📝 Editor’s Note: Network at a Glance

Welcome to the next installment of our Ecosystem Mega Issue Series – where we showcase the overall health & growth of emerging ecosystems with data-driven, onchain coverage.

Today we’re excited to be covering Sui – a high performance Layer 1 that uses the Move programming language –  which has been funded to the tune of a whopping $396M (the 3rd highest funded infrastructure project in our industry’s history behind ZK Sync [$458M] and Avalanche [$716M]).

The network has been on a tear in 2024 – hitting all-time high weekly active addresses of 1.6M in May 2024 and averaging >400k since the beginning of Q2 2024. TVL has also jumped 240% YTD, from $226M to $789M, with net positive bridging inflows of $104.2M (Inflows: $631.3M | Outflows: 527.7M) according to DeFiLlama.

In this issue, we’ll take you through Sui’s high level users trends, coverage on their maturing DeFi & consumer sectors, and give a data-driven look at emerging protocols being built on the network.

With that, let’s dive into the coverage.

– ON Editorial Team

• In the three months from May 20 through Aug. 20, Sui had an average of 472.6k daily active addresses, a 10x increase over the previous period. This peaked at over 2.2M in June, driven by popular apps in the ecosystem, surpassing Solana's peak of 2.09M during the same timeframe

• Sui is a Layer 1 blockchain designed for high performance in terms of transactions (TPS) — early tests demonstrated a max of 297,000 TPS . This is in part thanks to Sui's Programmable Transaction Blocks, which allow up to 1,024 instructions per transaction. Last December, interest in inscriptions pushed TPS close to 6,000. Notably, even during peak activity, gas fees remain steady.

• Sui's new Mysticeti consensus engine delivers low latency, with early results showing P50 latency of 629 ms in Western Europe. This ultra-low latency ensures near-instant transaction completion, making Sui a strong option for high-performance applications.

• Sui's DeFi ecosystem has steadily grown since the network launched on mainnet and continues to demonstrate ecosystem maturity and stability. YTD daily trading volume, particularly from March onwards, indicates growing adoption, usage, and consistent engagement (averaging $40M+ over the past month) without dramatic spikes or drops. The steady rise in volume reflects increasing market confidence in Sui’s DeFi infrastructure, attracting more liquidity, projects, and users to the platform.

• Total Value Locked (TVL) on Sui surged more than 1500% over the last five months of 2023. It continued to climb in early 2024, hitting its peak of over $880.7M USD in late May. As of Aug. 26, 2024, TVL on Sui is at $789M USD, a 240% increase YTD.

• The total value bridged to Sui is also growing, with 92% coming from Ethereum, highlighting the blockchain's role as a primary liquidity source. Solana contributes 5.9%, while smaller blockchains like Aptos and Arbitrum contributing less than 1%. This growth reflects increasing network activity and a diverse influx of assets and users, as net inflows crossed $104M YTD.

• NAVI Protocol, as the one-stop shop liquidity protocol on Sui has remained in the #1 position in the lending/borrowing DeFi category since its launch. Focused on providing high capital efficiency to its users, NAVI offers a lending/borrowing support for major native assets, liquid staking tokens, and stables. Following the release of an upgrade called NAVI Pro, the protocol recently surpassed its all-time high TVL by reaching $250M+, accounting for >50% of all lending TVL on Sui.

• Furthermore, NAVI has attracted a highly active user base, second only to the largest DEX on Sui. The protocol has managed to maintain an average of 2,000 daily active users over the last 30 days, showing continuous interest and trust in the protocol

• Worth noting is that in August, NAVI saw a significant surge in asset supplies, following refreshed pool incentives. In less than a week, the protocol saw a 730%+ increase in its USDC TVL, ultimately surpassing the $100M mark at its highest point, pushing the overall TVL to a new all-time high.

• Bluefin is a decentralized orderbook DEX built for both professional and retail traders. Since it's launch on the Sui Network, Bluefin has processed over $30B in trading volume from 33,000+ users.

• Funding rates are used to balance the price difference between the perpetual contract and the spot price of the underlying asset. Annualized funding rates on Bluefin remain low, with a 4.41% annualized rate on BTC vs. 4.33% on Binance and -11.71% on ETH vs. 3.21% on Binance.

• The liquidation process on Bluefin is designed to protect the platform and its users from the risk of systemic bankruptcy. The chart below shows the distribution of liquidations by markets traded on Bluefin. 

• Aftermath Finance is an "all-in-one DeFi platform for trading, investing and earning yield," according to its docs. With over $300M in swap volume to date, Aftermath’s smart-order router has seen a number of recent improvements, including the introduction of the V2 routing algorithm enabled greater granularity and increased speed on the platform.

• The afSUI/SUI pool on Aftermath has remained one of the most liquid pools on all of Sui with over $20M TVL. A feature called Dynamic Gas allows afSUI to be used as a gas token on Aftermath, and other protocols have also integrated afSUI in strategies including leverage staking and as collateral for lending.

• DeepBook protocol is a central limit order book (CLOB) on Sui that aims to bring high frequency trading to the chain. Since the launch of V2, DeepBook has seen average daily user activity more than doubled since May - June, up from 120 daily users to over 250 in July - August.

• Over the past 5 months, fees earned have increased from 200 to 400 $SUI per day, signaling a strong growth in revenue.

• Core Sui primitives, and the applications that leverage them, continue to show value of reducing the friction for users and ultimately improving the consumer experience. zkLogin offers users the ability to create a Sui account with a social login, such as Google or Twitch, but without that company knowing anything about the users’ onchain activity. zkLogin has showed continued popularity as the PTBs (programmable transaction blocks) and DAWs (decentralized apps with wallets) have maintained steady usage with some spikes up to 225k.

• Sponsored transactions, a feature that allows developers to cover users' transaction fees, help apps like Wave Wallet and FanTV attract users by removing the need to buy tokens upfront. While the percentage of sponsored transactions varies, Sui saw days in the last quarter where 32.3% of transactions required no gas fee, enabling easy onchain activity for thousands.

• SuiNS is a decentralized protocol on Sui that gives users human-readable names instead of the default alphanumeric ones. Over 180k wallets, calculated by querying SuiNS objects and summing the unique wallets holding them, currently hold a name, enhancing efficiency and confidence in asset transfers.

• FanTV is a social streaming platform powered by AI and Web3 technology. It is currently the #1 social dApp on the Sui blockchain, boasting over 3.5M registered user wallets and more than 9M transactions.

• The platform's rapid growth includes a community of over 20,000 creators and 1M monthly active users that consume 900,000 hours of content monthly. FanTV is seeing a healthy growth in daily active wallets with a 27%+ growth month on month (from 60K in June to 76K in July), reflecting a sustained upward trajectory.

• Wave Wallet saw explosive growth at the beginning of May and peaked at the end of May with over 1.3M active wallets. While active wallets have declined since then, Wave Wallet is consistently in the top 10 of active addresses across all applications that Artemis tracks.

• Wave plays a crucial role in onboarding new users to the Sui ecosystem — it accounts for 80% of the daily active addresses. This dominance has been consistent since Wave's release.

• Wave Wallet facilitates between 18-40% of transactions on Sui daily and is a key onboarding venue for new Sui users across both the consumer & DeFi sectors.