Recently, something pretty interesting has been happening in the Sui ecosystem. A major lending protocol called Solend launched on Sui as Suilend, and I think that’s quite symbolic.

Solend is a protocol with a proven track record: it has supported more than 170k users and 70+ assets on Solana, while managing over $200 million in TVL. The fact that they chose to come to Sui specifically suggests they have considerable confidence in Sui’s technical environment.

The founder of Solend has made some interesting comments—basically, “When developing on Ethereum and Solana, it felt like the tools were somewhat limited. But Sui and the Move language provide advanced development tools.” In other words, if you’re going to build a protocol like Suilend, the Sui environment is more efficient.

They’re not cutting corners on security either. Industry-leading security firms Zellic and Ottersec are auditing Suilend, and smart contract protections are built into the Move language itself. This is an important point for DeFi participants.

And performance matters too. Sui can process up to 297,000 transactions per second, and its latency is at the industry’s lowest level. Suilend can benefit from this parallel processing in nearly all transactions. That directly translates into the real user experience.

The timing is also good. Sui has only just recently surpassed $500 million in TVL and entered the top 10 DeFi ecosystems. What’s more, in just the past 1 month alone, assets worth $310 million equivalent from Ethereum have flowed in via Wormhole. So when Suilend launched, the ecosystem was already in a growth mode.

Until now, DeFi has mainly been centered around Ethereum and Solana, but with a large protocol like Suilend coming to Sui, it feels like the situation is starting to change. Personally, I expect the expansion of the Sui ecosystem to continue accelerating.