SUI

Sui · Move L1 (object model, Mysticeti DAG consensus)

44 /100

T4Speculative · #26 of 77

Money routeTwo-way ↗low likelihoodReviewed Oct 23, 2026

Score qualifies for T3; held by Adoption 1 (needs 2).

DemandSoundnessDurability

15 of 4520 of 409 of 15

Key facts

SupplyFloat 41% of issued supply

Circulating 4.12B, 41%
Locked or unvested 5.88B, 59%
Max 10.00B

FDV / market cap

2.4x

$9.6B / $3.9B

Market cap

$3.9B

Price $0.956, 7d −4.8%

Market data: CoinGecko, Oct 24, 2026. Scores reviewed Oct 23, 2026.

Assessment

A fast, well-engineered Move chain whose token is structurally an insider-controlled platform bet. Supply is genuinely fixed at 10B with no mint path and the protocol routes every computation fee to stakers, but those fees run ~$2M a year (down 81% after a validator-led gas-price cut) against a ~$4.1B market cap, so staking yield is almost entirely a pre-minted subsidy. Insiders received ~94% of supply, at least ~42% of active stake comes from non-circulating insider-held tokens, and 5.2B SUI has no release date before 2030. Soundness is the weak point: three halts in 23 months on a single client, and the May 2025 Cetus response showed validators can freeze and move user funds within a week. US staking ETFs exist but hold only ~$85M, and ecosystem DeFi deposits and stablecoins fell 60-75% over the year.

How value reaches holders

Each epoch the protocol pools all computation fees with the stake subsidy and credits them to validator staking pools by voting power; validators keep a commission capped at 20% (stake-weighted ~7%) and delegators auto-compound. Over the trailing year that was ~1.63M SUI ($2.1M) of fees against ~119.9M SUI ($139M) of subsidy, so fees were ~1.3% of staking rewards and the network staking yield is ~1.3% a year (epoch 1288). The subsidy draws down a pre-minted 1B SUI fund (773.5M paid, 226.5M left, cut 10% every 90 epochs, next step ~Jan 12, 2027), so it is unlock, not issuance. Storage fees are refundable deposits held in the storage fund; the non-refundable slice that DefiLlama labels burned is retained in that fund (supply is still exactly 10B) and fell from 1% to 0.01% of rebates with protocol v138 on Oct 9, 2026. No burn, no buyback, nothing reaches non-stakers, and at least ~42% of active stake comes from non-circulating insider-held tokens that earn the same rewards

Score anatomy

Demand

15 / 45: the stronger of two routes, plus adoption

Why would anyone hold it: does value reach the token, and is the network or product used today?

Holder routing engine input

The protocol credits 100% of computation fees to staking pools (commission capped at 20%), ~75% of retained fees over the trailing year; storage fees are refundable deposits and nothing is burned

Plumbing at 50%+, or 100% via contract but governance-revocablemedium confidenceHow this is scored

Revenue reality engine input

Trailing-year fees ~$3.0M (DefiLlama; $2.1M of computation fees on-chain), down 81% year on year after the Apr 2026 gas-price cut from 556 to 100 MIST; Oct 2026 run-rate ~$1.7M/yr

$0.5-5M/yr, or undisclosedhigh confidenceHow this is scored

Monetary usage engine input

~$170M of SUI and SUI LSTs posted at third-party lenders (Suilend $87M, Navi $66M, Current $16M), DefiLlama Oct 23, 2026; gas alone would be 1.

Measurable niche monetary use: payment rails, savings products, or collateral at third-party venues below the next levelmedium confidenceHow this is scored

Adoption ×3

Sui TVL fell 74% to $0.50B and stablecoins 58% to $0.46B YoY; fees -81% after a gas cut: usage down near or past 60%

Marginal or fading: negligible use for its size, usage down 60%+ year on year, or a lost forkmedium confidenceHow this is scored

Two routes, the stronger counts

Revenue 1, minus 0.5 for routing 4 = cash flow 0.5. Money use 2. The engine is the stronger route: 2.

Soundness

20 / 40

Can a long-term holder trust the rules: supply, float, distribution and control?

