Sui Blockchain Launches Its Mainnet

Sui, a Layer-1 blockchain developed by former Meta employees, has launched its mainnet. The project uses a proof-of-stake consensus model and was programmed in the Move language, which was originally planned to be used for Meta's now-scrapped Diem project.

Sui’s eponymous governance token is trading at $1.30 as of 2am ET, giving the blockchain a fully diluted valuation of $13B. This puts it ahead of established networks like Avalanche, Solana and Polygon.

The SUI token is used for governance and to pay transaction fees and incentivize validators for staking their tokens. Half of the total supply of 10B tokens is allocated to a community reserve managed by the Sui Foundation.

Early investors are sitting on tidy gains, as the tokens were sold at between $0.03 and $0.10 across multiple exchanges in an Initial Exchange Offering (IEO). Binance users also had the opportunity to stake BNB or TUSD to earn SUI tokens, and the popularity of the campaign briefly caused TUSD to surge above its dollar peg.

Mysten Labs, the core development team behind Sui, raised $300M from VC heavyweights in a series B round at a valuation of $2 billion in September 2022. In March, Alibaba Cloud signed a memorandum of understanding with Mysten Labs to help grow the Sui ecosystem.

Low Throughput

Despite being built for high speed, Sui’s current network throughput is quite low.

Sui is currently processing 3 transactions per second (tps) and reached a peak of 137 tps in the past 30 days. In comparison, SUI's primary competitors, Aptos and Solana, are processing 7 tps and 3,893 tps, respectively.

Nearly 4.72 billion SUI tokens have been staked by 2,165 validators across the globe.

Community Criticism

Many community members were disappointed by Sui's mainnet launch, with some venting their frustration for not being eligible to purchase pre-sale tokens or getting airdrops.

"Tested devnet, multiple testnet waves, wallet, transactions,nfts everything since more than 8mo. Still, I didn't get a single recognition/public sale ticket," a Twitter user wrote.

Arthur0x, DeFiance Capital founder, was critical of Sui's lofty valuation.

"Almost all founders of hyped L1 in past cycles are billionaires now despite little real traction achieved in their blockchain," he added.