As the Web3 technology stack continues to evolve, smart contract languages are gradually migrating from Ethereum-dominated Solidity to Move, a language with greater security and resource abstraction capabilities. Move was originally developed by Meta for its crypto project Diem (formerly Libra). With features such as first-class resources and formal verification friendliness, Move is gradually becoming an important language option for the underlying architecture of the new generation of public chains.
In this evolutionary context, Aptos and SUI have become the dual core representatives of the Move ecosystem. Aptos was launched by Aptos Labs, the original Diem core team, and continues the native Move technology stack, emphasizing stability, security and modular architecture; while SUI was built by Mysten Labs. On the basis of inheriting the Move security model, it introduced object-oriented data structures and parallel execution mechanisms, forming a SUI Move branch with more performance breakthroughs and development paradigm innovations, and reconstructing on-chain resource management and transaction execution modes. It can be said that SUI is a Layer 1 that truly reconstructs the smart contract operation mechanism and on-chain resource management methods from the first principles. It is not rolling up high TPS, but rewriting how the blockchain should run. This makes SUI not only powerful, but also paradigm-leading. It is a technical foundation born for complex on-chain interactions and large-scale applications of Web3.
1. Break through the siege and reshape the public chain landscape
After Solana enters the Firedancer era, its performance curve may remain ahead; but it is still a single-chain high-frequency trading paradigm. SUI attempts to respond to needs beyond the performance arms race with a horizontal stack + end-to-end privacy/storage. This is significantly different from Aptos (also Move, but still single-dimensional expansion) or Sei (dedicated chain, deep concentration of liquidity). For investment institutions, this means:
• If you are looking at high TPS + continuous transaction fees, Solana private chains may generate faster returns;
• If you are interested in “new types of applications” and horizontal interface control, SUI’s alpha comes from the unsaturated SaaS/privacy/offline tracks;
• Aptos and SUI have a high degree of overlap in DeFi and BTCFi, so be careful of involution in the track.
Compared with Solana: Solana has experienced multiple rounds of bull and bear baptisms and has a huge ecosystem. As a latecomer, SUI has obvious advantages: it uses the safer Move language to avoid the vulnerabilities caused by the parallelization of Rust+Sealevel in Solana, and has low hardware requirements and lower verification node costs, which is conducive to decentralization. In terms of performance, the two are comparable, Solana TPS is slightly higher, and SUI has lower confirmation delay. In terms of ecology, Solana has more projects and users, focusing on complex DeFi (such as Serum, Drift), SUI grows faster, and user activity has once caught up, with the help of new fields such as BTCFi and LSD to achieve differentiation. Solanas community is mature, and the scale of SUIs international community still needs to be expanded. In the future, the two may coexist, Solana is more crypto-native ecology, and SUI focuses more on Web2 penetration and game social networking. Both pursue performance limits: Solana relies on Firedancer multi-threading, and SUI relies on Mahi-Mahi upgrades.
Comparison with Aptos: Aptos and SUI both originated from Libra/Diem. Aptos was the first to go online and was once awarded the halo of the first Move chain and a high valuation. In the past year, the Aptos ecosystem has developed slowly, and the user and developer activity is lower than that of SUI. The reasons include: Aptos uses complex Block-STM parallelism, and its performance drops significantly at high concurrency, while the SUI object model is more efficient; Aptos is positioned as a robust financial infrastructure, mostly around DeFi and NFT, and its style is close to that of Ethereum clones; SUI attempts multiple narratives, with fast user growth (8.03 million new coin holders far exceed Aptos), but the risk is relatively high. In terms of incentives, Aptos has had airdrops but lacks continuous incentives. Although SUI has no airdrops, the foundation has strong support, and the monthly active addresses and on-chain transaction volume are better than Aptos. Aptos has a strong team and financial strength, and may focus on institutional finance or the East Asian market in the future, but the market is more optimistic about SUI at present.
Compared with Sei: Sei is a dedicated transaction chain that emerged in 2023. It is based on Cosmos and focuses on order book transactions. Blocktime is about 500 ms. It tries to seize the Solana downtime market. It is popular in the short term, but the TVL and user growth are not sustained, and the ecological development is limited. The positioning is too narrow and it relies on liquidity mining, making it difficult to form a complete ecosystem. In contrast, SUI takes the general L1 route, supports a variety of applications, and is more resistant to risks. Seis cross-chain compatibility and language advantages are inferior to SUI. Although it may transform or fully integrate into the EVM ecosystem, it is difficult to threaten SUI in the short term. More worthy of attention is Linera, incubated by Mysten, which is positioned as high-frequency micropayments or as a side chain for SUI expansion, which is different from SUIs positioning.
