Sui

What it is

Sui is a layer 1 blockchain, a base network that settles its own transactions, built by Mysten Labs and launched on 3 May 2023. Its founders, among them Evan Cheng and Sam Blackshear, worked together at Novi, the Meta division building the Diem digital currency; when Meta wound that project down, they left to build Sui. The memorable inheritance is Move, the programming language Blackshear created at Meta for Diem, which lives on as Sui’s native language for smart contracts and was designed from the start to make common token-handling bugs hard to write.

How it works

Most blockchains keep a single global ledger of accounts and force every transaction through the same queue. Sui instead stores its state as objects, individual records with clear owners. If a transaction only touches objects you own, such as sending a coin to a friend, it can skip the full consensus queue and confirm almost instantly. Transactions that touch shared objects, such as a trading pool used by many people, go through Mysticeti, Sui’s consensus protocol, in which many validators propose transactions in parallel rather than taking turns. The result is finality, the point of no reversal, in under a second. SUI pays for gas and can be staked with validators to secure the network. Supply is fixed at 10 billion.

The story so far

Sui arrived in 2023 with unusual pedigree and heavy backing, and its early years followed a familiar arc: a well-funded launch, a build-out of DeFi, gaming and consumer apps, and a market cycle in which SUI traded above $5 at its peak before retreating with the wider market. Mysten Labs continues to develop the core protocol while the independent Sui Foundation funds the ecosystem. The technical record has been the stronger story, with the network’s parallel execution and low fees attracting developers who found older chains congested, and its research papers on consensus widely cited by rival teams.

Where it stands

As of late July 2026, SUI ranks about 31st by market value at roughly $2.9 billion, trading near $0.71, with about 4 billion of the 10 billion maximum coins in circulation, according to CoinGecko. That circulation figure is the detail to keep in view: a majority of the supply is still due to unlock over the coming years, which dilutes existing holders as it arrives. The other things worth watching are whether Sui’s consumer and gaming bets bring in users who stay, and whether activity on the network holds up independently of market cycles. Our crypto explainers hub compares Sui with the other layer 1 networks in the crypto section.