What makes Sui a "maverick" chain?

Author: Zhou Zhou, Foresight News

"The reason I choose SUI is that it has a clear development direction, which not all public chains have," said several founders of the SUI project party to me.

A developer who has been involved in Sui ecosystem construction for nearly two years commented: "The Move language used by Sui gives me the feeling of a language developed by a big company, very standardized, reducing the difficulty of entry for Newbies, making it easier for developers to learn." This is one of the many distinctive features of Sui.

In the communication, I found that: Sui's highly differentiated features and styles are reflected in many aspects, and these styles are precisely what other public chains do not have. For example, Sui provides many project parties with Grants in USD instead of their own Tokens; Sui strictly requires brand isolation between the project party receiving the Grant and the Sui official; Sui is determined to make a strong push into the gaming track, and so on.

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

On October 17, 2024, the 10th Wanchain Blockchain Conference was held in Shanghai, and SUI also held multiple offline activities during the same period. I attended several offline gatherings of SUI and gained a deeper understanding of the development of the SUI ecosystem.

Since September, the price of Sui Token has been rising along with TVL, which has attracted widespread attention from professionals in the encryption industry. It can be said that it is one of the most followed public chains in the industry. In just one month, Sui's TVL has risen from $600 million to $1 billion, nearly doubling. The Token price has also risen from 0.8U to 2U in just over a month, with the highest rise of Token reaching nearly three times. Some practitioners call Sui the Solana killer.

So, why does SUI rise so fast, and who is the capital promoter behind it? What are the differences between SUI and other public chains, and what are the innovative applications? Is the rise of SUI a long-term phenomenon, or a short-term speculative behavior?

After communicating with multiple entrepreneurs in the SUI ecosystem, I found some answers.

Independent SUI

SUI is a unique presence in the encryption industry, and many of its actions demonstrate this.

The CEO of Mysten Labs, the company behind Sui, Evan Cheng, grew up in Kaohsiung, a southern city in Taiwan, and joined Apple in 2005. After 2017, he switched to Facebook as the director of programming language engineering, leading some internal Cryptocurrency enthusiast groups within the company.

After a period of time, he became the platform development director of Libra and promoted the development of the Move language. Mysten Labs has multiple co-founders, such as Adeniyi Abiodun and Sam Blackshear, who also come from Facebook's Libra project. The experience of working on well-known projects at renowned companies naturally "transferred" to Sui.

The first characteristic of SUI is its focus on the gaming 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 ownership issues in games and has successfully attracted a large number of game developers to join, including Nhan Net, Marble, FNC, and NCSoft, the three major listed companies in South Korea. Currently, there are about 75 publishers developing applications on Sui." A year ago at this time, Sui only signed contracts with 30 development studios.

And CEO Evan Cheng is no exception. He has mentioned SuiPlay, the gaming device launched by Sui, multiple times on Twitter and in video conversations. In recent weeks, both SuiPlay and the top meme fear, uncertainty and doubt on Sui have promised rewards and Airdrop to SuiPlay holders.

The second feature of Sui is a strong emphasis on Compliance. Web3 itself advocates a culture of Decentralization and permissionless, and most Web3 institutions do not pay much attention to Compliance. However, Sui is an exception.

A practitioner close to Mysten Labs told me that the Compliance process within Mysten Labs is very strict, and it even feels a bit like a Web2 giant.

Another entrepreneur in the Sui ecosystem said, "Sui's grant to the project party is in USD, not in Sui Token, which surprised me a lot." "In addition, the Sui official requires tedious and complex documents, KYC, accounts, and it often takes a long time to receive the grant."

Almost everyone I've met in the SUI ecosystem has mentioned to me this obvious feature of SUI: the emphasis on Compliance.

After chatting with several SUI practitioners, I learned that this may be closely related to SUI's strategic direction. One practitioner said that for those projects recognized by SUI officials, such as CETUS, Scallop, etc., you don't have to worry about Rug Pull, SUI will provide support.

This is completely different from the strategy of many public chains, such as Blast, which clearly states to users that it is not responsible for any problems with projects in its ecosystem. Sui and Blast are two extremes in different directions. Blast is completely irresponsible, while Sui's strict requirements for Compliance have also left some developers with an impression: as long as it is a project recognized by Sui, users don't have to worry too much about rugs.

This reflects a significant strategic issue, which is also the third feature of SUI, that is, SUI's goal is to focus on cooperating with Web2 major institutions to achieve Mass Adoption. And many traditional large institutions do not allow cooperation with tainted institutions. In many traditional world institutions, this is a must-do.

This also explains some phenomena, such as Sui and his three co-founders have almost no habit of CX Meme, which seems out of place. Because whether it is Base founder Jesse, Solana founder Toly, both are guiding and supporting Meme culture. And Sui does not or rarely do this, Sui does not want to have behaviors that may be a stigma for traditional institutions, affecting its opportunities to cooperate with large institutions.

Sui's Differentiated Development: Compliance in the United States, Prosperity in the Chinese Ecosystem

SUI is a public chain that aims to comply with regulations in the United States and has partnered with well-known global gaming company Depth. Interestingly, most of the top Decentralized Finance projects are founded by Chinese entrepreneurs, such as CETUS, Scallop, etc.

"70% or even more than 80% of Decentralized Finance projects are created by Chinese entrepreneurs," said Chen, a Sui ecosystem entrepreneur, sharing his observation with me.

Chen believes this may be related to Sui's clear development direction. Once a system has a clear development direction, Chinese entrepreneurs often outpace European and American teams in terms of speed and efficiency.

Chen also talked about SUI's comparison with other public chains in the Move system.

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. Among the public chains on the Move language, SUI and Aptos are still the most important, and these two are often compared by developers in their competition to become the leading Move public chain.

"From a personal subjective perspective, Sui official tweets often provide updates on technology and product feature directions, while Aptos seems to have fewer updates in this regard and seems to focus more on event-related content. This seems to be a small difference between Sui and Aptos," Chen said.

Sui has a clear goal of developing games and cooperating with We2. However, as an ecological entrepreneur in a non-gaming and non-large-scale organization, Chen's confidence in developing on Sui does not seem to be affected. Chen said this is because Sui's founding team has a clear development direction, rather than being inconsistent and confusing to the builders in the ecosystem. Currently, many public chains do not have a clear direction, which makes practitioners feel confused. There seems to be no such problem on Sui.

Some practitioners believe that Sui is a public chain with clear goals. This is very different from many public chains that change direction or have no clear differentiation. This feature seems to bring many different changes to the Sui ecosystem.

The first year of SUI is to focus on the development of Decentralized Finance; SUI is the future route to cooperate with Web2 institutions; SUI aims to focus on the development of games; SUI aims to be the most Compliance public chain. A practitioner summarized the development route of the SUI ecosystem as concise, focused, and clear.