Compared with Ethereum L2: Ethereum L2 (such as Arbitrum, Base) has a prosperous ecosystem, with TVL exceeding 2 billion US dollars. SUIs advantages are ultra-low latency and high concurrency, which are difficult to match with Rollup, and low gas fees, suitable for applications such as high TPS games. Ethereum L2 enjoys strong capital network effects and security endorsement. The competition between SUI and L2 is essentially a competition between the new paradigm (public chain) and the traditional paradigm (Rollup). In the long run, they may coexist, and in the short term, it depends on who can better meet application needs.
2. Rapid progress, impressive ecological data
Since the launch of the SUI mainnet in May 2023, user growth has been exponential: by April 2025, more than 123 million user addresses have been created on the SUI chain. This number is almost close to the cumulative address volume of old public chains such as Tron. In the second half of 2024, the average monthly active address of SUI was about 10 million; and since mid-February 2025, this indicator has jumped sharply, and by mid-April it has steadily exceeded 40 million, and the monthly activity has more than quadrupled. In terms of new users, there will be an inflection point at the end of 2024 - the average daily new wallet addresses will climb from 150,000 to the level of 1 million+ that has continued thereafter.
In particular, the rise of new public chains is often accompanied by a large influx of cross-chain funds. SUI ushered in the first wave of traffic through third-party bridging in mid-to-late 2024: as of November 2024, a total of approximately US$944.8 million in funds had been bridged. As of mid-2025, the total cross-chain lock-in volume (bridge TVL) of SUI was approximately US$2.55 billion. This shows that in addition to the TVL within DeFi, there are still a large number of assets staying as bridge assets, supporting the liquidity demand on SUI. In addition, as DeFi activities heat up, the supply of stablecoins in the SUI ecosystem has risen: in mid-April 2025, the market value of SUI stablecoins hit a record high of more than US$800 million. This scale is already equivalent to the stablecoin level of old public chains such as Tron, highlighting the increasing trust of users in the SUI network for value storage and transfer. In terms of the composition of stablecoins, USDC is still the absolute main force, and its market value has always accounted for more than 60%. USDT was also issued on SUI at the end of 2024 and maintained a certain level of activity.
Although it still lags behind Solana in throughput, SUI has fully covered high-frequency scenarios such as on-chain order book DEX, real-time PvP and social interaction, and due to the rapid termination + DAG parallel execution, it provides a natural fit track for micropayments, in-game asset exchanges, and social likes/comments type writing. With the subsequent upgrade of Mahi-Mahis goal of >400,000 TPS, SUI is constantly consolidating its scalability moat, but the 150-minute downtime event on 2024-11-21 warns that the stability of the core protocol under high-concurrency boundary conditions still needs to be continuously verified. In addition, low average Gas is the core selling point of SUI in competing for on-chain real-time application developers; but if the peak rate repeatedly hits high levels, games and social scenarios are prone to user churn. Holders/stakers need to pay attention to storage fund parameters and the rhythm of L2 solutions to evaluate the long-term fee curve.
At present, the SUI ecological data is very impressive: First, the resilience of its capital structure is taking shape. The steady-state TVL in Q2 2025 is about 1.6~1.8 B USD, of which stablecoin + LSD ≈ 55%, which can be retained even without incentive subsidies - indicating that the sticky capital after the hot money cycle has been initially precipitated. In addition, the proportion of institutional addresses holding 6% increased to 14% (doubled in half a year, Artemis standard caliber), the proportion of retail funds decreased but the activity increased, the funds were more concentrated but more active, providing a safety cushion for the next round of leverage/derivatives expansion.
Second, the developer retention rate is higher than that of public chains of the same age. According to Electric Capital statistics, the 24-month survival rate (dev has been submitted to GitHub for two consecutive years) SUI = 37% > Aptos 31% > Sei 18%. The key incentives are: the object model + Walrus / Seal native SDK reduces the mental cost of rewriting the on-chain structure; most teams are willing to write the first contract in SUI rather than porting.
Third, the bimodal user structure (DeFi + content entertainment) drives the diversification of on-chain interactions. DeFi contracts account for about 49% of the on-chain calls; content applications such as FanTV, RECRD, and Pebble City contribute about 35% of the calls. Social and consumer applications have not yet really started, and are potential blue oceans. Web3ization of content creation (music, video) has already shown signs in SUI, but it can go further. In particular, SUI has many users in Southeast Asia, and social products targeting the habits of users in the region can be considered. There may be a market for localized on-chain short videos, on-chain fan rewards, etc. When these products grow, they can derive businesses such as advertising and data analysis, forming a positive cycle for the ecological economy. Social products have a long growth period, but once they succeed, they are very sticky.
