Chirp: Why we chose Sui over Solana

Author: Tim Kravchunovsky Source: coindesk Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

When Chirp (the DePIN of the telecommunications industry) was choosing a blockchain, Solana was obviously the best choice. But it ultimately decided to go with Sui. CEO Tim Kravchunovsky explains why.
From the crypto news headlines, it initially seemed that Solana had firmly established its position as the home of DePIN. From Hivemapper to Helium, some of the most well-known DePIN projects are built on this blockchain. However, when we explored Solana as a blockchain to build our project on, something was not quite right. So after analyzing and doing the necessary due diligence, we decided to choose Sui over Solana.

The first thing that gave us pause for thought was Solana's frequent outages. 2022 has been a disaster year for the entire crypto industry, and Solana seems to be experiencing downtime every other month. But even after the Firedancer validator client went live (designed to stamp out any further outages), the network was still down for nearly five hours in February 2024. It could have been a fluke, but that possibility doesn’t fill us with confidence.

On top of that, Solana seems to be struggling to cope with its own growing popularity. The network has been congested several times this year due to memecoin mania and the rapid rise in popularity of Bitcoin-like mining of Ore. Over the past few months, as traders of memecoins like BONK and WIF flooded the network, X went viral and users complained about failed transactions. This frenzy is a good test of the network’s ability to handle real-world transaction volume—I can’t tell you with absolute confidence that other blockchains won’t have difficulty—but for us, it was another red flag.

For DePIN, especially for a project like ours that processes large amounts of data in real time, our two main requirements for a blockchain are reliability and scalability. When Solana first emerged as the “Ethereum killer,” this was the most exciting thing about it — it promised to reliably process more than 50,000 transactions per second. But in reality, of course, it’s well below that number under real-world conditions. That’s simply not enough for what we do at Chirp.

So, for these main reasons, when we began our search for the “holy grail” of the DePIN blockchain, we decided to look beyond the obvious choice of Solana. We knew that this meant entering uncharted territory. After all, among the larger and more established Layer1s, Solana was indeed the top choice for speed and low transaction costs (another key criterion for us). This search led us to Sui — a blockchain that went public on May 3, 2023.

We think Sui really improves on the design of the last bull run blockchain, and in our opinion, it comes closer to solving the infamous blockchain trilemma than any other Layer1. It’s cost-effective, decentralized, and secure. It has 100 validators, spread across the globe, and its throughput ranges from 10,871tps to a staggering 297,000tps. I’m an engineer, so I know not to always expect the best performance — in fact, I’m more inclined to predict the worst in real life. But even 10,000tps is still pretty impressive.

Of course, we’re not comparing apples to apples here. While the number of active wallets on Sui and Solana is actually comparable (despite Solana being a more mature blockchain), Sui hasn’t experienced anything like the memecoin trading frenzy that Solana has. But we can only conclude from the facts before us that Sui’s lower gas fees have really helped us keep costs in check so far.

Last, but not least, Sui is a great fit because it offers a wide range of tools to support our growing Internet of Things (IoT) network. For example, Sui Name Service (SNS) is a naming system that assigns unique identifiers to blockchain addresses, allowing on-chain IoT devices to be named and therefore easily tracked, which goes a long way toward creating a more transparent and efficient system of connected devices. This allows us to realize our vision of building a device-agnostic network to connect as many devices as possible to the blockchain.

Think of it as Solana 2.0, if you will

In a nutshell, these are the main reasons why we chose Sui over Solana. That’s not to say that Solana doesn’t offer many of the properties needed for a strong and resilient DePIN network. It remains one of the fastest blockchains in the industry and has been implementing upgrades such as Firedancer designed to make it more reliable. It’s also a mature Layer1 that has weathered a bear market (and, in fact, rose from the ashes after the FTX crash). As such, it’s a solid choice for future DePIN projects.

However, in an ecosystem that innovates as quickly as blockchain, there will always be innovative developments that improve upon existing products and surpass them. We believe Sui is just that — a kind of Solana 2.0, if you will. If an early stage DePIN project came to me for advice, I would have no hesitation in recommending Sui as the first choice for a robust and scalable network.