Supply discipline ×3

Fixed 10B minted at genesis with no mint path (the Supply object is destroyed in epoch 0); subsidies come from a pre-minted 1B fund, so 0% new issuance; changes need an upgrade backed by ~83% of stake

Hard cap or net deflationary by protocol rule, under 1%/yr gross growth, and nobody can mint past the cap or change the schedule short of a hard fork node operators adoptmedium confidenceHow this is scored

Float and unlocks ×1

Float 41.2%; ~21M SUI a month enters circulation incl. ~7.7M of pre-minted stake subsidy (0.5% of float), and 5.2B SUI (52%) for the Foundation, Mysten and contributors has no release date before 2030

0.5-1.5% per month, or large foundation or treasury holdings without a schedulehigh confidenceHow this is scored

Distribution ×2

~94% went to insiders (Foundation reserve 50%, contributors 20%, VC rounds 14% on undisclosed warrant terms, Mysten 10%); the public bought 250M SUI at $0.10 or $0.03; the Foundation directs over 30%

Insiders received over 50%, or one organization directs over 30% todayhigh confidenceHow this is scored

Decentralization and security ×2

Halts on Nov 21 2024, Jan 14 2026 (~6h) and May 28-29 2026 (~6h) on a single client; validators froze ~$162M of Cetus attacker funds in May 2025 and moved it by upgrade; a halt needs 1/3 of stake (~$2.3B)

A halt, rollback or exploited consensus bug in the last 24 months, attack cost under $10M, or a foundation-selected validator set or small multisig can halt or upgrade with no meaningful exit windowhigh confidenceHow this is scored

Durability

9 / 15

Is it big, proven and reachable by institutions?

Scale ×1

$4.1B market cap (band 4), $682.6M/day median volume (band 5), no flags.

Major: $1-10B market cap and $50M/day+How this is scored

Track record ×1

Mainnet since May 3, 2023 (3.5 years), with chain-wide stalls fixed by coordinated patch rollouts in 2024-2026 and a validator-enforced freeze and fund move after the $223M Cetus exploit

3-5 years, or a rollback, coordinated chain-wide halt or restart, or a $50M+ exploit in the last 5 yearshigh confidenceHow this is scored

Institutional access ×1

Three US spot staking ETFs since Feb 2026 (Canary SUIS $28.9M, 21Shares TSUI $27.5M on Oct 22; Grayscale GSUI 30.3M SUI on Jun 30), ~$85M in total, under the $500M line

One US spot ETF, or US ETFs under $500Mhigh confidenceHow this is scored

What would move it up

To reach T3 Mixed, one gate is still open:

Adoption 1needs 2(open)
Score 44gate 40(met)
Value engine 2gate 2(met)
Supply 5gate 1(met)

Tier outlook · next trigger Nov 1, 2026

Two-way ↗low likelihood

Computation fees against the $0.5M and $5M/yr lines: ~$1.7M/yr run-rate in Oct 2026 after the Apr 2026 gas-price cut (reference gas price 556 to 100 MIST)
Routing once the Oct 9, 2026 storage-rebate change (99% to 99.99%) fills the trailing window: computation fees near 100% of retained fees could lift routed to 5 by Oct 2027
Any further halt (last May 28-29, 2026) and any independent second client; security stays at 1 until at least May 2028
The 5.2B SUI with no release date before 2030, any schedule change, and Foundation OTC sales like the 44M SUI sold to SUI Group in 2025
US spot ETF assets (~$85M across SUIS, TSUI and GSUI) against the $500M line, plus the pending Bitwise filing

Research report

Oct 23, 2026 · source confidence 78%

Sui is a proof-of-stake layer 1 built by Mysten Labs around the Move language and an object-based data model, live since May 2023. Its supply is fixed at 10 billion SUI, all created at genesis, and the code has no path to mint more; staking subsidies are paid from a 1 billion SUI fund set aside at launch, of which about 226 million remains. The protocol passes every computation fee to stakers, but those fees came to roughly $2 million over the past year, down about 80% after validators lowered the reference gas price in April 2026, so staking rewards of about 1.3% a year are almost entirely subsidy. Ownership is concentrated: about 94% of supply went to the Sui Foundation's reserve, early contributors, private investors and Mysten Labs, about 41% circulates today, and 5.2 billion SUI has no scheduled release before 2030. The network halted three times between November 2024 and May 2026, runs a single client implementation, and in May 2025 validators froze about $162 million taken in the Cetus exploit and later moved it through a stake-weighted protocol upgrade. Three US spot staking ETFs launched in February 2026 and hold about $85 million combined, while DeFi deposits and stablecoin supply on Sui fell by roughly 60 to 75% over the year.