For example, by March 2025, the BTCFi lock-up on the SUI chain exceeded the 1,000 BTC mark; in April, BTC assets accounted for 10% of SUIs total TVL, including wBTC, LBTC, stBTC and other forms. In other words, about $250 million worth of Bitcoin is already in play on SUI. These Bitcoin assets are fully utilized on SUI: users can pledge BTC-anchored assets to lending protocols in exchange for stablecoins to achieve holding coins to earn interest, or provide BTC/stablecoin liquidity to obtain transaction fees. One-stop liquidity protocols such as Navi quickly supported BTC as collateral and launched yield aggregation strategies such as BTC Plus.
Fourth, potential growth curve: RWA and native derivatives have two gaps. In terms of RWA, Seal/Nautilus provides compliant privacy + verifiable calculations, which is the natural foundation for issuing bonds and fund shares; it has cooperated with Open Market Group (planning to issue RWA income certificates in SUI) and 21 Shares (its existing SUI ETP scale is about 300 M USD) to test the tokenization of physical assets/bonds, which brings opportunities to do RWA issuance SaaS, compliant identity as a service, on-chain secondary exchanges and valuation oracles, etc. In terms of native perpetual/options, the current on-chain Perp OI is about 20 m, and Bluefin accounts for about 70%. The difference between Hyperliquid-style application chains and SUI = performance vs liquidity aggregation. If SUI decides to do composable/cross-protocol matching at the consensus layer (such as DeepBook 2.0), there is a chance to run a unified derivatives infrastructure, and there is a 10x growth space at the upper limit.
3. Forward-looking layout: SUI Foundation, OKX Ventures, Mysten Labs, etc. become key ecological forces
A prosperous ecosystem cannot be separated from the catalysis and empowerment of strategic capital. OKX Ventures played a vital role in the process of SUI ecosystem from its inception to its rapid rise. Its investment strategy is not a simple financial bet, but a forward-looking and systematic layout based on a deep understanding of SUIs technical architecture and ecological potential, thus catalyzing the prosperity of SUI ecosystem.
Sui application ecology currently focuses on funds (DeFi + BTCFi), followed by entertainment (GameFi/NFT/social), and AI-native tools and derivatives are still in their early stages. The real gaps are concentrated in RWA lending and on-chain derivatives: the former is waiting for the implementation of Seal/Nautilus privacy compliance solutions, and the latter requires stronger matching depth and risk hedging tools.
OKX Ventures is recognized by the market as one of the earliest discoverers and strategic co-builders of the SUI ecosystem. Shortly after the SUI mainnet was launched and the ecosystem was still in its early stages, OKX Ventures made decisive moves with its keen judgment and strategically invested in multiple core projects such as Cetus, Navi, Momentum and Haedal. These projects cover key tracks in the DeFi field such as decentralized exchanges (DEX), lending, and liquidity staking (LST), laying a solid foundation for the subsequent explosion of SUIs financial ecosystem. For example:
• Momentum: is an innovative DEX deployed on the SUI blockchain, co-founded by ChefWEN, a former Meta Libra core engineer. Since its launch in 2025, its trading volume has quickly exceeded US$1 billion, with over 200,000 active users, making it one of the fastest growing liquidity platforms on SUI. It adopts the ve(3, 3) model, giving back 100% of token emissions, transaction fees and rewards to users, and achieving deep interest binding between traders, voters and liquidity providers. Momentum also manages over US$500 million in TVL, supports stablecoins and multi-asset transactions, and is gradually establishing its position as the core liquidity engine in the SUI ecosystem with its advantages of low fees and high efficiency.
• Haedal: Haedal is the leading liquidity staking protocol on the SUI blockchain. Users can obtain haSUI and other credentials by staking SUI or WAL, and continue to be active in DeFi applications while participating in governance. Since its launch in early 2025, the TVL has exceeded US$200 million, with more than 44,000 daily active wallets, making it the leader in the LSD track. Its Hae 3 technical architecture includes HMM market makers, HaeVault yield optimization and HaeDAO governance system, which increases the basic staking income to more than 3.5%, and cooperates deeply with many SUI core protocols. With high security and capital efficiency, Haedal is committed to becoming an alternative to Lido in the SUI ecosystem and leading the reshaping of the LSD market structure.
