On May 3, 2023, the Sui mainnet officially went live, which was 2 years ago today. Many may remember that when Sui first launched, the situation was not as optimistic as it is now — the investment party FTX collapsed, and the foundation was forced to “buy back tokens” itself; during the bear market, the token price fell from $1.7 to $0.4; there were no regular token airdrops, but rather lottery-based token purchases, which flooded the community with “No airdrop, No community.” and even directly called it “fraud.”

Just two short years have passed, and everything has changed. In this cycle where Bitcoin bottomed at $16,000 and ultimately broke through $100,000, Sui is undoubtedly the new protagonist in the public chain arena. Looking at the entire public chain landscape, it is only slightly less prominent than Solana in this round of ‘rebirth from the ashes.’ In fact, the FDV (Fully Diluted Valuation) of SUI, the governance token of Sui, ranks only behind BTC, ETH, XRP, SOL, and BNB among non-stablecoins, making it the sixth largest crypto asset in the industry.

Cryptocurrency FDV ranking, data: CoinGecko

How did Sui achieve such impressive results? What did it do right, and where did its competitors fall short? On the occasion of Sui’s second anniversary, as a deeply involved participant in the ecosystem, the author attempts to uncover the growth secrets behind Sui’s various data based on personal experiences and subjective perceptions.

DeFi ecosystem

Sui now ranks 9th in the DeFi TVL (Total Value Locked) with $1.78 billion, surpassing the established public chain Avalanche and the Aptos public chain with the Move language, which launched its mainnet a year earlier, but Sui’s DeFi ecosystem development is not achieved overnight.

On-chain DeFi TVL rankings, data: DeFiLlama

Like most ‘VC coins’, the mainnet activity data of Gate just after its launch is not ideal, and DeFi cannot operate without users. How will Gate turn this situation around?

Quests ‘Big Money Giveaway’, introducing the first wave of traffic

Since July 23, Year 7, Mysten Labs (the developer of Gate) has successively launched 3 phases of Bullshark Quests in less than half a year. Users can receive SUI token airdrops by completing tasks, with 5 million tokens per phase and a total of 15 million tokens ‘airdropped’.

It is worth noting that the early incentive model of Gate.io tends to be more inclined towards ‘sunshine all over’, rewarding based on headcount rather than capital distribution. While those ranked at the top can receive a large number of tokens, ordinary retail investors ranked relatively lower also have decent returns.

At this stage, a large number of retail investors and airdrop studios have poured into the Sui ecosystem, helping Sui establish an objective early user base. The official rewards of Sui also leave an impression of ‘non-rolling’ and ‘friendly to retail investors’ in the airdrop track. The author was also attracted by Quest at the end of 23 and began to get in touch with the Sui ecosystem.

Quest 3 The number of tokens in different ranking levels

Token incentives, strong coin price to alleviate selling pressure

Sui Early TVL Trend Under Token Incentives

Sui is the earliest public chain in this cycle to provide interest subsidies for DeFi protocols using tokens. In the early stages, relatively niche protocols could even achieve over 100% annualized returns through stablecoins. The author has participated in many DeFi mining activities and, tempted by high interest rates, increased the deployment of funds on Sui during this phase.

In the early days, the interest rate for staking stablecoin LP in Aftermath reached as high as 110%

After that, there are many public chains imitating Sui’s massive subsidies to the DeFi ecosystem, such as Aptos, Starknet, Sei, ZKsync, but the ecosystem has not achieved the prosperity of Sui. Where do the differences come from? DeFi interest rates attract mining whales, while the token prices mentioned earlier are relatively weak. In order to lock in profits, large holders can only ‘mine, withdraw, and sell,’ causing sustained selling pressure on tokens, further driving down prices. To maintain the same interest rate, more tokens need to be subsidized, leading to a vicious cycle.

However, the high token subsidy of SUI was distributed at a low coin price, and then the coin price steadily rose. The whales’ willingness to hold SUI tokens increased, the selling pressure decreased, and the amount of tokens required to maintain the same interest rate also decreased, achieving a positive spiral of coin price growth and TVL growth.

Referring to the current SUI price, the actual annualized return of the DeFi protocol with a 100% APY mentioned earlier may be over 300%, instead, ‘mining, withdrawing, selling’ is a better option.

