Over the last few years, everyone has been wondering which crypto project or protocol will be the first to achieve true mass adoption, meaning adoption by people who aren't even that interested in crypto. Sui appears to be uniquely positioned to take this title.
Sui was founded by Evan Chen, Sam Blacksher, Adan Abiodun, Costas Chakos, and George Denis, all of whom used to work at Facebook (now Meta) on its digital currency project, Diem, formerly known as Libra. They founded Sui in late 2021, a few months before Diem officially shut down. Sui was built by a US software company called Mysten Labs, and its ongoing development is coordinated by the Sui Foundation, a nonprofit based in the Cayman Islands. Sui raised almost $400 million across various ICOs and IEOs in 2021, 2022, and 2023, with FTX being one of the largest investors. Note that Sui, or rather Mysten Labs, bought back the Sui coins that were sold to FTX in April last year. The good news is that this eliminated the risk that the FTX bankruptcy estate would dump these coins on the market. The bad news is that it cost Mysten Labs almost $100 million, a quarter of its runway.
In any case, Sui's main net went live in May last year. Sui uses a delegated proof-of-stake blockchain that's capable of processing up to 297,000 transactions per second. It's important to note, though, that this figure is based on a test conducted prior to Sui's launch in April last year. It's unclear what Sui's current TPS is. For what it's worth, a recent report by CoinGecko found that Sui had been processing an average of 854 transactions per second, second only to Solana at over 1,000 TPS. The difference, of course, is that Sui has not experienced any outages or congestion issues, whereas Solana has. Regardless, speed comes with trade-offs, and in Sui's case, that's decentralization.
The Sui blockchain has just 106 validators, according to SuiScan. This might have something to do with the fact that becoming a validator requires a minimum of 30 million Sui coins—that is, over $30 million at the time of shooting. Thankfully, though, delegation is possible with no minimum stake. Staking rewards are currently around 3.3% per year for validators and delegators. Misbehaving validators risk having a portion of their stakes slashed, though it's not clear if this applies to delegators too. Staked Sui can also be easily liquid staked, thanks to Sui's novel architecture.
In contrast to other smart contract-compatible layer ones, Sui's technology is oriented around objects, not accounts. Sui also uses a newer programming language called Move, which was created by Sam. These two features make the Sui blockchain very scalable and flexible.
Notably, the fees pay for both computation and storage. The fees paid for storage can be reclaimed by destroying the data being stored, such as an NFT, for example. We'll leave links in the description if you want to learn more. Sui has a maximum supply of 10 billion, distributed as follows: 20% to early contributors, 14% to investors, 10% to Mysten Labs, 6% to the community, and 50% to the community reserve, which includes staking rewards. Note that some sources suggest slightly different allocations. As you can see, Sui's vesting schedule is quite aggressive, with a sizable cliff that occurred earlier this month. It's worth pointing out that the Sui allocated to investors will finish vesting in the middle of 2026.
The Sui FUD continued in June when the Sui Foundation allegedly sold a portion of its locked Sui staking rewards on Binance. This was a big deal because these coins were supposed to be locked. The Sui Foundation denied the allegations, but evidence of the selling was visible on-chain. As many pointed out, staking, vesting allocations, and selling the staking rewards seem to be standard for proof-of-stake blockchains, particularly those with lots of VC funding.
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