Structure (24 facts)

Chain: Sui L1: delegated proof of stake with Mysticeti (DAG-based BFT) consensus and 24-hour epochs; protocol version 139 at epoch 1289 (2026-10-23); one production client, Mysten Labs' sui-node (Rust), with no independent implementation
What it is: Move smart-contract platform with an object data model; built by Mysten Labs (Series A $36M Dec 2021 led by a16z, Series B $300M Sep 2022 at ~$2B led by FTX Ventures); reserve and ecosystem managed by the Sui Foundation; no DAO
Genesis: genesis 2023-04-12, public mainnet 2023-05-03 with 514.65M SUI (5.15%) circulating; first-day price fell ~37% from $2.16 to $1.37
Max supply: 10,000,000,000
Supply on chain: coin metadata supply 10,000,000,000 SUI exactly (Sui GraphQL, 2026-10-23): nothing minted or burned since genesis
Circulating supply (approx): 4,118,270,447
Market cap (approx): $4,096,000,000
Mint authority: none: sui::sui::new() asserts epoch 0 and the system sender, mints 10B SUI and destroys the Supply object in the same call, so no TreasuryCap exists. More SUI would need a framework change shipped as a protocol upgrade, which activates only when validators with 2f+1 plus half of f of stake (~83%) support it (buffer_stake_for_protocol_upgrade_bps 5000; overridable to 2f+1 if a quorum of validators sets the override). Mysten Labs ships the releases
Emission: no new issuance. Staking subsidies come from a 1,000,000,000 SUI fund pre-minted at genesis: 773.52M paid through epoch 1288 and 226.48M left (on-chain, sums to exactly 1.0B). Current draw 254,186.58 SUI per epoch, cut 10% every 90 epochs (last 2026-10-14 at epoch 1280, next ~2027-01-12 at epoch 1370); ~78.7M SUI over the next 12 months (0.79% of supply, 1.9% of circulating); the fund decays geometrically and ~148M remains after a year
Distribution: genesis allocation per the Foundation's Dec 2022 chart (reproduced by Tokenomist and exchanges): Community Reserve 50% (Foundation: delegation, grants, R&D, the 1B subsidy fund), early contributors 20%, investors 14% (Series A 7.14%, Series B 6.96%), Mysten Labs treasury 10%, Community Access Program and app testers 6%. Insider share ~94% (~84% excluding the subsidy fund)
Public sales: April 2023 exchange sales: 225M SUI at $0.10 (OKX Jumpstart, KuCoin Spotlight; 1/13 at launch then monthly over ~12 months) and 25M SUI at $0.03 for recognized community members (fully unlocked at launch); US persons excluded; plus a Binance Launchpool. Investor token terms (warrants attached to the equity rounds) were never disclosed
Unlocks: official Foundation schedule (sui-circulation API): 4,118.27M circulating in Oct 2026 (41.18%), +20.77M on 2026-11-01 (0.50% of float), +221.9M over the next 12 months (5.4% of float), 4,782.79M (47.83%) by May 2030 where the published schedule ends. Monthly unlocks fell from ~52M to ~23M in Jun 2026 as investor and contributor tranches finished; the May 2024 cliff added 1,043M (+80% of float). Tokenomist: 5,217M SUI (52.17%) is 'allocated, released after 2030' (Community Reserve ~30%, contributors ~14%, Mysten ~8%), cliff-type. The Foundation says the schedule 'is determined by the needs of the network'
Foundation control: the Foundation says the Community Reserve holds more than half of all SUI (Blockworks filing 2026-09-28), deploys its stake across validators and rebalances monthly, custodies with BitGo; locked tokens sit with BitGo, Anchorage and Coinbase Prime (Sui, May 2024). It sold 44M SUI to Nasdaq-listed SUI Group at 85% of the 2025-07-31 TWAP, restricted to 2027-08-30. Mysten Labs holdings are undisclosed
Staking: total stake 7,076.26M SUI (70.8% of supply, 172% of circulating) across 125 active validators (max 150); joining stake 30M SUI, removal below 20M (7-epoch grace) or 15M, so most validators depend on Foundation delegation. Because stake exceeds circulating supply by 2,958M SUI, at least ~42% of active stake must come from non-circulating (Foundation, Mysten, contributor) tokens. Network reward rate ~1.34% a year gross (epoch 1288); stake-weighted commission ~7%, cap 20%
