SUI
Sui is a next-generation blockchain designed to fulfill the potential of decentralized technology by prioritizing security, scalability, and accessibility. Built on the Move programming language, Sui offers developers a secure and efficient environment for creating smart contracts. Its architecture allows for horizontal scalability, which enables the network to handle increased demand without compromising performance. Sui also focuses on improving user experience by integrating features that simplify onboarding and reduce costs, making it accessible for a broader audience. Now the Billion dollar question;
GEN 1 = BTC
GEN 2 = ETH
GEN3 = SOL
GEN4 = SUI?
1. Introduction
Sui Network has gained significant attention recently, with many speculating it could be the next major Layer 1 (L1) blockchain, potentially rivaling established players like Solana. While the "Solana killer" narrative may be overblown, Sui's innovative technology, promising ecosystem, and user-friendly experience merit a deeper analysis to determine its long-term potential as an investment.
This thesis will explore Sui's technological strengths, its programming language (Move), the current state of its ecosystem, user experience (UX), and the tokenomics of the SUI token. The goal is to assess whether Sui presents a viable investment opportunity or if it is just another overhyped VC-driven project.
2. Technology Features
Sui's technology is its most compelling aspect. Built on the Move programming language, Sui promises significant scalability and efficiency improvements over existing blockchains. Key features include:
- High Throughput: Sui claims a potential transaction throughput of 100k+ TPS for single-type transactions. This could make it one of the fastest blockchains available, though this claim is limited to certain transaction types.
- Fast Finality: Sui's block production time is 0.33 seconds, with a finality time of 500 milliseconds. This low latency could enhance the user experience, particularly for applications requiring quick confirmation times.
- Parallelization: By enabling parallel transaction processing, Sui reduces bottlenecks and enhances overall network efficiency, a critical factor for scaling decentralized applications (dApps).
- Optimized Storage Model: Sui uses an object-based transaction model, which allows for more efficient data storage and retrieval. This could reduce costs and improve performance over time.
Assessment: Sui's technological foundation is strong, with features that differentiate it from many other L1s. However, scalability claims need to be proven under real-world conditions.
3. The Move Programming Language
Move, the language underlying Sui, is designed with security and ease of use in mind. It offers several advantages over Solidity:
- Security Enhancements: Move includes protections against common vulnerabilities, such as reentrancy attacks, which have plagued Ethereum-based smart contracts. This could lead to more secure dApps.
- Ease of Adoption: Move is touted as being easier for developers, particularly those from non-crypto backgrounds, to pick up. While this could broaden the pool of potential developers, the language's adoption remains to be seen.
Assessment: Move's security features and potential ease of adoption are positives, but the jury is still out on whether it will attract a significant developer community. Adoption by developers will be a key determinant of Sui's success.
4. The Sui Ecosystem
As of now, Sui's ecosystem is still in its infancy, with around 30 dApps and only a dozen with a Total Value Locked (TVL) above $10 million. Notable projects:
- Navi Protocol: Gained some traction.
- Cetus Protocol and Typus Finance: Interesting DeFi projects.
However, despite these initial successes, the ecosystem is relatively small compared to other L1s like Ethereum or Solana. Additionally, there's a lack of unique dApps that offer capabilities unavailable on other chains.
Assessment: Sui's ecosystem is growing but still lacks the scale and uniqueness required to become a major player. The presence of native dApps is a positive, but more innovative projects are needed to attract users and liquidity.
5. User Experience (UX)
Sui's UX is one of its stronger points. Users have reported a smooth and fast experience, with intuitive wallet functions and clear airdrop notifications.
- Account Abstraction: This allows for more advanced features like social logins using zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, sponsored transactions, and stable gas fees.
- Sui Explorer: An advanced blockchain explorer that enhances transparency.
Assessment: Sui excels in providing a user-friendly experience, which could be a significant competitive advantage, particularly for attracting non-crypto users. Cross-chain compatibility and bridging are areas that require improvement.
6. SUI Tokenomics
The SUI token's valuation and tokenomics present a mixed picture:
- Valuation: Sui's market cap of $2.6 billion and a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $10 billion seem reasonable when compared to other L1s. However, the L1 trade is becoming increasingly crowded, which could limit upside potential.
