Sui’s total value locked (TVL) has reached all-time high of $903 million, driven by DeFi growth

Sui’s total value locked (TVL) has reached all-time high of $903 million on September 23, 2024 according to DefiLlama.

The growth in TVL has been driven by DeFi platforms, mostly comes from Navi Protocol and Suilend. Navi Protocol is a lending platform on Sui. It currently has $344 million TVL. While, Suilend is also a lending platform. It has TVL of $157 million.

What is SUI

Sui is a decentralized layer-1 blockchain and a smart contract platform developed by Mysten Labs, a company founded by former executives and engineers from Meta’s (formerly Facebook) Diem blockchain project and Move programming language team.

Launched in 2023, Sui aims to provide a highly scalable, low-latency blockchain infrastructure with a focus on supporting the next generation of decentralized applications (dApps) and Web3 projects, including gaming, finance, and other high-performance use cases.

Key Features of Sui:

Move Programming Language: Sui is built using the Move programming language, originally developed for the Diem blockchain. Move is designed to be more secure and flexible than traditional smart contract languages like Solidity, reducing the likelihood of vulnerabilities. Move was influenced by Rust programming language.

Parallel Transaction Processing: Unlike most blockchains that process transactions sequentially, Sui uses a parallel processing model. This allows for high throughput (processing many transactions simultaneously), which is essential for large-scale dApps, particularly in gaming and financial services.

Scalability: Sui can achieve high scalability by processing simple, independent transactions (like payments) in parallel without the need for consensus among all nodes. For complex transactions, Sui employs a consensus mechanism based on Narwhal and Tusk, a DAG-based (Directed Acyclic Graph) protocol that helps with efficient consensus.

Sui is a high-performance blockchain designed to provide instant settlement (480 milliseconds time to finality) and high throughput (120,000 transactions per second).

Storage Model: Sui uses a unique object-centric data model, where smart contracts operate on programmable objects. This allows the chain to easily track and manage the ownership and transfer of assets, offering enhanced security and programmability for complex applications like NFTs, assets in games, or DeFi.

Gas Fees and Cost Efficiency: Sui employs a fee structure that aims to remain low and predictable even as transaction volumes increase. By leveraging its unique architecture and parallel execution, Sui keeps gas fees low without sacrificing performance.

Developer-Friendly: Sui aims to make it easier for developers to build scalable dApps with improved tools, better error handling, and advanced testing capabilities provided by the Move language and development ecosystem.

SUI token utility

1. Gas Fees:

• Transaction Fees: SUI tokens are used to pay gas fees for executing transactions and running smart contracts on the Sui network. Every transaction on the blockchain, including transfers and interactions with decentralized applications (dApps), requires users to pay a fee in SUI. These gas fees incentivize validators to process and verify transactions.
• Fee Predictability: Sui aims to provide more predictable and stable gas fees by leveraging its parallel execution architecture, which avoids congestion in the network.

2. Staking and Validator Rewards:

• Staking for Validators: The Sui blockchain operates using a delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism, where validators are responsible for securing the network by processing transactions and validating blocks. Users can stake their SUI tokens to become validators or delegate them to validators to help secure the network.
• Rewards: Validators earn rewards in SUI tokens for participating in the consensus process. These rewards are distributed to validators and delegators as an incentive for contributing to the security and operation of the network.

The maximum supply of SUI tokens is 10 billion. This supply is fixed and will not increase beyond this cap.

Sui has been considered part of the “next-generation” of blockchains alongside competitors like Aptos, which also emerged from the Meta/Diem project. The Sui blockchain is particularly well-suited for Web3 gaming and DeFi, where low-latency and high throughput are essential for user experience.