Sui jumps into the asset basket: from ecosystem data to Wall Street recognition

Entering 2026, the Sui public chain is experiencing a magnificent transformation from a technical experiment to an institutional-grade asset. When Grayscale and Bitwise successively submitted spot ETF applications to the US SEC, it was not just a document submission but a clear signal that Sui is officially entering the same asset basket as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others. However, behind this dazzling report card, Sui also faces the challenge of balancing rapid expansion with ecosystem stability.

Ecosystem Index Growth and User Activity Reaching New Highs

Over the past two and a half years, the Sui ecosystem has shown remarkable growth. Since the mainnet launched in May 2023, its TVL has skyrocketed by approximately 32 times. Although it has recently retreated to around $1 billion due to market adjustments, this still reflects the vibrant vitality of the ecosystem.

In terms of public chain fees, Sui grew from an initial $2 million to about $23 million, an increase of 11.5 times, indicating continuous growth in real-world applications. Througput data more intuitively demonstrates technical strength: peak daily throughput reached 66.2 million transactions, and over the past year, daily throughput has remained stable above 4 million, confirming that Sui has achieved true horizontal scaling.

User growth is equally impressive. From tens of thousands of daily active users at launch to a peak of 2.5 million in April 2025, and now stabilizing around 600,000 daily active users, the ratio of old users remains above 20%, demonstrating extremely high user stickiness. This means a large influx of new users continues to enter the Sui ecosystem, rather than a fleeting trend.

This exponential growth is the core reason attracting institutional capital. Sui is no longer just a technically advanced public chain architecture but a mature economy carrying real traffic and asset value.

Institutional Capital Enters, Sui Ascends to Mainstream Asset Basket

On December 5, 2025, Grayscale submitted an S-1 registration statement to the SEC, planning to convert its Sui trust fund into a spot ETF and list on NYSE Arca. More importantly, this application includes a staking mechanism, meaning investors can not only gain exposure to SUI prices but also earn additional endogenous income through validator rewards on the public chain.

Bitwise followed suit, submitting an application to the SEC on December 19, planning to list on Nasdaq, with Coinbase as the custodian. Even more noteworthy, Bitwise has included SUI in its “Bitwise 10 Crypto Index ETF,” and this independent spot ETF application marks that SUI has officially entered the mainstream asset basket alongside BTC, ETH, SOL, and others.

The regulatory attitude shift of the SEC further accelerates this process. The new leadership has created a more relaxed environment for altcoin ETFs, gradually transforming Sui ETF from a market vision into a concrete timeline.

According to the latest data, as of January 22, 2026, the circulating market cap of SUI tokens is $5.82 billion, with a fully diluted market cap of $15.34 billion. Although about 62% of tokens are still locked, the market has recently digested the unlocking tokens smoothly, with no sharp sell-offs. The arrival of the Sui ETF will significantly lower the entry barrier for traditional wealth management institutions and reshape the valuation logic and liquidity depth of SUI tokens.

Privacy and Compliance: A Double-Edged Sword; Underlying Function Upgrades Ignite Business Demand

While all public chains emphasize data transparency, Sui takes a different approach. In 2026, the Sui network will launch native private transaction features. This is not an optional plugin but a core capability integrated into the consensus layer and object model.

The core of this feature is “privacy by default”—when users make payments or transfers, transaction amounts and counterparty information are only disclosed to the sender and receiver by default. This could generate huge business demand, especially for entities needing to protect trade secrets and privacy-conscious individual users.

However, Sui’s privacy solution is not purely anonymous. Its most notable features are compliance-friendly architecture:

• Audit Hooks: Protocols allow opening specific transaction details to regulators under certain compliance processes;
• KYC/AML Integration: Financial institutions can perform anti-money laundering checks while maintaining privacy protections;
• Post-Quantum Cryptography: Incorporates CRYSTALS-Dilithium and FALCON standards to ensure on-chain privacy data remains unbreakable for decades.

These technical components position Sui as a “regulated privacy financial network,” attracting banks and commercial entities with high data sensitivity. However, this positioning is a double-edged sword—it aims to attract traditional finance but may also raise doubts among pure crypto advocates. Technical challenges include maintaining high TPS while integrating zero-knowledge proofs and post-quantum encryption algorithms.

Liquidity Infrastructure Innovation and Ecosystem Internal Circulation Acceleration

Liquidity depth has always been a core indicator of L1 vitality. In recent months, Sui projects have made frequent moves in this area.

As the top TVL project in the Sui ecosystem, NAVI Protocol launched Premium Exchange (PRE DEX) on December 29, 2025, marking NAVI’s evolution from a single lending protocol to a comprehensive DeFi infrastructure. PRE DEX focuses on establishing a premium discovery mechanism, providing a market-driven pricing platform for protocol tokens with price dislocation. This will greatly enhance asset management efficiency for institutional investors and multi-wallet users.

Meanwhile, two funding events indicate that liquidity management within the Sui ecosystem is entering an AI-driven era.

In December 2025, Magma Finance completed a $6 million strategic financing led by HashKey Capital, aiming to address liquidity fragmentation in the ecosystem. Its innovation lies in adopting an Adaptive Liquidity Market Maker (ALMM) model, where AI analyzes market volatility in real-time and automatically adjusts asset price distributions during sharp fluctuations, rebalancing liquidity provider capital into active trading zones, offering traders lower slippage and LPs higher real yields.

Ferra Protocol completed a $2 million pre-seed funding in October 2025 (led by Comma3 Ventures), launching the first DLMM (Dynamic Liquidity Market Maker) DEX on the Sui mainnet. Its modular design integrates CLMM, DAMM models, and dynamic joint curves, further empowering fair token launches and liquidity guidance. Ferra aims to become a dynamic liquidity layer on Sui, making capital a “living water” flowing with market sentiment.

Underlying Currents in the Ecosystem: Can Trust Crisis Become an Opportunity for Transformation?

However, Sui’s rapid expansion is not without risks. Its largest lending protocol, SuiLend, recently cast a shadow over the entire ecosystem due to a buyback scam incident.

As a former top lending protocol on Sui, SuiLend’s TVL once approached $750 million, accounting for 25% of the entire chain’s share. But behind the impressive data, the performance of its token SEND has been disappointing. Despite generating $7.65 million in annualized revenue in 2025 and claiming that 100% of protocol fees are used for buybacks, the SEND token price has fallen over 90% in the past year.

Although it carried out buybacks totaling $3.47 million since February 2025 (about 9% of circulating supply), the effect was limited for a small-cap asset with a market cap of only $13 million. More seriously, community suspicion arose that buybacks involved insider trading, turning into a way for the team to offload tokens. During the IKA liquidation event, SuiLend did not activate an insurance fund but forcibly deducted 6% of user principal, further damaging trust. Additionally, the protocol’s operation mainly relies on monthly subsidies of several million dollars from the Sui Foundation.

The community generally believes that buyback strategies are just a superficial gesture—reducing token supply on the surface but failing to offset high issuance and early VC dumping pressure. This case serves as a wake-up call: without genuine user growth and sustainable business models, buybacks may only be a house of cards hiding emptiness.

Beyond TVL and revenue, the market needs more focus on protocol governance and incentive structures. For Sui, the road to Wall Street is dazzling, but ensuring the solidity of its foundation may be a longer and more critical journey.

Data explosion has proven its technical potential, but trust is the fundamental for ecosystem survival. Sui needs to complete its transformation from a technical experiment to a mature economy—while maintaining innovation sharpness and reasonable valuation, it must also fill trust as a core piece of ecosystem value growth. Only then can Sui, entering the asset basket, truly become a long-term choice for institutional allocation.