- Supply Dynamics: A major concern is the 40% increase in circulating supply by October 2025, due to VC unlocks. This could exert significant downward pressure on the price if not managed carefully.
- VC Influence: The fact that 50% of the supply is controlled by Sui/Mysten Labs raises concerns about the potential for large sell-offs, particularly as VCs may look to realize profits from their early investments.
Assessment: While the SUI token's current valuation is not unreasonable, the looming supply increases and VC influence are significant risks. These factors could lead to volatility and potential downward pressure on the token price.
7. Conclusion and Investment Outlook
Bull Case: Sui's strong technology, promising UX, and the potential of the Move language provide a solid foundation for growth. If Sui can expand its ecosystem, attract more developers, and maintain its user-friendly experience, it could carve out a niche in the increasingly crowded L1 space. Long-term, Sui could become a significant player if it can differentiate itself with unique dApps and scale effectively.
Bear Case: The primary risks to Sui's success are its relatively small ecosystem, lack of unique applications, and the potential for significant token dilution due to VC unlocks. Additionally, the increasing competition from new and existing L1s could limit Sui's market share and growth potential.
Investment Thesis
Years ago, I observed firsthand how foundational infrastructure decisions can dictate the trajectory of entire industries. Even systems launched with the best intentions—promising openness and neutrality—eventually succumb to centralizing forces. This isn’t due to malice but arises from systemic pressures amplified by early architectural choices.
The history of the Internet is a case study in this dynamic. It began as a decentralized peer-to-peer network designed to withstand disruptions. Yet, over time, its architecture shifted towards centralization. As complexity increased, convenience and scalability concerns led to compromises, introducing centralized gatekeepers like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. These companies optimized for performance, but the cost was the erosion of decentralization.
The same story is unfolding in Web3. Blockchain technologies like Bitcoin and Ethereum were heralded as decentralization’s second coming, promising to break free from legacy power structures. But scalability issues, high costs, and user demands for simplicity have driven centralization—whether through Layer-2 solutions relying on centralized sequencers, social logins that entrust a single provider, or dominant NFT marketplaces dictating terms.
Centralization isn’t inherently evil, but it contradicts the ethos of decentralization that many builders and users value. It undermines trustless systems and locks ecosystems into patterns where a few entities wield disproportionate control. To escape this gravitational pull, we need to reimagine infrastructure from first principles.
The Problem: Design Debt and Centralization
“Tech debt can be refactored; design debt often requires a total reset.”
Most blockchain systems today face design debt. Core assumptions like the “blockchain trilemma” (trade-offs between decentralization, security, and scalability) have locked platforms into architectures that concentrate power. Examples include:
• Global State Models: Platforms force all transactions into a single shared ledger, creating bottlenecks and high costs during demand spikes.
• Centralized Scaling Solutions: Layer-2 systems or off-chain storage introduce new points of failure.
• Network Inefficiencies: Traditional routing protocols are vulnerable to control by ISPs and other intermediaries.
These choices, though made in response to real challenges, have set the stage for centralization. Attempts to patch these issues with layers of complexity often exacerbate the problem rather than solving it.
To build systems that truly embody decentralization, we must avoid these pitfalls from the outset.
The Opportunity: Infrastructure That Enforces Decentralization
True decentralization isn’t achieved through validator counts or tokenomics alone. It requires a foundational design that prevents centralization from taking root. This means building systems where:
1. Power Cannot Pool: No entity can quietly amass control over critical components.
2. Verifiability is Built-In: Every layer, from storage to networking, must be tamper-proof and trustless.
3. Builders Come First: Developers need tools that are intuitive and scalable without sacrificing decentralization.
Platforms like Sui exemplify this approach:
• Object-Centric Design: Unlike account-based models, Sui uses objects as first-class citizens, aligning with the natural paradigms of Web2 developers. This reduces complexity, eliminates common bugs, and allows transactions to execute in parallel rather than competing for shared global resources.
• Horizontal Scalability: Sui scales seamlessly by sharding at the object level, enabling localized fee markets to prevent congestion from spilling over.
• Verifiable Storage (e.g., Walrus): Decentralized storage layers ensure tamper-proof data without relying on a single provider, extending decentralization to hosting and data availability.
