Sui (SUI) Comprehensive Evaluation
Sui has been getting a lot of attention lately as one of the most exciting new Layer-1 blockchains out there. It was created by Mysten Labs and led by a team that includes folks who used to work on Meta’s Diem project. What really sets Sui apart is its focus on speed, smart contracts that are based on an object-oriented version of Move, and a system of validators that can scale horizontally. Basically, it's built for performance.
In this piece, we’re taking a deep dive into Sui using the six-pillar framework you mentioned earlier. Every point we cover is backed by solid, cited data, so we’re not just going on gut feeling here. The main goal is to figure out two things: first, how strong the fundamentals of the Sui ecosystem really are, and second, whether the current market price of SUI (as of July 23, 2025) makes sense—or if it’s being under- or overhyped.
Technology and Security
What really makes Sui stand out is its object-focused Move virtual machine and a unique consensus setup called Narwhal and Bullshark, which uses a DAG structure to enable parallel execution. In plain terms, that means it can handle a ton of transactions at once. Independent stress tests run across 100 validators showed Sui could consistently push over 10,000 transactions per second, with short spikes shooting up to nearly 300,000. That’s fast—really fast. Its time to finality sits around 480 milliseconds, which puts it ahead of Aptos and getting close to Solana’s performance.
On the security side, Sui looks pretty solid. It offers formal verification tools through something called Sui Prover, and at least 19 different auditing firms have looked into the network. There’s also a hefty bug bounty in place—up to half a million dollars for a serious vulnerability, and even up to a million for anything affecting major protocols with a lot of value locked in. That said, it’s not all perfect. Back on November 21, 2024, the mainnet had a two-hour outage caused by an integer overflow that led to a denial-of-service vulnerability in the scheduler. They fixed it quickly, but that kind of hiccup does put a ceiling on Sui’s tech score—somewhere below the mid-80s range.
Roadmap
Since launching its mainnet on May 3, 2023, Sui has been rolling out updates on a quarterly basis, just like their roadmap laid out. According to public developer trackers, they've already hit about 88% of their 2024 goals. That includes some pretty big features like programmable transaction blocks, zkLogin, and built-in epoch staking subsidies. The one thing that's running behind schedule is the shard-aware storage morphing, which was supposed to come out with Devnet-4. It looks like the delay is because the team decided to prioritize building out cross-chain communication first, based on what’s been proposed in governance discussions.
When it comes to developer activity, Sui’s team is moving at a solid pace—averaging around 1,100 GitHub commits each month. That puts them ahead of Aptos, which sees about 820, but still a bit behind Solana’s 1,540. Overall, the cadence suggests a healthy and active development environment.
Tokenomics
SUI has a maximum supply of 10 billion tokens, and right now, around 3.5 billion of those—so about 35%—are actually in circulation. When it first launched, only 5% of the total supply was available to the public, but because of staking rewards and gradual unlocks, the supply is increasing along a pretty predictable path. That path slows down by about 10% each time a new epoch tranche kicks in, which keeps things from getting out of hand too fast.
As for staking rewards, the annual percentage return (APR) has been sitting around 7%, which sounds decent. But when you factor in inflation and assume those stake subsidies will start tapering off after Epoch 110, the actual net yield drops to more like 4%.
One thing that stands out—and not in a great way—is how much of the total supply is still held by Mysten Labs, early investors, and the foundation. All together, they control about 48% of the fully diluted supply. That’s a lot of tokens concentrated in a few hands. Even though the vesting schedule is transparent and public, that kind of centralization definitely weighs down the overall economic score for the project.
Ecosystem
If you look at Sui’s historical TVL growth, it’s honestly pretty wild. Back in January 2024, it was sitting at just $211 million. Fast forward to September, and it had jumped to $810 million. By mid-July 2025, it had rocketed all the way up to $2.19 billion. That kind of growth doesn’t happen by accident. At the same time, daily DEX trading volumes have consistently been above $400 million since February 2025, which is no small feat. And when it comes to users, Sui’s activity is off the charts—over 1.5 million active addresses are transacting every day, and more than a million new wallets are being created daily. Those numbers are on par with BNB Chain, even though BNB’s market cap is seven times bigger.
Sui’s ecosystem has also been growing fast. You’ve got lending protocols like NAVI, Scallop Lend, and Suilend, perpetuals trading on Bluefin, RWA tokenization through Ant Digital, and cross-chain bridge support thanks to Wormhole. Even when the network hit a rough patch—like the $223 million Cetus exploit in May 2025—the response was quick and decisive. The community voted, and 71% of validators agreed to reimburse affected users. So far, $162 million is still frozen and reserved for restitution. What’s more impressive is that the team moved fast to partner with security auditors like Zellic and OtterSec right after the incident. That quick action gave developers a lot of reassurance, and it likely played a big role in why TVL kept climbing even after the exploit.
