Author: Zhou Zhou, Foresight News
"The reason I chose Sui is that it has a clear development direction, which is not the case for all public chains," said several founders of Sui projects.
A developer who has been building in the Sui ecosystem for nearly two years commented, "The Move language used by Sui feels like a language from a big company, very standardized, and reduces the difficulty for newcomers to get started, making it easier for developers to learn." This is one of Sui's many distinctive features.
In my conversations, I found that Sui's highly differentiated characteristics and style are manifested in many ways, which are not present in other public chains. For example, Sui's grants to many projects are in US dollars, not its own tokens; Sui strictly requires brand separation between the grantee projects and the Sui official; Sui is determined to make a strong push into the gaming sector.
These make Sui a "maverick" public chain in the crypto industry.
On October 17, 2024, the 10th Wanxiang Blockchain Conference was held in Shanghai, and Sui also held multiple offline events during the same period. I attended several of Sui's offline meetups and gained a deeper understanding of the development of the Sui ecosystem.
Since September, Sui's token price and TVL have been skyrocketing, attracting widespread attention from crypto industry practitioners. In just one month, Sui's TVL has grown from $600 million to $1 billion, nearly doubling. The token price has also risen from $0.8 to $2 in just over a month, a nearly threefold increase. Some practitioners have dubbed Sui the "Solana killer".
So why has Sui risen so fast, and who are the capital backers behind it? What are the differentiating factors between Sui and other public chains, and what innovative applications does it have? Is Sui's growth a long-term phenomenon or just a short-term speculative behavior?
After communicating with multiple Sui ecosystem entrepreneurs, I found some answers.
The Maverick SUI
Sui is a maverick in the crypto industry, and many of its behaviors reflect this.
Evan Cheng, the CEO of Mysten Labs, the company behind Sui, grew up in Kaohsiung, southern Taiwan. He joined Apple in 2005 and later moved to Facebook in 2017 as the engineering director of programming languages, leading the company's internal cryptocurrency enthusiast groups.
After a period of time, he became the platform development manager for Libra, driving the development of the Move language. Mysten Labs has several co-founders, such as Adeniyi Abiodun and Sam Blackshear, who also came from Facebook's Libra project. The experience of working on well-known projects at famous big companies has naturally "inherited" to Sui.
Sui's first distinctive feature is its focus on the gaming sector.
One of the co-founders, Adeniyi, said in an interview with Grayscale this month: "We chose the gaming industry because it is usually the earliest adopter of technology, driving the development of AI and high-performance computing. Therefore, Sui is focused on solving the ownership issues in games and has successfully attracted a large number of game developers, including the three major listed companies in South Korea, Nhan Net, Marble, FNC and NCSoft. Currently, there are about 75 publishers developing applications on Sui, compared to only 30 studios signed a year ago."
CEO Evan Cheng has also mentioned Sui's gaming device SuiPlay multiple times on Twitter and in video dialogues. In recent weeks, both SuiPlay and the top meme FUD on Sui have promised rewards and airdrops for SuiPlay holders.
Sui's second distinctive feature is its strong emphasis on compliance. The Web3 space generally advocates for decentralization and permissionless culture, and most Web3 institutions do not emphasize compliance. But Sui is an exception.
An industry insider close to Mysten Labs told me that the compliance process within Mysten Labs is very strict, almost like a Web2 big company.
Another Sui ecosystem entrepreneur said, "Sui gives projects grants in US dollars, not Sui tokens, which surprised me a lot." "And Sui officials require cumbersome and complex documents, KYC, and accounts, often taking a long time to get the grant."
Almost every Sui ecosystem participant I've talked to has mentioned Sui's clear emphasis on compliance as a distinctive feature.
After talking to multiple Sui practitioners, I learned that this may be closely related to Sui's strategic direction. One practitioner said that for the projects recognized by Sui, such as Cetus and Scallop, you don't need to worry about them running away, as Sui will provide a safety net.
This is completely different from the strategies of many other public chains. For example, Blast explicitly tells users that it is not responsible for any problems in the ecosystem projects. Sui and Blast represent two extremes - Blast takes no responsibility, while Sui's strict compliance requirements have left some developers with the impression that as long as a project is recognized by Sui, users don't need to worry too much about rug pulls.
This reflects a major strategic issue, which is also Sui's third distinctive feature: Sui's goal is to focus on cooperation with Web2 big institutions to achieve mass adoption. Many traditional big institutions do not allow cooperation with tainted institutions. This is something that must be done in the eyes of many traditional big institutions.
This also explains some phenomena, such as Sui and its three founders almost never having the habit of CX Meme, which seems out of place. Because whether it's Base founder Jesse or Solana founder Toly, they have been guiding and supporting meme culture. But Sui rarely does this, as Sui does not want its behavior to include anything that could be seen as a blemish by traditional institutions, which could affect its opportunities for cooperation with big institutions.
Sui's Differentiated Development: Compliant in the US, Thriving in the Chinese Ecosystem
Sui is a public chain that wants to be compliant in the US and deeply cooperate with renowned global gaming companies, but interestingly, the top DeFi projects are mostly founded by Chinese entrepreneurs, such as Cetus and Scallop.
"70% or even 80% of DeFi projects are founded by Chinese entrepreneurs," said Chen, a Sui ecosystem entrepreneur, sharing his observation.
Chen believes this may be related to Sui's relatively clear development direction. When a system has clearly defined its development direction, Chinese entrepreneurs often have higher speed and efficiency than European and American teams.
Chen also discussed the comparison between Sui and other Move-based public chains.
Currently, there are more than 20 public chains based on the Move language, three of which are directly from the Facebook team: Aptos, Sui, and Linera. Among the Move-based public chains, Sui and Aptos are the most important, and developers naturally often compare these two chains.
"From a personal subjective perspective, Sui's official tweets often update on technical and product feature directions, while Aptos seems to have fewer of these and seems to focus more on event-related content. This seems to be a small difference between Sui and Aptos," Chen said.
Sui has a clear goal of doing games and cooperating with Web2 big companies. But as a non-gaming, non-big-institution Sui ecosystem entrepreneur, this does not seem to affect Chen's confidence in developing on Sui, as he believes Sui's founding team has a relatively clear development direction, rather than being all over the place, which leaves builders in the ecosystem feeling lost. Currently, many public chains lack a clear direction, leaving practitioners feeling very confused. But this does not seem to be a problem on Sui.
Some practitioners believe that Sui is a public chain with very clear goals. This is very different from many public chains that are all over the place or don't have a clear differentiated development direction at all. This feature seems to have brought many different changes to the Sui ecosystem.
Sui's first year is to focus on developing DeFi; Sui's future is to take the path of cooperation with Web2 big institutions; Sui is to focus on developing games; Sui is to be the most compliant public chain. A practitioner summarized Sui ecosystem's development roadmap as concise, focused, and clear.