• Cetus: Cetus is a decentralized exchange and liquidity protocol deployed on Sui and Aptos, supporting multiple liquidity algorithms such as CLMM, RFQ, DMM, and taking into account both retail and institutional needs. Its multi-curve strategy design and efficient Tick pricing mechanism significantly improve capital efficiency, and build the main clearing and aggregation bottom layer on SUI. Despite a security incident in 2025, the team quickly fixed the vulnerability, recovered funds, and launched a compensation plan, becoming a model of security governance. After the restart, trading volume rebounded rapidly, with a daily peak of over US$300 million and TVL stabilizing at more than US$120 million. Cetus is building the key infrastructure for Move ecosystem liquidity with high performance and high composability.
• Navi: The first Sui native one-stop liquidity protocol, integrating lending, liquidity pledge, automatic leverage and isolated market, with a TVL of US$200 million and 830,000+ users in 2025. Launched a 10 million NAVX ecological fund to support incubation, and deeply integrated with mainstream DEX to provide underlying liquidity and liquidation for DeFi projects.
OKX Ventures investments are not isolated points, but connected into surfaces, forming a powerful ecological synergy effect. The DEX it invests in provides a clearing place for lending protocols, while the lending and LST protocols create new assets and liquidity sources for DEX, jointly building a self-reinforcing DeFi closed loop. More importantly, OKX Ventures contribution goes far beyond the capital level. As the worlds top encryption platform, the industry resources, market insights, and technical support it brings have greatly accelerated the product iteration, market promotion, and user acquisition of these early projects, thereby promoting the maturity and prosperity of the entire SUI ecosystem. This investment + empowerment model is one of the key catalysts that enable the SUI ecosystem to quickly stand out among many public chains.
At the same time, the investment of the SUI Foundation and Mysten Labs in the infrastructure layer has also laid a deep competitive barrier for the ecosystem. Mysten has raised more than $300 million in total for SUI development in 2023-2024. A large part of these funds have been invested in the research and development of thick infrastructure such as Walrus, Seal, and Nautilus. This strategy is different from the ecosystem that focuses on terminal applications such as Solana: SUI chooses to make up for the shortcomings of the underlying layer first, and then stimulate application innovation through Grants and hackathons (such as the Overflow hackathon in 2024, which attracted more than 350 projects to participate). The richness of infrastructure also brings technical stickiness within the ecosystem: once developers get used to and rely on these unique services provided by SUI (such as Seals secure storage and Nautiluss trusted computing), their willingness to migrate to other chains will decrease, because other platforms may lack equivalent functions or need to be rebuilt. In addition, these infrastructures also enhance SUIs carrying capacity for emerging fields. For example, the combination of Walrus+Seal gives SUI a unique advantage in supporting social, AI and other DApps that require privacy and massive data; Nautilus may attract cutting-edge developers who want to implement AI reasoning and secure multi-party computing on the chain.
4. Value positioning, from fastest L1 to programmable Internet stack
Sui has been described as a “high-performance parallel chain” by the public over the past year. However, at the latest event, Mysten Labs co-founder Evan Cheng gave a more ambitious statement: “Blockchain is not just trading; Sui is a global coordination layer that weaves compute, liquidity and data into the programmable foundation of the next generation of the Internet.”
The team hopes to integrate traditional Internet components - computing power, storage, identity, liquidity, and privacy computing - into the same native protocol stack, and make each layer available to external applications. The six components (Sui Mainnet, DeepBook, SuiNS, Walrus, Seal, and Nautilus) are already running on the mainnet or public testnet, and all use open licenses or on-chain governance to host source code. They provide a new path: Suis real differentiation lies not in single-point TPS, but in horizontal combination.
At present, this infrastructure has entered the production stage. The Mysticeti consensus engine brings sub-second finality (P 50 delay is about 0.39 seconds), and there is no congestion even during peak hours; DeepBooks public matching layer reduces the matching delay to 390 milliseconds, with more than one million orders per day, accounting for more than 40% of the total chain transactions; in terms of identity layer, SuiNS has minted 280,000 domain names, and zkLogin has completed more than 12 million social logins in three months, covering nearly one-third of daily active users; since the launch of the Walrus native storage mainnet, 580 TB of data has been written, and the fragmentation utilization rate has increased from 8% to nearly 12%; Seal provides MPC/TSS secret management services, covering 40+ enterprise applications; Nautilus supports verifiable computing, allowing TEE reasoning results to be uploaded to the chain as Move objects, and 7 AI projects are already in testing, of which 3 have disclosed a total fundraising of US$17 million.