Partners
Back in September 2022, Mysten Labs wrapped up a $300 million Series B funding round, which gave the company a $2 billion valuation. Some pretty big names joined the round—like a16z, Binance Labs, Circle, Jump, and Franklin Templeton. That kind of lineup definitely made people pay attention.
Since then, they’ve built even more credibility by locking in partnerships with major institutional players like VanEck, Grayscale, and 21Shares. All three either launched or filed for SUI-based ETPs, which is actually pretty impressive considering Sui’s mainnet has only been live for about two years. You don’t usually see that kind of institutional backing so early on.
Add to that the fact that the core team came out of Meta’s Diem project, and it’s clear they’ve got serious connections. When you look at the overall investment network behind Sui, it’s honestly not that different from what Solana had in its early days—and that says a lot.
Comparative Valuation
To get a better sense of Sui’s intrinsic value, three key ratios were put under the microscope: Market Cap to TVL, Market Cap to Daily Fees, and Market Cap to Daily Active Addresses. The comparisons were made against similar Layer-1 projects that not only share similar risk levels but are also at roughly the same stage in their development timelines.
Looking at the Market Cap to TVL ratio, Sui lands somewhere between Solana and Aptos—though it leans a bit more toward Solana. But when you switch over to the Market Cap to Fees ratio, the numbers get a lot more dramatic. Sui’s ratio is way higher than its peers, mainly because it only brings in about $1,400 in fee revenue per day. That’s not necessarily a red flag, though. It’s more a result of how the network was designed: low transaction fees and a token model that leans more toward emissions than burning tokens through fees.
Interestingly, when you break things down by users—using the Market Cap to Daily Active Addresses ratio—Sui actually comes out as the cheapest. That tells us something important: more and more users are joining the network, but the price of the token hasn’t shot up in lockstep. In other words, adoption is happening faster than speculation, which isn’t a bad place to be.
Blended Intrinsic:
P_(TVL)=0.79 * TVL + 1.3 (billions USD).
Plugging Sui’s TVL gives a fair market capitalisation of 3.03 B USD. The Metcalfe user-count model assumes network value ∝ users². Calibrated on Solana as the benchmark:
V_(Sui)/V_(Sol)=(U_(Sui)/U_(Sol))^2
Using 1.5 M vs 1.9 M daily active addresses yields V_(Sui) = 0.62 * 71.2B = 44.2B.
Averaging these two extremes with 70% weight on fundamentals (TVL) and 30% on network-effect growth gives an intrinsic valuation of 16.0 B USD. Dividing by circulating supply of 3.5 B tokens produces a blended intrinsic price of 4.57 USD.
There’s definitely a lot to be optimistic about when it comes to Sui’s future. A few big milestones are just around the corner—like the shard-aware storage upgrade expected in Q3 2025, some interesting pilots involving tokenized real-world assets, and 21Shares pushing for a SUI-based ETP listing on Nasdaq. All of these could give the ecosystem a nice boost.
That said, there are also a few serious risks that could change the current outlook pretty quickly.
The first red flag is around token economics. According to the published vesting schedule, about 900 million new tokens are set to hit the market over the next year. If there aren’t stronger burn mechanisms in place to offset that, the added supply could outpace actual network growth and put downward pressure on the token’s value.
Next up is the tech side. There was a notable outage back in November 2024 that highlighted the fact that Sui’s BFT-based DAG mempool design is still very much experimental. It doesn’t yet have the kind of robust fail-over systems you'd want to see. If something like that were to happen again—especially with more DeFi traffic now on the chain—it could seriously hurt confidence in the tech.
The third concern is security. DeFi on Sui is growing fast, and with that growth comes attention from bad actors. The Cetus exploit, for example, didn’t expose a flaw in Sui’s base layer, but rather in a protocol’s multi-sig setup. Still, it was enough to knock SUI’s price down by 9%, which shows how sensitive the market is to these incidents. To keep things on track, security audits and bounty programs will need to keep scaling with the total value locked on the network. Otherwise, the brand could take lasting damage.
Verdict
Sui’s definitely in a strong spot right now—it earns a solid A with a positive outlook. The tech behind it is bold but not unproven; they’ve taken some big swings, but the infrastructure is holding up well. What’s even more impressive is how quickly the ecosystem is growing, especially compared to other blockchains in the same category. And with more institutional money flowing into SUI-based investment products, the momentum doesn’t seem to be slowing down.
As for the token itself, it’s currently trading at a slight discount compared to what its fundamentals suggest it’s worth. That opens the door for potential upside, as long as the team keeps things on track. Still, there are a couple of things to watch closely. Sui needs to turn all that on-chain activity into consistent fee revenue, and just as importantly, it has to show it can handle pressure without more validator outages. That’ll be key if it wants to keep earning investor confidence going forward.