual return as staking rewards.
Sui’s greatest strength is its scalability. Mysten Labs claims the Sui blockchain can process up to 297,000 transactions per second. Currently, it only processes around 50–100 TPS. You can view the network statistics on this page.
Sui’s scalability is possible through parallel processing. Its blockchain can classify and prioritize transactions to quickly verify simple transactions. The block time is about 400 milliseconds or 0.4 seconds, making Sui’s blockchain one of the fastest on the market.
Sui’s smart contracts are developed using the Move programming language from the aforementioned Diem project. Move is based on Rust, which Solana and Polkadot use. Thanks to this, Sui can easily attract competing app developers to its platform.
Sui’s biggest competitor, Aptos, also uses the Move programming language.
The SUI token
The native token of the Sui blockchain is SUI. It is used for staking and transaction payments on the Sui blockchain. Thus, SUI’s use cases are similar to the native tokens of competing smart contract platforms.
The SUI token also has a governance role. Token holders can participate in voting and influence the development of the Sui ecosystem. Voting takes place through network validators.
The SUI token entered the market on May 3, 2023, when its MainNet was launched. This is when 10 billion SUI tokens were also created. The allocation was as follows:
- 20% for early participants
- 14% for investors
- 10% to the treasury
- 6% for testing
- 50% to the community reserve
An investor must consider the SUI tokens’ distribution (unlocks). Currently, only 2.6 billion (26%) of all tokens, are in circulation. The graphic below shows that the situation will change significantly in the next two years.
Over four billion more SUI tokens will be released to the market in a few years, which can cause selling pressure. This is usually not a problem during a bull market when demand is high, but such a token can collapse significantly during a bear market.
Sui as an investment
Sui is an exciting newcomer in the smart contract platform category. It has received funding from the industry’s biggest venture capital firms, and the network statistics look promising so far. The number of users and transactions has been growing strongly since the release of MainNet.
Many investors might be interested to know that Raoul Pal, known from the Real Vision platform, supports this project. Pal became famous a few years ago as an Ethereum bull, but he changed his position to Solana at the turn of 2022/2023. This move was 100% correct, as Solana has been the best investment among smart contract platforms for the past year.
Raoul Pal recently posted the following thread on X. In it, he compares the price development of the SUI token with competing coins. Pal also sits on the board of the Sui Foundation, which is good to note.
Sui $SUI is the groundbreaking ultra-fast L1, super efficient, full blockchain ecosystem that came out of Meta's Diem project.
The idea is that it is built for the scale of 4 billion people… i.e turning Web2 > Web3 1/
— Raoul Pal (@RaoulGMI) August 8, 2024
On paper, Sui looks like an interesting investment. It progresses along a similar development curve to Aptos, probably Sui’s biggest competitor. However, Sui launched its MainNet more than half a year later.
Like dozens of other smart contract platforms, the biggest challenge is reaching a critical mass of users to enable large-scale adoption.
During 2023 and 2024, Solana has undeniably risen to a new level. This is primarily due to meme coins, meaning Solana has become the leading meme casino on the market. What use case separates Sui from dozens of other similar blockchains? So far, there is no clear answer to this question.
Are you interested in purchasing SUI? Read more from our beginner’s guide on How To Buy SUI. It gives you step-by-step instructions on how to buy and store Sui safely.
