Sui News
SUI Token Sees Positive Momentum Amidst Market Volatility and Ecosystem Expansion
Published
1 year agoon
By
Gaurav RoyTable Of Contents
The crypto market went green on Monday and is continuing that trend on Tuesday as the total crypto market capitalization increased by 1% to $1.111 trillion.
The gains came as the Financial Services and Markets Bill (FSMB) that recognizes crypto as a regulated activity and stablecoins as a means of payment was approved by the UK Parliament's upper house, the House of Lords. With this, the bill has entered the final stages before it will be put into law.
The largest cryptocurrency by market cap, Bitcoin, is up 1.4% to trade at $26,756, at the time of writing. However, despite recovering from a three-month low last week, buoyed by the market's optimism over BlackRock's potential success with its Bitcoin spot ETF application, Bitcoin remains vulnerable.
The second-largest crypto, Ether, meanwhile, is only up by 0.2% and is trading at $1,728. According to JP Morgan, the recent release of Hinman documents in the SEC-Ripple case is a major boost to Ethereum, noting, the documents are likely to intensify the move among major cryptocurrencies to become more decentralized and look more like ETH.
Meanwhile, Ethereum developers are proposing raising the validator limit from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH. This came amidst the waiting times being over one month due to low validator limits.
While crypto prices are green this week, Bank of America (BAC) said in a Friday research report that digital assets have underperformed the Nasdaq stock index by 24% since May after gaining 52% this year.
BoA said an excessive focus on regulatory headwinds, illicit activity, and spot Bitcoin ETF approval in the US is “overshadowing the rapid development and integration of distributed ledger and blockchain technology infrastructure.” The bank expects blockchain infrastructure and tokenization to “transform financial and non-financing infrastructure and markets over the next five to 10 years.”
SUI Token Gains Momentum
As the crypto market went green, SUI also experienced a volatile week.
Among the top 100 cryptocurrencies with a market cap of $407.4 million, SUI was trading at $0.782 before it lost some of these gains to now trade at $0.772. With these latest gains, the trading volume of SUI saw a 38% increase from a day ago to register over $136.7 million in the last 24 hours.
The price of SUI is also in the green by 7.9% in the past week but its June performance is negative by 19.4% and also down by 32.8% in the past month.
SUI’s price actually hit its all-time high (ATH) on the day of its mainnet launch on May 3, 2023, at $2.16 and ever since then it has been on a downtrend, losing 64.38% of its value in a matter of two months. The ATH eclipsed the pre-sale price of 3 cents and the public sale price of 10 cents.
The token was made available to community members in an early sale on three centralized crypto exchanges (CEXs); OKX, KuCoin, and ByBit. Binance also added support for SUI on its Launchpad.
Earlier this month, on June 10, the crypto asset went on to hit its all-time low at $0.5579. As the crypto market experienced volatility this month, SUI price managed to jump 41.6% off its lows.
In the SUI derivatives market, the volume has surged by 56.26% to $1.65 billion while open interest (OI) has risen by 13.50% to $142.63 million, as per data provided by Coinglass. OI is the total number of open derivative contracts that have not been settled. Increasing OI represents new money coming into the market while decreasing OI indicates money flowing out of the market.
Interestingly, SUI has a total supply of 10 billion tokens while only a mere 528.27 million are currently circulating in the market. Almost 94% of the SUI supply is still locked, according to Token Unlocks. The constant unlocks of SUI supply put pressure on the price of the crypto asset.
On June 3rd, SUI had an unlock of 61 million tokens, which increased its circulating supply by 13%. For the next many coming months, these unlocks will continue when the circulating supply doubles in November. These tokens are being airdropped to retail users as part of its community access program. The Sui Foundation will also receive some of the tokens.
For the last ten days, SUI’s price has been seeing an uptrend after a fresh tokenomics improvement proposal.
A Sui Improvement Proposal (SIP) was introduced on June 10 by the project’s core contributors, which aims to enable liquid staking for SUI tokens and allow developers to build features for the same. By enabling liquid staking on Sui, investors will be able to earn rewards (currently SUI validators earn 5.43% annually) while actively trading with their liquid-staked tokens.
SUI is the native token of the Sui Network which is used to pay gas fees, facilitate on-chain transactions, staking to secure the network and give holders the right to participate in future governance.