Efficient developers in the Chinese community

As the founder of the development team Mysten Labs, Evan Cheng, who is of Taiwanese descent, the Taiwanese team of the Sui ecosystem is particularly large. Behind the ecosystem’s lending protocol Scallop, options protocol Typus, stablecoin protocol Bucket, and so on are all Taiwanese teams. The advantage of having many Chinese developers is high development efficiency and guaranteed code quality. In comparison, teams in Europe and America tend to have a more laid-back approach to work.

Mysten Labs co-founder, CEO Evan Cheng

Wealth Effect

The success of an ecosystem is closely related to whether it can create wealth for ordinary users and whether it has a wealth effect. Looking back from a God’s eye view at the time node when Solana started its momentum, in addition to the dominance of the Meme track, the wealth effect of Jito and the subsequent Jupiter airdrop attracted numerous retail investors to invest in Solana’s unreleased token projects, driving the development of DeFi, which is indispensable.

At the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, the top lending protocols on Sui at that time, Scallop and Navi, also followed suit with Solana’s gameplay, launching point systems and coins one after another. A considerable amount of funds overflowed from Solana (it cannot be denied that Solana was still the preferred choice at that time) participated in these two projects.

I participated in the last round of the Scallop airdrop with $10,000, and received a hotpot airdrop.

But at this time (actually now) Sui’s native project cannot support a high valuation. So after the airdrop of hundreds to thousands of dollars on Solana, everyone received tens, hundreds, or even a few dollars of SCA, and then began to complain that users did not have wealth effects.

I didn’t expect that SCA turned out to be the most conscience airdrop in the Sui ecosystem for a long time. The neighboring Navi even issued coins a year ago, and ‘forgot’ about the airdrop users, using the points ranking to seduce users for more than a year.

Official launch, creating wealth effect

The wealth effect issue is not unique. Public chains such as Aptos, Starknet, Sei, ZKsync, etc. have not achieved anything in this regard, or it can be said that public chains with wealth effects are few.

But if there are problems, Mysten Labs has a solution.

Mysten Labs is almost unique, developing projects on its own and airdropping tokens to project parties. If the native project Sui cannot support the valuation, Mysten Labs can meet your imagination. Including the Sui mainnet (hundreds of billions of dollars), Mysten Labs has incubated three unicorn-level (over 10 billion dollars) protocols and platforms, all centered around Sui. (For details, see:Sui developer product matrix overview: more than just a public chain）

Deepbook

Deepbook is positioned as the liquidity center on Sui, serving as a CLOB (Central Limit Order Book exchange) at the protocol level on Sui. Since its launch, the highest FDV has exceeded 3 billion USD, currently still around 1.8 billion USD.

On October 14, 2024, DEEP officially TGE, and 10% of the total token supply is used for user airdrops, with a maximum value of 300 million US dollars, and a total of 101968 Sui addresses are eligible to claim.

Sui Name Service

Sui Name Service is the domain name protocol on Sui. In addition to mapping addresses on the Sui chain in the .sui format, it is also deeply integrated with other projects of Mysten Labs, such as Walrus. For example, if you want to deploy a website on Walrus with a custom domain name, you need to purchase SuiNS. For instance, the official website for staking WAL is stake-wal.wal.app, rather than stake.wal.app or staking.wal.app, which is because both stake.sui and staking.sui SuiNS domains have been purchased by unofficial individuals.

On November 14, 2024, NS opened the airdrop for claiming, with 10% of the total token supply allocated for community airdrops, peaking at a value of $30 million.

Walrus

Walrus is a decentralized storage and data availability protocol based on Sui. Ideally, using Walrus will bring deflationary pressure to the SUI token. Walrus raised $140 million in a separate funding round. (Recommended reading: Interpreting the decentralized storage protocol Walrus)

On March 27, 2025, WAL token TGE, 4% airdropped to active users and testnet participants in the Sui and Walrus ecosystems, worth about 1.2 billion US dollars, and 6% reserved for future airdrops after the mainnet goes live. Over 120,000 Sui addresses received WAL airdrops.

At the same time, the liquidity pledge project Amnis on TGE on Aptos was only airdropped to the top 10,000 on the leaderboard, and the circulating market value of the AMI token is about 5 million US dollars. In comparison, the wealth effect on Sui is ‘breaking through the defense’.