Security: voting power capped at 10% per validator; Mysten-1 and Mysten-2 hold 6.13% of stake (largest entity), Coinbase's two validators 3.54%. 18 validators exceed 1/3 (halt), 47 exceed 2/3, and 8 can block a protocol upgrade. Halting needs ~2.36B SUI of stake (~$2.3B, 57% of circulating), not rentable at that size; the practical risk is insider-delegated stake and a single client rather than an outside buyer
Incidents: Oct 2024: the epoch 560 to 561 change entered safe mode (subsidies skipped for 3 epochs, back-paid at epoch 563 by a special-case patch); 2024-11-21: mainnet halt ~1 hour; 2026-01-14: stall ~6 hours from a consensus-commit divergence, fix canaried on Mysten validators and replayed by all, no rollback; 2026-05-28/29: stall of 5h55m (reported as back-to-back halts) from a gas-charging crash bug in v1.72 (address balances); epochs 1007 and 1142 ran 26.7h and 27.6h
Cetus intervention: 2025-05-22: ~$223M drained from the Cetus DEX; validators refused the attacker's transactions, freezing ~$162M in two addresses (~$56M bridged out as ETH). On-chain stake-weighted vote 2025-05-27 to 05-29 (Foundation stake excluded): 90.9% yes. A protocol upgrade then let a recovery address act as the attacker addresses for two pre-specified transactions, sending funds to a 4-of-6 multisig (Cetus, OtterSec, Sui Foundation, 2 keys each)
Value accrual: computation fees 100% to staking pools by voting power (minus commission; storage-fund share ~0.04% goes to validators equally); storage fees are refundable deposits (storage fund 2.87M SUI); non-refundable share 1% until protocol v138 (2026-10-09), now 0.01%; no burn, no buyback (none disclosed), no fee share to non-stakers
Revenue: on-chain computation fees 1,632,272 SUI (~$2.07M) for 2025-10-23 to 2026-10-22 vs ~119.9M SUI of subsidy; DefiLlama fees $3.0M trailing year vs $15.5M the year before (-81%); DefiLlama 'revenue' ($0.70M) is the non-refundable storage slice, mislabelled as burned; last-30-day computation fees ~$140K (~$1.7M/yr)
Fee policy2026: validators lowered the reference gas price from ~556 to 100 MIST over epochs 1106 to 1112 (2026-04-22 to 04-28); protocol-level gasless stablecoin transfers activated 2026-05-21; storage rebate raised to 99.99% in v138 (2026-10-09). All three shrink fee capture per transaction
Usage: ~10.8M transactions/day (epoch 1288), 2.02B over the trailing year (+14% year on year); DeFi TVL $495M (2026-10-23) vs $1,944M a year earlier and a $2,636M peak (2025-10-09); stablecoins ~$420-463M vs $1,113M a year earlier; ~150M SUI incl. LSTs (sSUI, haSUI, vSUI) supplied to Suilend, NAVI, Current and Scallop; liquid staking ~127M SUI
Liquidity: ~$288M/day spot (CoinGecko), Binance largest venue, also Coinbase, OKX, Kraken, Bybit, KuCoin
Institutional access: US spot staking ETFs: Canary Staked SUI (SUIS, 2026-02-18, $28.86M net assets on 2026-10-22, 100% staked), Grayscale Sui Staking ETF (GSUI, NYSE Arca 2026-02-18, 30.27M SUI / $21.0M on 2026-06-30), 21Shares Sui Staking ETF (TSUI, Nasdaq 2026-02-24, $27.54M on 2026-10-22); leveraged products from Teucrium (TXXS) and Volatility Shares; Bitwise S-1 pending; CME CF Sui-Dollar Reference Rate exists, no CME futures confirmed; SUI Group (SUIG) holds ~108.9M SUI incl. loans, ~82% staked
Provenance gaps: Foundation-held and Mysten-held balances are undisclosed, so the insider stake share is a lower bound (~42%) from stake minus circulating; investor warrant prices are unpublished; whether the 52% post-2030 bucket was in the original 2023 schedule (one 2023 report said full release by Apr 2030) is unverified; GSUI assets after Jun 30, 2026 and Bitwise launch status not confirmed

Market figures at report date (Oct 23, 2026)

Price (approx): $0.994
FDV (approx): $9,947,000,000
All-time high / low: 5.35 (2025-01-04), now -81%; ATL 0.3648 (2023-10-19); -59% over 1y; spot volume ~$288M/day (7% of market cap)

Sources (33)

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