Sui (SUI): a Move-language mainnet that runs objects in parallel
The layer 1 built by former Meta Diem engineers, and its coin
Sui is a layer-1 mainnet, a base blockchain that settles its own transactions, built by Mysten Labs, a company founded by veterans of Meta’s Diem blockchain project. SUI is its own coin, used to pay fees and to secure the network.
1. Who built it
Mysten Labs was founded in 2021 by Evan Cheng, Adeniyi Abiodun, Sam Blackshear, George Danezis and Kostas Chalkias. They had worked at Meta on Diem and the Novi wallet, and they designed Sui around Move, the smart-contract language created for Diem. The mainnet opened on May 3, 2023.
SUI has a fixed maximum supply of 10 billion. The Sui Foundation supports the ecosystem, and the shares of early investors and contributors are released gradually over several years.
2. How it works: objects and parallel execution
Where Ethereum updates a table of account balances, Sui treats every coin, NFT or game item as an ‘object’ with an owner and a version. Transactions that touch different objects can run at the same time, and a simple transfer of an object owned by one person can be finalized on a fast path without full consensus. Objects shared by many users are ordered by a consensus protocol called Mysticeti.
The network runs on delegated proof of stake: holders stake SUI with validators, who finalize blocks. SUI pays for gas, staking and on-chain votes, and storage fees go into a ‘storage fund’ that refunds part of the cost when data is deleted. Sui also offers zkLogin, which lets people use a web login such as a Google account for a wallet while zero-knowledge proofs keep the login details private.
3. Ecosystem and milestones
Sui hosts DeepBook, an order-book exchange built into the chain, the Cetus exchange and several lending apps, and Walrus, a decentralized storage network from Mysten Labs, launched its mainnet in March 2025. On the Crypto Nation map, SUI is the city-hall tower at the centre of the Sui city, surrounded by tokens issued on Sui.
On February 18, 2026, the first US spot SUI ETFs with staking began trading. Canary’s SUIS listed on Nasdaq and Grayscale’s GSUI on NYSE Arca, after 21Shares had earlier launched a 2x leveraged SUI ETF.
4. Things to know
When the Cetus exchange was exploited on May 22, 2025 and about $223 million was drained, validators froze roughly $162 million held in the attacker’s addresses. A governance vote approved on May 29 moved the funds to a multisig trust controlled by Cetus, OtterSec and the Sui Foundation. Many welcomed the recovery, but it also showed that validators can block specific addresses, which started a debate about decentralization.
The network has also stopped several times: for about two hours on November 21, 2024, for about six hours on January 14, 2026 because of a consensus bug, and twice in two days in late May 2026 after a bug linked to the 1.72 upgrade. The large influence of Mysten Labs and the foundation, and the steady release of locked tokens, are also worth knowing.
Written from information public up to October 2026. It does not recommend or rate any coin and is not investment advice. If something is wrong, please tell us through the contact page.