Sui is a layer-1 blockchain built by Mysten Labs, and SUI is its native token. Sui stores everything on-chain as objects with a clear owner, which lets it process unrelated transactions in parallel and confirm them in well under a second. Its smart contracts are written in Move, a language designed to make digital assets hard to copy or lose by mistake.
Who created Sui?
Sui was created by Mysten Labs, founded in 2021 by Evan Cheng, Sam Blackshear, Adeniyi Abiodun, George Danezis and Kostas Chalkias. The founders previously worked at Meta on the Diem blockchain project, where the Move language was first developed. Sui's mainnet launched in May 2023.
SUI pays the gas fees for every transaction on Sui, including a storage fee for data kept on-chain. Holders can stake SUI with validators to help secure the network and earn staking rewards, and each validator's voting weight on protocol decisions depends on the SUI staked with it. SUI is also widely used as collateral and as a trading pair in Sui's DeFi apps.
What is the total supply of SUI?
SUI has a fixed maximum supply of 10 billion tokens. Not all of it is in circulation yet: tokens set aside for early contributors, investors, the community reserve and the Mysten Labs treasury unlock on a schedule that runs for several years, so the circulating supply rises over time. The live circulating supply is shown in the market data on this page.
Is Sui the same as Aptos?
Related, but distinct. Both emerged from Meta's Diem project and use the Move language, but they have different architectures (Sui: object-centric; Aptos: account-based), different consensus mechanisms, different teams, and separate ecosystems. They are competitors, not the same project.
What's the difference between Sui and Ethereum layer 2s?
Ethereum layer 2s (like Arbitrum or Base) are built on top of Ethereum and inherit its security, but add their own complexity, bridging friction, and liquidity fragmentation. Sui is an independent layer 1 with its own security model and native ecosystem: simpler in some ways, but without Ethereum's security backing or the ability to tap into Ethereum's liquidity without bridging.
How do I buy SUI?
SUI is listed on most large crypto exchanges and can also be swapped on decentralized exchanges built on Sui. If you want to hold it yourself, withdraw it to a self-custody wallet that supports the Sui network: Sui uses its own address format, so a wallet that only supports Ethereum or Solana cannot receive it. Always check the network before you send.
Can Sui validators freeze my funds?
The Cetus incident demonstrated that Sui validators can coordinate to block specific addresses from spending on-chain, effectively freezing funds. This was used to protect users after a hack, and the funds were ultimately returned through a community vote. But it does confirm that validator-level censorship is technically possible, which is a meaningful difference from fully censorship-resistant chains like Bitcoin.
Is there a SUI ETF?
Yes. The first US spot SUI ETFs started trading in February 2026: the Grayscale Sui Staking ETF (GSUI) on NYSE Arca, and the Canary Staked SUI ETF (SUIS) and the 21Shares SUI ETF (TSUI) on Nasdaq. Some of these funds stake their SUI and pass the rewards on. 21Shares also offers a 2x leveraged SUI ETF (TXXS). An ETF gives you price exposure through a brokerage account, but you do not hold the SUI yourself.
Is SUI a good investment?
Whether SUI suits you depends on your goals and risk tolerance, and this page is not financial advice. Sui has fast technology, growing institutional access through ETFs and an active app ecosystem, but it is a young network: it suffered major outages in November 2024 and January 2026, apps built on it lost more than $220 million to exploits in 2025, and locked tokens are still being released into circulation. SUI's price has been highly volatile. Only invest what you can afford to lose, and speak to a licensed financial adviser before making investment decisions.
What is Sui (SUI)?
Sui is one of the most technically ambitious blockchains ever built. Developed by Mysten Labs, a company founded by former Meta engineers who worked on the Diem project, Sui launched its mainnet in May 2023 with a fundamentally different approach to how blockchains store and process data. Instead of the account-based model used by Ethereum and most of its descendants, Sui uses an object-centric architecture that enables native parallel transaction processing, sub-second finality, and a full-stack developer platform that includes decentralized storage, access control, and social login, all built into the protocol itself.
Sui isn't just another fast blockchain. Its object-centric architecture, Move programming language, and integrated developer stack represent a genuine rethinking of how Layer 1s are built, and of what they can become.
Quick Facts
Property
Value
Founded by
Mysten Labs
Mainnet Launch
May 2023
Smart Contract Language
Move
Consensus
DPoS + Mysticeti
Transaction Finality
~390ms
Max Token Supply
10 billion SUI
Peak TVL
$2.6B (October 2025)
Who Built Sui and What SUI Is Used For
Sui is a Layer 1 blockchain developed by Mysten Labs, a company founded by former Meta engineers who built core components of the Diem (formerly Libra) blockchain project. Launched on mainnet in May 2023, Sui has positioned itself as a next-generation smart contract platform, one that rethinks blockchain architecture at a fundamental level rather than iterating on Ethereum's design.