• Decentralized Networking (e.g., SCION): Rethinking routing protocols ensures secure, multi-path, inter-domain connectivity, bypassing traditional ISP choke points.
By embedding decentralization at every level, Sui and similar platforms create systems where no single actor can monopolize power, ensuring fairness and resilience as they scale.
Why Now: The Decentralization Imperative
The shift towards centralization in Web3 is accelerating. Market dominance by centralized entities—from NFT marketplaces to L2 sequencers—threatens the original promise of blockchain technology. This centralization is driven by:
• Consumer Expectations: Users prioritize convenience over decentralization, pushing developers to adopt centralized solutions.
• Developer Constraints: Building decentralized systems is hard, and the path of least resistance often leads to centralization.
Yet, a counter-narrative is emerging. Builders and communities are demanding systems that live up to the ideals of trustlessness and openness. This shift presents a unique window to invest in infrastructure platforms that prioritize decentralization at their core.
The Case for Investment
We believe the next wave of Web3 innovation will be defined by projects that:
1. Reimagine Core Architectures: Address design debt by adopting new paradigms like object-centric programming and localized state management.
2. Prioritize Verifiability: Embed trustless mechanisms into every layer, from execution to storage and networking.
3. Scale Without Sacrifice: Achieve horizontal scalability without introducing centralized bottlenecks.
4. Empower Builders: Provide intuitive, developer-friendly tools that lower barriers to entry and foster innovation.
Investing in these projects is more than a financial opportunity; it’s a chance to shape the future of decentralized technology. By supporting platforms that resist centralizing pressures, we can ensure that Web3 fulfills its promise of fairness, openness, and trustlessness.
Conclusion
The road to decentralization is paved with tough technical and economic trade-offs. But history has shown that early architectural choices can determine whether a system stays true to its principles or succumbs to centralizing forces.
By investing in infrastructure built from the ground up to resist centralization, we can create a future where decentralization isn’t just a buzzword but a foundational reality. The next chapter of Web3 will belong to those who build it right from the start.
Investment Thesis: Building Decentralization into Web3 Infrastructure
Years ago, working on products that scaled to billions of users, I learned that early infrastructure decisions set the trajectory of an industry. Even systems designed with the best intentions—openness, neutrality, and resilience—eventually centralize under market and technical pressures.
This isn’t because builders set out to consolidate power; it’s a natural outcome of systemic pressures reinforced by architectural choices. As we saw with the Internet, decentralization is fragile, and without deliberate design, systems slide toward centralization.
In Web3, we see the same forces at play. Blockchain promised trustless systems, autonomy, and fairness. Yet the ecosystem increasingly relies on centralized crutches—whether through L2 sequencers, NFT marketplaces, or cloud storage. This evolution jeopardizes Web3’s foundational ethos and underscores the urgent need for infrastructure designed to resist centralization from day one.
The Internet: A Case Study in Centralization
The Decentralized Origins
The Internet’s foundation was decentralized by design. ARPANET and NSFNET prioritized distributed architectures that could withstand disruptions, even nuclear attacks. Protocols like TCP/IP, Usenet, and DNS reflected a peer-to-peer ethos, allowing any node to send and receive data.
This openness flourished during the early days of the Web. Websites were hosted independently, search engines like AltaVista and Yahoo served as navigational tools, and participation required no central authority. The network was a “loose federation” of independent nodes.
Centralization Accelerates
The rise of the client-server model and asymmetric broadband connections (ADSL) marked a turning point. As users consumed more content than they produced, hosting and data delivery became dominated by platforms optimized for downstream bandwidth.
• Data Centers and Gatekeepers: By the early 2000s, Google, Amazon, and Facebook capitalized on scale advantages. Their services centralized data, optimized for convenience, and introduced ad-driven models that reinforced their dominance.
• Cloud Centralization: AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud became the Internet’s backbone as companies outsourced hosting to cut costs. Today, over 60% of web traffic flows through just a few cloud providers.
These trends were fueled by user and developer demands for convenience and scale, but they came at the cost of decentralization. Platforms became arbiters of access, discourse, and policy—a dynamic we now see emerging in Web3.
