Sui: what it is and how it works

What is Sui, and why is everyone talking about it? Discover the history of this innovative blockchain and how it’s revolutionising the world of Web 3.0.

The Web3 ecosystem—particularly within the DeFi space—has always been marked by a constant stream of emerging technologies with enormous potential. Yet, only a few have successfully turned their bold ambitions into tangible solutions that deliver real value to users.

In this landscape, Sui stands out as a truly innovative blockchain. It’s already proving its strength through consistent growth in both Total Value Locked (TVL)—the total amount of assets secured within the network—and overall trading volumes.

Officially launched on 3 May 2023, Sui is a Layer 1 blockchain built on a delegated proof-of-stake (dPoS) consensus mechanism. It was developed by Mysten Labs, a startup founded in 2021 by a group of former Meta (Facebook) engineers.

The team had previously worked on Libra, Facebook’s ambitious blockchain project—later rebranded as Diem—which aimed to create a financial alternative to traditional banking systems. However, the initiative was eventually abandoned due to intense political pressure and a host of regulatory challenges.

Drawing on the lessons learned from that experience, the Sui team approached this new venture with a less institutional tone than Libra. Instead, they concentrated on building a high-performance, efficient blockchain designed to ensure strong decentralisation and prevent governance power from being concentrated in the hands of a select few.

The objective has been clear from day one: to solve the blockchain trilemma—the trade-off between scalability, security, and decentralisation—a long-standing challenge that has hindered progress in the space.

This strategic approach is rapidly positioning Sui as one of the most promising new players in the Web3 ecosystem, drawing growing attention from both retail and institutional investors.

In this article, we’ll take a clear and accessible look at the key technical features that are putting Sui in the spotlight—before diving into its long-term growth prospects as a truly innovative blockchain.

Web2-proof user experience

The future success—or failure—of the Web3 ecosystem will largely depend on how well projects can simplify user experience and operational processes, making them more accessible to the general public.

The real winners will be those who manage to combine the core values of Web3—such as decentralisation, data ownership, and transparency—with a Web2-level user experience, offering intuitive and familiar access methods like Google or Facebook login.

With this increasing focus on user-centric design, blockchains like Sui are allocating significant resources to streamlining and simplifying interactions within the Web3 space.

Specifically, the Sui development team has delivered an impressively smooth user experience by introducing two key innovations: zkLogin and Sponsored Transactions. Let’s explore them in more detail.

With zkLogin, accessing blockchain features has never been easier.

This technology allows users on the Sui network to interact with decentralised applications (DApps) using familiar login credentials—such as Google or Facebook accounts. By removing the need for users to install and manage a traditional crypto wallet, zkLogin significantly reduces complexity and makes Web3 much more approachable for non-technical users.

Another major hurdle that the Sui team has tackled is the management of transaction fees—the costs required to execute actions on the blockchain.

While transaction fees are vital for the security and functioning of any decentralised network, they can be confusing and discouraging, especially for users coming from the Web2 world who may have little or no experience with crypto wallets, digital assets, or private key management.

To address this, the Sui team developed Sponsored Transactions—a system that allows third parties (like the DApps themselves) to cover transaction fees on behalf of users. This removes a significant friction point from the user experience.

With this approach, users don’t need to hold the native Sui token to complete transactions, lowering one of the most significant entry barriers to Web3 for newcomers.

By combining zkLogin and Sponsored Transactions with near-instant transaction finality, Sui offers a seamless and frictionless transition from Web2 to Web3, effectively engaging an entirely new segment of users.

Delegated proof of stake

When it comes to its consensus mechanism, Sui employs delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS)—an advanced variant of the traditional proof-of-stake model—designed to deliver greater efficiency and faster transaction speeds.

Under this system, for each epoch—a period lasting approximately 24 hours—control over transaction validation is entrusted to a limited set of selected validators, who are responsible for maintaining the network’s operations during that time.

These validators are chosen through a delegation process involving SUI token holders, and it works as follows:

Once selected, validators are responsible for producing and finalising blocks during their assigned epoch. At the end of each cycle, rewards are distributed to both validators and delegators in proportion to their stake, minus a small commission retained by the validator.

Transaction parallelisation

Unlike the vast majority of blockchains today—which use a horizontal and sequential model for transaction execution—Sui introduces a cutting-edge approach called parallel execution.

As the name suggests, this system allows multiple transactions to be processed simultaneously, leveraging the fact that many operations on the network are independent. This enables Sui to handle a far greater volume of transactions in parallel than blockchains using traditional sequential models like Ethereum.

In numerical terms, this innovation allows Sui to process up to 297,000 transactions per second (TPS). When compared to Ethereum’s approximate 15 TPS, the difference in scalability potential becomes strikingly clear.

Thanks to this architecture, Sui is one of the most scalable blockchains on the market today, offering users a virtually instantaneous experience—comparable to that of Web2 platforms—without compromising on privacy or decentralisation.

Move: a revolutionary programming language.

Last but not least among the technical highlights explored in this article is Move, the programming language used by Sui developers to build secure, efficient, and scalable smart contracts.

Move is an open-source language originally developed by Meta for the Diem blockchain. It has since been refined and embraced by projects like Sui and Aptos, which have tapped into its full potential.

Unlike Solidity—the programming language behind Ethereum, which draws from familiar syntaxes like JavaScript, C++, and Python to prioritise versatility and ease of use—Move takes a fundamentally different approach. Its focus is on security and system integrity, even at the expense of some flexibility.