Ecological Airdrop

From the criticism of ‘No Airdrop, No Community.’ to the paradigm shift of ‘No Community, No Airdrop.’ Although Sui did not conduct a user airdrop when its mainnet went live, it has indeed excelled in utilizing airdrop marketing and community building in the subsequent period.

ReferenceThe conference is approaching, rumors are flying, will the Sui ecosystem usher in a new round of airdrops?;Gold Rush Manual | How to lay out 300 million WAL tokens for the second phase airdrop?The screenshots in the two articles hint at the opportunity for ‘airdrops,’ subtly encouraging users to interact with the ecosystem and join the community, and users who ultimately follow through do receive airdrop rewards. This is the ‘airdrop marketing’ that users are happy to see, and the reputation of the Sui chain’s wealth effect is thus established.

Based on Adeniyi’s hint, the author received an airdrop of NS tokens from SuiNS.

Excellent Control and Market Value Management

Interestingly, except for the SUI native currency, the ecological tokens airdropped above have not been listed on Binance (no chips have been handed over), and their initial circulation is relatively low. The DeFi protocols in the Sui ecosystem provide these tokens with extremely high deposit rates, further locking up the tokens and reducing circulation.

The lower token circulation makes it easier for Mysten Labs to do ‘market value management’ and easier to ‘create wealth effects’.

Learning from Solana

As the two most dazzling public chains in this cycle, the tactics of Solana and Sui do have many similarities. In terms of the sequence of events, it should be Sui learning from Solana. What kind of tactics will be the winner in this cycle?

The price of the coin is the best marketing.

Observing the rise of Solana and Sui, a common point is that the coin price rises before the fundamentals, and then various data catch up.

The price of the currency itself is the best marketing. A strong price attracts attention, mindshare, and funds, filling in various ‘fundamental’ data, and finding reasons for further increase. For example, the growth of TVL is often driven by the rise of the native token of the public chain.

You only focus on pulling the market, and there are Confucian scholars who will “interpret the classics” for you.

Hardware, airdrop, you have, I have

Sui game console SuiPlay0X1

Solana launches Web3 phones Saga and Seeker, aiming to bridge Web2 and Web3 through them and introduce Web2 traffic to encryption. However, most of the users buying these Web3 phones are native Web3 users, motivated by the potential ecological project token airdrops behind them.

Sui also learns Solana and focuses on Web3 hardware. On September 2, 2024, Mysten Labs, in collaboration with Playtron, a game handheld operating system developer, launched the pre-sale of the Web 3 game handheld SuiPlay0X1 (details: The price is 599u, is SuiPlay game console worth buying?），The presale of ten thousand units of the handheld console has been sold out, and it will be shipped this summer.

We all have the hardware, and I can’t be left out of the airdrops you have! Since its launch, SuiPlay has received airdrops or airdrop promises from over 10 ecological projects.

Breaking News: SuiPlay game console received an airdrop

Community building

Whether the community is united affects the overall atmosphere of the ecosystem and external perception of it. Sui’s current community is undoubtedly one of the most sticky communities in Web3.

Developer’s exclusive agreement

According to relevant sources, the Gate Foundation has signed an exclusive agreement with the project party, requiring it to only build on the Gate chain as a prerequisite for receiving foundation funding (for user incentives, etc.). The seemingly ‘closed’ restriction does effectively prevent developers from being wishy-washy. Developers on the Gate chain are relatively focused, unlike some developers on EVM chains who repeatedly switch sides.

Ecological unity and mutual assistance, bound by interests

The Sui ecosystem project is relatively united, with frequent occurrences of ‘airdrops to each other.’ Although the author ranks in the top 50 of the Navi points leaderboard and has not received an airdrop of 1 NAVX token, they have received many airdrops from ecosystem projects to Navi users.

Bluefin airdrops to Sui ecological projects

Summary

Building a DeFi ecosystem, creating wealth effects, and fostering community culture are all challenging tasks. Sui, which is only 2 years old, has achieved its current success not by chance. Behind a project of this scale, there must be manipulation and assistance from Cabal, and the outstanding performance of the Sui team itself is undeniable.

In this cycle, Sui is still the follower of Solana. If the development momentum remains unchanged, it may become a challenger in the near future.

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