The name comes from the Japanese word for "water," reflected in its water-drop logo. Like water, the project is designed to flow efficiently: Sui is built to process transactions at high speed without the bottlenecks that affect older blockchains.
Sui's native token is SUI, used to pay transaction fees (called "gas"), stake to earn rewards and participate in governance, and secure the network through its delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) consensus model. The total supply is capped at 10 billion SUI. Not all of it circulates yet: allocations to early contributors, investors and the community reserve unlock on a multi-year schedule.
While most blockchains process transactions one at a time in sequence, Sui can process many transactions simultaneously and in parallel, which dramatically improves speed and throughput without sacrificing security.
The Object-Centric Model: Sui's Core Innovation
To understand what makes Sui genuinely different, you need to understand how blockchains store data, and why that matters for performance.
Ethereum and most other smart contract platforms use an account-based model: your wallet has a balance, contracts have state, and every transaction modifies shared global state. The problem is that this creates contention: before any transaction can be confirmed, the network must check the entire global state, forcing sequential processing, one transaction at a time.
Objects, Not Accounts
Sui represents everything on-chain (tokens, NFTs, smart contract data) as discrete "objects", each with a unique ID, a defined owner, and a type. Because Sui knows exactly which objects a transaction touches, it can determine whether two transactions are independent. If they are, both can run simultaneously. This is true native parallel execution, not a workaround or approximation.
Ethereum's model is like a single shared spreadsheet: every edit locks the whole document. Sui's model is like Google Docs: each object is its own file, and many people can edit different files simultaneously without any conflict.
Simple Transfers Without Consensus
For transactions involving objects owned by a single user (the most common case, such as sending tokens), Sui can bypass the full consensus mechanism entirely. These "simple transfers" are confirmed directly between the sender and validators, making them extraordinarily fast and cheap. Full network consensus is only needed when transactions involve shared objects (like interacting with a DEX).
Mysticeti: Sub-Second Finality
Shared-object transactions use Mysticeti, Sui's DAG-based (Directed Acyclic Graph) consensus protocol. Mysticeti went live on mainnet in 2024 and was upgraded to Mysticeti V2 in 2025, which brought finality down to approximately 390 milliseconds on Sui. That is faster than Solana's average of ~800ms, and orders of magnitude faster than Ethereum's ~12-second slots.
Validator scaling is the job of Pilotfish, a Mysten Labs design that lets validators add more standard servers to handle increased traffic horizontally. That is a contrast to Solana's approach, which requires increasingly expensive specialized hardware.
Move: The Programming Language Built for Digital Assets
Smart contracts on Sui are written in Move, a programming language created by Meta engineers for the Diem project. It is now widely regarded as one of the most secure smart contract languages in existence.
Move's breakthrough idea is treating digital assets as "Resources": objects that obey conservation laws. In Move, a token cannot be created from nothing, duplicated, or accidentally deleted: the language itself enforces these properties at compile time. This eliminates entire categories of vulnerabilities that have cost billions in Solidity exploits.
Move raises the floor for smart contract security. It does not patch known exploits; it makes entire classes of bugs structurally impossible.
Formal Verification with Sui Prover
In May 2025, Asymptotic introduced the Sui Prover, a formal verification tool that allows developers to mathematically prove that their smart contracts behave correctly under all inputs and conditions, a standard long used for safety-critical software.
Move's safety guarantees apply to what the language structurally prevents. They do not cover flawed application-level logic. The $223M Cetus hack in May 2025 was caused by a math overflow bug in custom application code, not a flaw in Move itself. Security always requires rigorous auditing, testing, and formal verification regardless of the underlying language.
The Sui Stack: Beyond a Blockchain
In 2025, Sui made a major strategic pivot, redefining itself not just as a fast Layer 1, but as a complete full-stack developer platform. The "Sui Stack" packages several integrated technologies that solve common problems Web3 builders face when launching real applications.
Component
What It Does
Walrus
Decentralized blob storage built for the Sui ecosystem, similar to a purpose-built IPFS. Lets apps store large files affordably in decentralized storage, with ownership and access managed on Sui.
Seal
On-chain access control. Defines who can read or write specific data, without relying on centralized auth servers.
Nautilus
Trusted off-chain computation. Lets smart contracts securely use data or computations that happen outside the blockchain.
zkLogin
Sign blockchain transactions using a Google or Twitch account. Removes the seed phrase barrier for mainstream onboarding.
SuiNS
On-chain name service (like ENS). Maps human-readable names (e.g., alice.sui) to wallet addresses.
DeepBook
A native, on-chain central limit order book providing shared liquidity infrastructure for any DEX or trading app built on Sui.
The philosophy: developers shouldn't need to assemble a dozen external services to build a serious application. By making these primitives native to the protocol, Sui reduces integration complexity, improves security, and lets builders focus on product, not plumbing.
