Sui: A "maverick" public chain

Written by Zhou Zhou, Foresight News

"I chose Sui because it has a clear development direction, which is not the case for all public chains." Several Sui project founders told me.

A developer who has been working on Sui's ecosystem for nearly two years commented: "The Move language behind Sui makes me feel like a language from a big company. It is very standardized, which reduces the difficulty for novices to get started and makes it easier for developers to learn." This is one of Sui's many distinctive features.

During the communication, I found that Sui's highly differentiated features and styles are reflected in many places, and these styles are precisely what other public chains do not have. For example, Sui gives many project parties grants in US dollars instead of its own tokens; Sui will strictly require brand isolation between the project parties that receive the Grant and Sui officials; Sui is determined to enter the game track, etc.

These make Sui a "maverick" public chain in the encryption industry.

On October 17, 2024, the 10th Wanxiang Blockchain Conference was held in Shanghai, and Sui also held many offline events during the same period. I participated in several offline gatherings of Sui and had a deeper understanding of the development of Sui ecology.

Since September, the price and TVL of Sui tokens have skyrocketed, which has attracted widespread attention from practitioners in the encryption industry. It can be said that it is one of the most concerned public chains in the current industry. In just one month, Sui's TVL rose from US$600 million to US$1 billion, nearly doubling. The token price rose from 0.8U to 2U in more than a month, and the token's highest increase was nearly three times. Some practitioners call Sui the Solana killer.

So, why did Sui rise so fast, and who is the capital pusher behind it? What are the differences between Sui and other public chains, and what innovative applications are there? Is Sui's growth a long-term phenomenon or a short-term hype?

After communicating with many entrepreneurs in the Sui ecosystem, I found some answers.

Sui is a maverick in the crypto industry, and many of its behaviors show this.

Evan Cheng, CEO of Mysten Labs, the company behind Sui, grew up in Kaohsiung, a southern city in Taiwan, joined Apple in 2005, and moved to Facebook in 2017 as director of programming language engineering, leading some of the company's internal cryptocurrency enthusiast groups.

After a period of time, he became the head of platform development at Libra and promoted 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 well-known companies was naturally "inherited" to Sui.

The first feature of Sui is its focus on the game track.

Adeniyi, one of the co-founders, 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 focuses on solving the ownership problem in games and has successfully attracted a large number of game developers to join, including South Korea's three major listed companies Nhan Net, Marble, FNC and NCSoft. At present, there are about 75 publishers developing applications on Sui." At this time a year ago, Sui only signed 30 development studios.

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The same is true for CEO Evan Cheng. He mentioned SuiPlay, the gaming device launched by Sui, more than once in Twitter and video conversations. In recent weeks, both SuiPlay and the top meme FUD on Sui have promised rewards and airdrops to SuiPlay holders.

The second feature of Sui is that it attaches great importance to compliance. Web3 itself advocates a decentralized and permissionless culture, and most Web3 organizations do not attach importance to compliance. But Sui is a special case. A practitioner close to Mysten Labs told me that the internal compliance process of Mysten Labs is very strict, and even feels a bit like a Web2 giant. Another entrepreneur in the Sui ecosystem said: "I was very surprised that Sui granted the project party US dollars instead of Sui tokens." "And Sui officials require cumbersome and complicated documents, KYC, accounts, etc., and it often takes a long time to get the grant." Almost every person in the Sui ecosystem I met will tell me about this obvious feature of Sui: the emphasis on compliance. After chatting with many Sui practitioners, I learned that this may be closely related to Sui's strategic direction. A practitioner said that he believes that for projects officially recognized by Sui, such as Cetus and Scallop, you don’t have to worry about running away, Sui will cover the bottom.

This is completely different from the strategies of many public chains. For example, Blast clearly stated to users that it is not responsible for any problems with any projects in the ecosystem. Sui and Blast are extreme in two directions. Blast is completely irresponsible, and Sui’s strict requirements for compliance have also left an impression on some developers: as long as it is a project officially recognized by Sui, users should not worry too much about rug.

This reflects a major strategic issue, which is also the third feature of Sui, that is, Sui’s goal is to focus on cooperation with large Web2 institutions to achieve Mass Adoption. However, many traditional large institutions are not allowed to cooperate with tainted institutions. For many large institutions in the traditional world, this is a must.

This also explains some phenomena, such as Sui and his three founders have almost no habit of CX Meme, which seems out of place. Because both Base founder Jesse and Solana founder Toly are guiding and supporting Meme culture. Sui will not or rarely do this. Sui does not want his behavior to appear in his behavior that may be a stain for traditional institutions, thereby affecting his chances of cooperating with large institutions.

Sui's differentiated development: compliance in the United States and prosperity in the Chinese ecosystem

Sui is a public chain that wants to comply with regulations in the United States and has in-depth cooperation with well-known game companies from all over the world, but what is interesting is that most of the top DeFi projects are Chinese entrepreneurs, such as Cetus, Scallop, etc.

"70% or even more than 80% of DeFi projects are Chinese entrepreneurs." Chen, a Sui ecosystem entrepreneur, told me his observations.

Chen believes that this may be related to the clear development direction of Sui itself. When a system has a clear development direction, Chinese entrepreneurs are often faster and more efficient than European and American teams.

Chen also talked about 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, namely: Aptos, Sui, and Linera. The most important public chains on the Move language are still Sui and Aptos. These two companies are competing to become the leader of the Move public chain, so developers will naturally compare these two public chains frequently.

"From a personal subjective perspective, Sui's official tweets often send updates on technology and product features, while Aptos seems to be less in this regard, and seems to pay more attention to activities. This seems to be a small difference between Sui and Aptos." Chen said.

Sui has a clear goal, to make games and to cooperate with We2. However, as a Sui ecosystem entrepreneur who is not in the game direction and not a large institution, it does not seem to affect Chen's confidence in developing Sui. Chen said this is because Sui's founding team has a clear development direction, rather than hammering east and west, which makes the builders in the ecosystem confused. At present, many public chains do not have a very clear direction, which makes practitioners feel very confused. There seems to be no such trouble on Sui.

Some practitioners believe that Sui is a public chain with a very clear goal. This is very different from many public chains that have a mixed development direction or no 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, in the future, will take the route of cooperating with large Web2 institutions; Sui, will focus on developing games; Sui, will be the most compliant public chain. A practitioner summed up the development route of the Sui ecosystem and said it was concise, focused, and clear.