When it comes to SUI tokenomics, half of its supply is allotted to the Sui Foundation to be used for grant programs, research and development, delegation programs, and validator subsidies. The Sui Foundation is an independent organization supporting the Sui community and its projects with a mission to onboard the next billion users to web3 by advancing the global adoption of the Sui blockchain.
Of the remaining 50%, 20% was distributed to early contributors, 14% of the supply was sold to raise funding, 10% was allocated to Mysten Labs Treasury, and the last 6% was used for a Community Access Program.
Click here to learn all about buying SUI in just four steps.
Sui Network Makes Progress
Sui is a nascent layer 1 blockchain that launched its mainnet on May 3 with a valuation of $2 billion. It was founded by ex-Meta Platform (previously Facebook) employees with a promise for fast transaction speeds.
Mysten Labs is the blockchain’s core contributor which raised a $300 million investment in a Series B funding round in September 2022 for the development of the blockchain. The company is backed by popular VCs including a16z, Binance Labs, Circle, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and NCSoft.
With the project’s successful pre-launch VC funding, the market compared it to Aptos, another relatively new blockchain with a large VC backing. Both blockchains were also designed by teams from Diem (formerly Libra), Meta’s failed stablecoin project that was shelved by the tech giant in 2022. Another similarity between both projects is Move, a Rust-based programming language that was developed at Meta and provides the foundation to both networks.
Sui is a layer 1 blockchain focused on instant transaction finality, transaction speed, and reduced latency in smart contract deployment. This is achieved in part through the Move programming language. Sui Move supports smart contracts called Move packages and digital assets. It uses bytecode verification to ensure that objects (aka tokens) cannot be created, copied, or accidentally destroyed.
For consensus, Sui uses a Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) system, where a fixed set of validators process transactions within each epoch. SUI holders select a set of validators based on their share of the total stake, determined by the amount of SUI tokens staked by holders with them.
Moreover, Sui uses parallel transaction execution to increase its scalability, which allows it to process up to 120,000 transactions per second (TPS).
On top of this, Sui differentiates transactions between simple and complex. Simple transactions may bypass the consensus protocol and are processed almost instantly. For complex transactions, Sui utilizes Narwhal, a DAG-based mempool that ensures that pending transactions are quickly identified, and Bullshark, which is for specific ordering of transactions.
It is notable that the Sui network only has 100 validators but more than 2,100 nodes. While these operate across 43 countries, they are primarily concentrated in Germany and the U.S. However, the network is still in its infancy, and over time the distribution of validators may become more distributed.
As for its ecosystem, the blockchain has more than 200 projects in its directory and many more building on its network. Sui has a growing ecosystem despite the total value locked (TVL) across the network falling to $11.9 million, from the $36 million peak last month, as per DeFi Llama. Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs) Cetus and Turbos account for the majority of this TVL at $5.85 million and $5.67 Million respectively.
However, it is nowhere near other popular layer 1 blockchains viz. Ethereum ($24.68 billion), Tron ($5.36 billion), BSC ($3.35 billion), and Arbitrum ($2.08 billion).
Just last week, Sui Foundation announced that it has granted $986K in awards to twelve projects building on Sui. These projects were BlockVision, HolaSui, KSui, Lotus Galaxy, The Move Dev, Orange Comet, Pyth Network, Sentio, Somis, Suia, and Huracan.
Meanwhile, on Monday, Sui Foundation awarded $500,000 to CertiK for discovering and flagging a potential attack vector on the Sui network ahead of its mainnet launch. An infinite loop bug was found by the blockchain security firm in the Sui code, which could be triggered by a malicious smart contract.
The vulnerability dubbed “HamsterWheel” was different from traditional attacks in the way that instead of crashing nodes, it trapped them in “a state of ceaseless operation without processing new transactions” that can effectively “cripple” the whole networks and make them inoperable. This attack, according to CertiK, demonstrates the evolving sophistication of threats to blockchain networks.
CertiK also confirmed that a team of developers has already rolled out the fixes for the bugs and promised to publish a full technical report later.
“We are extremely pleased that the program resulted in finding and fixing this bug well before Sui went live,” said Darius Goore, head of communications at Sui Foundation. “Due to the bug bounty program, but also a robust third-party audits program, and thorough internal testing, the first six weeks of Sui mainnet have been remarkably smooth from an operational and security perspective,” he added.
Gaurav started trading cryptocurrencies in 2017 and has fallen in love with the crypto space ever since. His interest in everything crypto turned him into a writer specializing in cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Soon he found himself working with crypto companies and media outlets. He is also a big-time Batman fan.