Sui vs. Ethereum vs. Solana
How does Sui stack up against the two dominant smart contract platforms?
Feature
Sui
Solana
Ethereum
Data Model
Object-centric
Account-based
Account-based
Smart Contract Language
Move
Rust / C
Solidity
Sui is architecturally the most advanced of the three for raw throughput and user experience. Ethereum leads on ecosystem depth, security track record, and institutional trust. Solana sits in between: battle-tested, fast, and widely adopted, but requiring increasingly expensive hardware to scale.
Sui's Ecosystem in 2025–2026
Over 2025, Sui evolved from a technically impressive but relatively young network into a competitive Layer 1 with active DeFi, gaming, institutional rails, and Bitcoin finance.
DeFi
Sui's DeFi ecosystem peaked at a Total Value Locked (TVL) of $2.6 billion in October 2025, powered by Suilend (lending), Cetus (the primary DEX), Bluefin (perpetuals), and Navi Protocol. Following security incidents and broader market weakness, TVL stood at approximately $561M as of February 2026, a steep correction from peak, but representing genuine on-chain financial activity.
Bitcoin Finance on Sui
One of 2025's breakout narratives was Bitcoin-backed assets. Multiple BTC representations became active:
Lombard's LBTC: liquid-staked Bitcoin for lending and trading workflows
Stacks's sBTC: deeper programmability and Bitcoin network integration
This lets BTC holders lend, trade, and earn yield, turning Bitcoin from a passive store of value into productive capital.
Gaming
Gaming is one of Sui's most natural use cases. In December 2025, XOCIETY, a third-person shooter built in partnership with Sui, launched Early Access on the Epic Games Store. The SuiPlay0x1 handheld gaming device is also in development, targeting mainstream audiences rather than crypto-native users.
Institutional Adoption
Institutional access widened in early 2026:
Spot SUI ETFs began trading in the US in February 2026: Grayscale (GSUI) on NYSE Arca, and Canary Capital (SUIS) and 21Shares (TSUI) on Nasdaq
21Shares also runs a 2x leveraged SUI fund (TXXS)
In 2025, developers executed over 1.16 billion programmable transaction blocks, and Sui hosted events in 17 cities reaching over 13,000 community members.
Security Incidents & Network Reliability
Any honest guide to Sui must address the significant incidents of 2025–2026.
Cetus Protocol exploit, May 22, 2025: $223M lost
Sui's largest DEX was exploited via a math overflow bug in its fixed-point arithmetic library. The attacker minted near-zero-value tokens to corrupt price calculations and drain real assets from liquidity pools. About $60M was bridged to Ethereum before validators coordinated to freeze the remaining ~$162M on Sui. After a community governance vote, frozen funds were recovered, the Sui Foundation provided a bridge loan, and Cetus returned to operations after 17 days.
The incident revealed that validator coordination can freeze on-chain funds. That was effective in this case, but it raises real questions about censorship resistance and decentralization.
Nemo Protocol exploit, 2025: $2.4M lost
A yield protocol on Sui was exploited for $2.4M in USDC through a smart contract vulnerability.
Typus Finance exploit, 2025: $3M lost
An unaudited contract at Typus Finance lost approximately $3M, a reminder that unaudited code carries serious risk regardless of the underlying chain's security properties.
Network outage, January 14, 2026: about 6 hours down
A consensus stall halted all transaction processing for approximately six hours, freezing over $1 billion in on-chain assets. User funds were never at risk (this was a liveness failure, not a security breach), but dApps were completely unavailable. This was Sui's second major outage (following November 2024), plus an additional degraded-performance event in December 2025.
Context: Outages and early-stage security incidents are not unique to Sui: Solana had multiple major outages in 2021–2022 before stabilizing. However, Sui's incidents are real risks and should factor into any evaluation, especially for applications requiring high uptime or large liquidity commitments.
Key Milestones & What's Ahead in 2026
Date
Milestone
May 2023
Mainnet launch with Move smart contracts, object model, and DPoS consensus
2024
Mysticeti V1 deployed; RPC 2.0 (GraphQL) API launched; first network outage (November)
May 2025
Cetus hack ($223M); $162M recovered via validator coordination and community vote
Sui is one of the most technically innovative blockchains ever built. Its object-centric architecture solves real problems that account-based chains cannot, and the Sui Stack, which combines native storage, access control, privacy and identity, is a genuine leap forward for what a Layer 1 can offer developers.
But Sui is also a young network still proving itself. Two major outages, over $228M lost to exploits in a single year, and validator-level fund-freezing that challenges pure decentralization principles are real marks against it.
Sui's architecture gives it a strong technical base. Whether its execution, ecosystem, and reliability will match its technical ambition remains the open question for 2026 and beyond.