Web3: Falling into the Same Trap
Scaling via Centralization
In blockchain, the “blockchain trilemma”—trade-offs between decentralization, security, and scalability—has been a limiting factor. Ethereum’s high fees and slow throughput, for example, led to the rise of Layer-2 (L2) rollups.
While L2s reduce costs, many rely on centralized sequencers, undermining decentralization. For example:
• Sequencers: A single entity orders transactions, introducing centralization risks.
• Promises of Future Decentralization: L2 providers often claim they’ll decentralize “later,” but history shows these “temporary” solutions become permanent.
Similarly, NFT ecosystems are dominated by centralized marketplaces. A leading marketplace recently stopped enforcing creator royalties, disrupting creator revenues overnight. Centralized APIs and infrastructure mean outages at one marketplace ripple across the ecosystem, underscoring how fragile this reliance is.
Compromises for Convenience
The push for mass adoption often prioritizes ease of use over decentralization:
• Social Logins: While they simplify onboarding, centralized logins reintroduce the single point of failure blockchains were designed to eliminate.
• Cloud Storage: Many “decentralized” apps still rely on centralized providers for data, undermining trustless principles.
These patterns mirror the Internet’s trajectory. Without deliberate intervention, Web3 risks becoming another centralized ecosystem wrapped in the veneer of decentralization.
The Solution: Building Decentralization into the Foundation
To resist centralization, Web3 infrastructure must be designed with decentralization, verifiability, and scalability from day one. Platforms like Sui exemplify this approach.
Object-Centric Design
Sui departs from the account-based models of Ethereum with an object-centric programming model:
• First-Class Objects: Assets, files, and records are treated as discrete objects. Developers reason about these objects directly, reducing complexity and avoiding common bugs (e.g., reentrancy attacks).
• Natural for Web2 Developers: This model aligns with how developers already think in object-oriented programming, bridging the gap between Web2 and Web3.
This shift simplifies development and enhances security without relying on centralized guardrails.
Horizontal Scalability by Design
Unlike monolithic global state models, Sui shards its state at the object level, enabling:
• Parallel Execution: Transactions touching different objects execute simultaneously.
• Local Fee Markets: Fees are localized, isolating congestion to specific shards without impacting the broader network.
This design allows Sui to scale seamlessly without introducing bottlenecks that encourage centralized offloading.
Verifiable Storage and Networking
Centralized storage and networking are major points of failure in decentralized systems. Sui integrates:
• Walrus (Verifiable Storage): Ensures data integrity without relying on a single cloud provider. This eliminates centralized hosting risks, empowering truly decentralized apps.
• SCION (Decentralized Networking): A next-gen networking protocol that reduces reliance on ISPs and ensures multi-path, tamper-resistant routing.
These features extend decentralization into layers often overlooked, ensuring resilience and trust at every level
The Investment Opportunity
Market Need
Web3 developers face increasing pressure to balance scalability, user experience, and decentralization. Current solutions often force trade-offs that compromise trustlessness. Platforms like Sui address this gap by providing:
• Developer-Friendly Tools: Intuitive object-oriented programming that reduces friction.
• True Decentralization: Verifiable infrastructure that resists centralizing forces.
• Scalability Without Sacrifice: Architectures that grow without compromising principles.
Early Adoption Indicators
• Growing Ecosystem: Sui’s adoption among developers highlights demand for scalable, decentralized solutions.
• Strategic Differentiation: By embedding decentralization into every layer, Sui positions itself as a long-term infrastructure play, not just a temporary scaling solution.
Vision Alignment
Investing in Sui and similar platforms is an opportunity to redefine Web3’s trajectory. By prioritizing decentralization from day one, these projects align with the original ethos of blockchain while addressing the scalability and usability challenges that drive centralization.
Conclusion
The story of the Internet serves as a cautionary tale: without deliberate design, decentralization gives way to convenience and scale, paving the road to centralization. Web3 faces the same pressures, but platforms like Sui prove it doesn’t have to repeat the same mistakes.
By investing in architectures that embed decentralization into their core, we can support the next generation of Web3 infrastructure. This is more than an investment—it’s a commitment to ensuring blockchain technology lives up to its promise of trustlessness, openness, and fairness.
Build it right, and decentralization won’t be a promise—it’ll be a reality.