With features such as explicit digital asset management and native support for formal verification, Move enables developers to eliminate entire classes of vulnerabilities that are common in Solidity-based smart contracts.

In an environment where the security of decentralised applications is more critical than ever, Move is emerging as one of the most promising tools for building the Web3 of tomorrow: secure, scalable, and ready to support the next wave of innovation.

SUI adoption: where are we now?

As highlighted at the beginning of this article, Sui’s Total Value Locked (TVL) points to a phase of strong network expansion. However, beyond this single metric, there are several other key indicators that offer a more comprehensive view of the ecosystem’s current growth trajectory.

For the purposes of our analysis, we’ll focus on three fundamental metrics: daily active addresses (i.e., users), stablecoin market cap (the total value of all stablecoins circulating on the Sui blockchain), and trading volumes generated within the network.

Note: The data analysed refers to May 2025.

One of the most meaningful indicators is the number of daily active addresses—a metric that provides a concrete snapshot of how frequently the blockchain is actually being used.

In Sui’s case, we can observe that the number of active wallets has recently reached all-time highs, signalling a clear and sustained increase in network adoption and user engagement.

Another crucial metric for assessing the health of a blockchain is the total market capitalisation of stablecoins within its ecosystem.

While virtually unlimited tokens can be created and traded on a blockchain, stablecoins play a foundational role in building a robust and functional DeFi infrastructure. Their presence is essential for enabling liquidity, facilitating trading, and anchoring the system to fiat-based value.

Alongside the increase in active users, the stablecoin market cap on Sui has shown steady and significant growth. In the first few months of the year, it surpassed the $800 million mark and is now approaching the symbolic milestone of $1 billion.

After looking at user activity and stablecoin capitalisation, we now turn to a metric that effectively synthesises both: trading volume.

As anticipated, this metric is also experiencing rapid growth. Sui recently hit a new weekly all-time high of $3.7 billion in trading volume, positioning itself among the top-performing blockchains by on-chain activity.

Notably, during the week of 5–11 May, Sui accounted for 5.35% of total DeFi trading volume, a significant milestone that signals accelerated economic activity and further reinforces the network’s rising prominence in the Web3 landscape.

Sui vs Solana: which is the best network?

Due to their high scalability and innovative architectures, Sui and Solana are frequently compared within the blockchain space. But which one is truly the better network?

Naturally, there’s no definitive answer to this question. Each network has its own distinct characteristics, and its effectiveness often depends on the specific use case. However, we can examine some objective data points that help highlight the key differences between these two infrastructures.

One of the first metrics worth considering is market capitalisation, a widely used indicator of a network’s overall value. It is calculated by multiplying the token’s current price by its circulating supply.

As of now, Solana boasts a market cap of $91 billion, significantly higher than Sui’s $13 billion. This substantial gap reflects not only Solana’s longer track record, broader adoption, and stronger ecosystem, but also highlights how Sui is still viewed as a rising star—a promising newcomer with vast growth potential that has yet to be fully realised.

From a technical standpoint, both Solana and Sui utilise transaction parallelisation, a crucial innovation that dramatically boosts performance and scalability.

However, despite this shared foundation, the two protocols differ significantly in terms of transactions per second (TPS). Solana can handle up to 65,000 TPS, while Sui, thanks to its highly optimised architecture and object-centric data management model, can reach theoretical peaks of around 297,000 TPS.

This positions Sui as one of the most high-performing blockchains in the industry today, establishing a new benchmark for efficiency and scalability in Web3.

Sui is at the centre of the NFT and Web 3.0 gaming movement

Thanks to its exceptional performance and optimised infrastructure, Sui is rapidly emerging as one of the most dynamic and promising ecosystems in the NFT space—and more notably, in the rapidly evolving world of Web3 gaming.

Beyond its high transaction throughput—which is essential for supporting increasingly complex, real-time gaming experiences—Sui has introduced a game-changing innovation: the object-centric model.

This model allows for native, flexible, and scalable management of dynamic assets, such as in-game items and evolving NFTs. It ensures seamless compatibility with the technical and logical requirements of a blockchain infrastructure purpose-built for gaming.

Through its official platform, sui.sui.io, Sui offers a dedicated Web3 gaming hub, designed to deliver immersive, decentralised gameplay experiences based on true ownership of digital assets.

Here, users can explore a growing catalogue of Web3 games, including titles like XOCIETY, Farcana, ONE Fight Arena, and many more—all developed to leverage Sui’s object-centric architecture fully.

These ongoing developments are steadily positioning Sui as a major force in Web3 gaming, a sector that has been—and could once again become—one of the most powerful and strategically important narratives in the blockchain space.

SUI, the hub of the Sui ecosystem

The economic framework of the Sui ecosystem revolves around its native token, SUI, which has a maximum supply capped at 10 billion coins. Currently, approximately 3.34 billion tokens are in circulation, giving SUI a market capitalisation of around $13.2 billion, as mentioned earlier.

Taking into account the full token supply, the fully diluted market cap—calculated by multiplying the current token price by the total eventual supply—stands at approximately $39.6 billion.

Beyond its economic value, SUI plays a pivotal role within the ecosystem as a multifunctional utility asset that powers several key aspects of the network. Specifically, SUI is used to:

The requirement to hold SUI in order to participate in network operations actively has generated strong organic demand for the token within the ecosystem.This demand, combined with overall market optimism surrounding the project, fueled a sharp increase in the value of SUI during the second half of 2024, with the token reaching an all-time high (ATH) of $5.30 before stabilising around $4 per token at the time of writing.