Based on the above capabilities, Sui has opened up multiple growth directions. The first is Web2 SaaS migration. The team listed more than 30 Web2 services such as Dropbox, GitHub, eBay, and YouTube as possible cases of rebuilding on Suis sixth layer in the future. At present, non-financial interactions such as content distribution, social networking, and identity authentication have accounted for about 42% of the call frequency of the main network, but only contribute 11% of the handling fee, indicating that a large number of low-gas high-frequency Web2-SaaS transactions have begun to migrate to the main chain. The B2B middleware that is still lacking around these applications (such as billing, permission management, content acceleration, and DevOps registry) constitutes a new blank area with high uncertainty and high odds-high business threshold, large subsidy space, and huge potential.
Another neglected direction is offline networks and extreme scenarios. The Sui team is testing non-IP networks such as SMS, LoRa, HAM, satellites, underwater sound waves, and trying to encapsulate transactions into offline shards and aggregate back to the chain through enclave-token and zero-delay zk-tunnel. This technical path targets weak network scenarios such as India, Southeast Asia, and post-disaster rescue, which is a real demand that the current mainstream L1/Rollup has not yet covered. Once implemented, it will stimulate a number of lightweight hardware/client entrepreneurial opportunities such as LoRa POS, SMS wallets, and zk-tunnel SDK.
In addition, in the blockchain × AI narrative, Sui does not emphasize on-chain model, but focuses on AI verifiability. Evan Cheng divides the combination of AI and chain into four quadrants, and Sui focuses on making AI weights, reasoning logs, and data sources auditable on-chain through Seal + Nautilus. This type of capability is more in line with regulatory and institutional needs. At present, some entrepreneurial projects have included AI reasoning as a service + auditable ledger in the Pitch Deck, among which MechColony realized a verifiable NPC behavior tree in 6 weeks. The core value of such projects is not in computing power, but in trust distribution - once Sui has established a reputation for trusted AI, its downstream data market, copyright clearing, model NFTization and other applications will naturally converge.
In terms of technological progress, Sui ecology is also constantly improving. There have been breakthroughs from basic consensus, protocol upgrades, to development experience and user tools. The protocol supports dynamic version control and on-chain/off-chain hot updates, allowing multiple rounds of seamless upgrades, reducing hard forks and improving stability. Mysticeti introduced the DAG asynchronous pipeline, achieving sub-second finality and 12,000 TPS throughput; the Move language introduced generic specialization, macro expansion and debugging tools, greatly improving development efficiency; the wallet end is deeply integrated with Phantom, Slush, etc. to optimize user interaction experience and asset security. In terms of ecological concepts, Sui emphasizes decentralization (wide distribution of resources), composability (flexible collaboration of modules), and true ownership (users control data and identity), and is committed to building a general infrastructure that serves the large-scale implementation of Web3.
Sui achieved smooth multi-network upgrades through protocol version control and hot update mechanisms in early 2025, enhancing network compatibility and consistency. After the Mysticeti consensus engine was deployed, the consensus delay was compressed to sub-seconds and stable throughput was maintained under high load. The Move language also completed upgrades such as generics and macro expansion, and significantly optimized the developer experience and user interaction process with wallet integration.
In terms of ecological components, Sui Ecosystem has built a full-stack architecture covering storage, encryption, and privacy computing through underlying protocols such as Walrus, Seal, and Nautilus, significantly improving the efficiency of on-chain and off-chain data processing and data sovereignty. Among them, Walrus, with its layered architecture and Red Stuff coding, achieves low cost, high concurrency, and multi-chain compatibility in decentralized storage and data availability, and is suitable for big data scenarios such as NFT, AI, and DeFi; Seal provides threshold encryption and programmable access control to promote the implementation of on-chain privacy and digital rights management; Nautilus implements verifiable off-chain computing based on TEE, natively supports Move, and expands applications such as AI reasoning, oracles, and chain games. In addition, Sui Ecosystem also brings together middleware and development tools such as SUIPlay, Move, DeepBook, zkLogin, and SUIBridge, forming a decentralized full stack covering computing, communication, identity, payment, security and other modules.
In terms of security governance, Sui also demonstrated a rare ability to respond quickly. After the Cetus theft, Sui coordinated the verification nodes through the on-chain governance mechanism to freeze the hackers address, recovered $162 million in assets, and realized private keyless transfer for the first time. The foundation and the project party provided a $30 million loan, combined with the recovery of funds and the gradual release of token compensation mechanism, so that the recovery rate of damaged users reached 85%-99%. Afterwards, Sui launched a $10 million security fund, promoted the open source of the protocol, strengthened audit incentives, and optimized the governance process to enhance transparency and community participation. Although this also triggered a discussion on decentralized power concentration, it undoubtedly demonstrated Suis comprehensive ability and experimental spirit in crisis response and community governance.
What these indicate is that Sui is shifting from the high-performance chain narrative of “fastest L1” to the higher positioning of “programmable Internet stack”.
