Original author: Alfred, LD Capital
1. Fundamental overview
In June 2019, Facebook (now Meta) announced plans to build a permissioned blockchain and a digital wallet to support a global payment network, and established the Libra Association (later renamed Diem) to be responsible for building the blockchain , subsidiary Calibra (later renamed Novi Finance) is responsible for developing digital wallets. But neither project ever fully came to fruition, with Diem and Novi discontinued in 2022. Later, two independent blockchains were born based on the research of Diem and Novi: Aptos and Sui. Aptos inherited the legacy of Diem and iterated on the technology developed by the project, while Mysten Labs created a new Sui.
Sui is a new public chain, the first Layer 1 blockchain and smart contract platform designed from the bottom up, designed to make digital asset ownership fast, private, secure, and accessible to everyone. Suis name is inspired by the element of water in Japanese philosophy. The power of water comes from its fluidity - its ability to easily adapt and change any environment.
1. Features and advantages of Sui
(1) Strong scalability, fast speed, and the possibility of large-scale Web3 implementation:
Sui Move programming language: Under the design of todays mainstream Solidity language, an asset is a numerical value, and asset transfer is completed by adding or subtracting from the wallet, rather than the actual movement of the asset. Move treats assets as a resource and stores it in a module. This module is similar to a smart contract, in which resources cannot be copied or deleted, but can only be moved and stored. The resources are transparent in the contract, but cannot be called outside the contract. is opaque. Simply put, Move changes ownership by detaching assets and moving them, which is where the name Move comes from.
Sui has made new improvements on the basis of Move to form the Sui Move language. The main differences are in object-centered global storage, addresses representing object IDs, and objects having globally unique IDs, etc., which form the underlying foundation for other technical innovations in Sui.
(2) Object-centered data model:
On Sui, assets are type objects, and all objects have the characteristics of stable, globally unique IDs. Each object can be transferred to other objects without interacting with the smart contract, and can even be linked to your assets. Interact with different smart contracts running. In Sui, all transactions take objects as input and generate new or modified objects as output. By observing all active objects, the global state can be determined.
Objects are mutable assets, objects can own other objects, and developers can change, combine, and create hierarchies, making Sui highly composable. Asset composability is crucial to scalability. For example, in the game you have assets such as stone, wood, cement, etc., and the contract allows these assets to be combined into houses. Most blockchain data models poorly model asset ownership. They are restrictive, making it difficult for stateful (e.g. games, social) applications to use them, and Suis object-centric data model solves these usability and programmability issues.
(3) Dual consensus mechanism:
Suis system design breakthrough eliminates a key bottleneck in many blockchains: the need for global consensus on a total ordered list of transactions. Given that many transactions do not compete for the same resources as other transactions, this calculation is wasteful. Sui achieves a breakthrough in scalability by enabling parallel protocols on causally independent transactions and dividing transactions into two types: complex transactions and simple transactions.
Complex transactions: Complex transactions involving shared objects are ordered and consensused through Suis Narwhal and Bullshark protocols. The Narwhal memory pool maintains the availability of submitted transaction data and provides a structured path in the form of a directed acyclic graph to traverse (select in order) this data. Bullshark consensus chooses a specific order for this structured data by agreeing on a specific directed acyclic graph traversal (based on the ordering of the DAG structure).
Complex transactions go through five steps before reaching final confirmation:
1. Transactions are broadcast to nodes from respective users/clients.
2. After receiving the message, the validator node votes on the validity of the message based on their equity scale.
3. After the user/client collects the Byzantine-resistant majority vote, it generates a record certificate and broadcasts the certificate back to the verifier.
4. Transaction certificates are sorted through Narwhal and Bullshark so that a majority of Byzantine-resistant verifiers can agree on the order of transaction data.
5. The validator makes a final response and the user collects an impact certificate, which is proof of the state change and ensures the finality of the transaction.
Simple transactions: Simple transactions involving only non-shared objects do not need to be sorted by Narwhal and Bullshark. In other words, simple transactions can skip step 4 in the above transaction processing process. Simple transactions are only subject to the lightweight algorithm of Byzantine Consensus Broadcast, which is less intensive and more scalable than Byzantine Consensus. Broadcasting ensures that all nodes receive the same message from the user/client; it does not require nodes to agree on the network state. Therefore, if multiple transactions are not related to each other (do not involve the same object), then these transactions can be processed in parallel in any order, and all simple transactions bypass the complex consensus.
2. Team background
Suis team has rich industry experience and strong technical strength. Evan Cheng is the co-founder and CEO of Sui/Mysten Labs and was the RD chief of Novi Financial. He has 10 years of development experience at Apple, and then worked at Facebook and Novi Financial for 2-3 years respectively. He founded Mysten Labs in September 2021.
Source: Linkedin
Sam Blackshear is the co-founder and CTO of Sui/Mysten Labs and was the chief engineer of Novi Financial. He has 6 years of working experience in Meta’s Libra/Diem and was deeply involved in the creation of the MOVE language.
Source: Linkedin
3. Financing situation
Sui has an excellent investment background. In 2021-12-06, it raised US$36 million in Series A financing from star investment institutions including A16Z, Coinbase Ventures, etc. 2022-09-08, raised US$300 million in Series B financing, with investment institutions including Jump Crypto, Binance Labs, Circle Ventures, etc.
Source: Rootdata
2. Recent ecological development
Suis is one of the fastest-growing public chains in TVL. TVL has almost doubled in the past month. According to data on DefiLlama, it exceeded US$175 million on December 7, exceeded US$200 million on December 26, and exceeded US$200 million on January 14. It exceeded US$300 million per day and is currently close to US$350 million.
Source: DefiLlama
The Sui ecology has grown from being mediocre at the beginning to now, with popular tracks and projects constantly emerging, and has good potential for ecological development:
(1) Karrier one (Depin): On January 11, 2024, Sui Foundation established a strategic partnership and invested in Karrier One. Karrier One is a Depin project aiming to build a decentralized mobile network and telecommunications services, with the goal of creating a community-owned carrier-grade 5G network that provides greater accessibility, speed, cost-effectiveness and security . NFT Mint is currently underway.
(2) E 4 C (GameFi): On January 4, 2024, E 4 C announced its launch on Sui to provide mobile native MOBA games, sustainable in-game asset ownership, and a seamless asset trading experience. The founder of E 4 C is Johnson Yeh, known as the godfather of Asian e-sports. Since 2015, he has served as the head of e-sports business for Riot Games China, building LOL into the largest sports project in China. He later became the General Manager of Riot Games (China, Japan and Southeast Asia). He also incubated League of Legends Mobile Game, League of Legends Team Battle Tactics Mobile Game, LPL E-Sports Manager, etc. He later brought MOBA games to Web3 and E 4 C: Final Salvation was born.
(3) MRC 20-MOVE (Smart Inscription): When the inscription market was booming, MRC 20-MOVE was released on January 1, 2024. The concept of smart inscriptions that are easy to expand, combine, and can be burned and refunded suddenly became popular in three days. Within this time, all 10 billion $MOVE were sold, with more than 1 million SUI locked and nearly 50,000 minting addresses.
(4) Solend Protocol-Suilend Protocol (Lending): A few weeks ago Sui announced that Solend Protocol, the largest lending protocol on Solana, will be launched on Sui (supporting both Solana and Sui), called Suilend Protocol. The founder of Solend Protocol believes that Sui’s technical foundation is very developer-friendly, and the developer experience around Move is 10 times better than Solan.
3. Token situation
1. Assignment and unlocking
The total supply of Sui is 10 billion, 48% is ecosystem reserve, 20% private investors, 20% team, 9% foundation, and Binance Launchpool accounts for 3%. The current circulation is mainly in the ecosystem, foundation and Launchpool, with a circulation rate of 11%.
Source: Cryptorank
The current market capitalization is US$1.515 billion, FDV is US$13.759 billion, and the 24-hour trading volume is US$745 million. The main trading venues are Binance (25.72%), Upbit (20.68%), and OKX (12.41%). In Seis Accelerated Development: Parallel EVM New Narrative Superposition and Active Operation released by LD Capital Research on January 12, data between new public chains were compared. Suis market value is lower than Aptos and Sei, and the TVL of Defi applications Above, Sui is higher than Aptos and much higher than Sei.
SUI has recently unlocked 66 million tokens (92.17 million U.S. dollars) every month. The first large-scale investor unlock will be on May 3, 2024. There will be a large number of more than 800 million tokens unlocked. Regular monthly unlocking will begin in June 1 Around 100 million tokens.
Source: Cryptorank
There are five main categories of SUI token use cases:
(1) Native assets of Sui platform
(2) Gas fee: Gas fee is charged for all network operations to reward participants of the proof-of-stake mechanism and prevent spam and denial of service attacks
(3) Storage Fund: The Sui Storage Fund is used to transfer equity rewards across time and compensate future validators for the storage cost of previously stored on-chain data.
(4) Proof of Stake: The delegated proof of stake mechanism is used to select, incentivize and reward the honest behavior of Sui verifiers and SUI owners related to their rights and interests.
(5) Voting on the voting chain is used for governance and protocol upgrades.
2. Futures and spot data
The price of SUI has been in decline since its listing on May 1, 2023 (closing price 1.2431) until October. The token price began to rise slowly in November, and began to accelerate on January 8, 2024, rising from 0.8 It rose to 1.2506, returning to the listing price in 23 years. From the recent 15 min line, it is observed that the price is consolidating in the 1.35 – 1.45 range, with the 30-day EMA as support, and various technical indicators are good, or may rise further after consolidation.
Source: Binance
In the one-hour spot order situation, there are relatively many buy orders around 1.35, which has certain short-term support. The intensive selling orders above are 1.42 and around 1.5.
Source: MobChart
In terms of futures data, the 30-minute contract positions have declined to a certain extent since the high point. The ratio of long and short positions is 1.06, and the ratio of long and short positions of large households is 1.33. The number of active transactions has increased, but the difference in buying and selling amounts has not changed much. Overall In line with the disks accumulated strength status.
Source: Coinglass
4. Summary
1. The MOVE language used by Sui has the advantages of high scalability, good programmability, fast speed and low cost. The ecosystem is booming and hot projects are emerging. The team has solid technical capabilities, good investment background, and a good fundamental foundation.
2. The tokens have not been unlocked in large amounts in the past three months. The first investor unlocked the tokens in May, and the new public chain data has advantages in comparison.
3. The token price has just returned to the 23-year listing price level, and the spot trading volume is active, and it is currently in a trend of consolidation or further upward breakthrough.
