Sui has rapidly emerged as a major player in the blockchain space, showcasing impressive user growth, a maturing DeFi ecosystem, and innovative consumer applications. This article explores key data, trends, and top-performing protocols within the Sui network.
Network Overview
Sui is a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain that utilizes the Move programming language. The network has demonstrated remarkable growth throughout 2024, achieving a record 1.6 million weekly active addresses in May. Since the beginning of Q2 2024, Sui has consistently maintained over 400,000 average active addresses.
Total Value Locked (TVL) has seen substantial growth, increasing by 240% year-to-date from $226 million to $789 million according to DeFiLlama data. The network has also experienced net positive bridge inflows of $104.2 million, with $631.3 million flowing in versus $527.7 million flowing out.
Performance and Adoption Metrics
Sustained User Growth and Network Performance
Between May 20 and August 20, Sui averaged 472,600 daily active addresses—representing a 10x increase from previous periods. June saw a peak of 2.2 million active addresses, driven by popular ecosystem applications, which briefly surpassed Solana's peak of 2.09 million during the same timeframe.
Sui is designed for high-performance transactions, with early tests showing a maximum throughput of 297,000 transactions per second (TPS). This performance is partly attributed to Sui's programmable transaction blocks, which allow up to 1,024 instructions per transaction. In December, TPS approached 6,000 due to inscription activity. Notably, transaction fees remained stable even during peak activity periods.
The network's novel Mysticeti consensus engine provides low latency, with early results showing P50 latency of 629 milliseconds in Western Europe. This ultra-low latency ensures near-instant transaction finality, making Sui a strong choice for high-performance applications.
DeFi Ecosystem Expansion
Continued Growth in Total Value Locked
Sui's DeFi ecosystem has shown steady growth since the network's mainnet launch, demonstrating increasing maturity and stability. Daily trading volume throughout 2024, particularly from March onward, indicates growing adoption and sustained engagement with an average exceeding $40 million over the past month without significant volatility or declines.
The steady rise in trading volume reflects growing market confidence in Sui's DeFi infrastructure, attracting more liquidity, projects, and users to the platform.
Total Value Locked surged over 1,500% during the last five months of 2023 and continued climbing in early 2024, reaching a peak of over $880.7 million in late May. As of late August 2024, Sui's TVL stood at $789 million, representing a 240% year-over-year increase.
The total value bridged to Sui has also grown, with 92% coming from Ethereum—highlighting its role as a primary liquidity source. Solana contributes 5.9%, while smaller blockchains like Aptos and Arbitrum contribute less than 1%. This growth reflects increased network activity and a diversified influx of assets and users, with net inflows exceeding $104 million year-to-date in 2024.
Leading Protocols on Sui
NAVI Protocol: Leading Lending Platform
NAVI Protocol has maintained its leading position in the lending DeFi category since its launch on Sui. As a one-stop liquidity protocol, NAVI focuses on providing users with efficient capital utilization, supporting borrowing and lending of major native assets, liquid staking tokens, and stablecoins.
With the recent NAVI Pro upgrade, the protocol surpassed its historical highest TVL, reaching over $250 million and accounting for more than 50% of all lending TVL on Sui.
NAVI has attracted a highly active user base, second only to Sui's largest decentralized exchange. The protocol maintained an average of 2,000 daily active users over the past 30 days, demonstrating continued user interest and trust.
Notably, in August, NAVI experienced significant growth in asset supplies following the introduction of new liquidity incentives. In less than a week, the protocol's USDC TVL grew over 730%, eventually exceeding $100 million at its peak and pushing overall TVL to new heights.
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Bluefin: High-Volume Decentralized Exchange
Bluefin, a decentralized order book DEX built for both professional and casual traders, has processed over $30 billion in trading volume since launching on the Sui network, serving more than 33,000 users.
Funding rates, used to balance perpetual contracts with spot prices of underlying assets, have remained at low levels on Bluefin. BTC annualized rates stood at 4.41% compared to Binance's 4.33%, while ETH rates were -11.71% compared to Binance's 3.21%.
Bluefin's liquidation process is designed to protect the platform and its users from systemic insolvency risk, with a balanced distribution across trading markets.
Aftermath Finance: Comprehensive DeFi Platform
Aftermath Finance positions itself as an "all-in-one DeFi platform for trading, investing, and earning yield." The platform has facilitated over $300 million in trading volume, with recent improvements to its smart order router including the introduction of a V2 routing algorithm that enhanced platform precision and speed.
The afSUI/SUI pool remains one of the most liquid pools on Sui with over $20 million TVL. A feature called Dynamic Gas allows afSUI to be used as a gas token on Aftermath, and other protocols have integrated afSUI into their strategies including leveraged staking and as collateral for loans.
DeepBook: Central Limit Order Book Performance
DeepBook protocol, the central limit order book (CLOB) on Sui designed to bring high-frequency trading to blockchain, has achieved significant milestones with 21 million transactions and 3,000 unique users over the past six months.
Since the launch of V2, DeepBook's average daily user activity doubled from 120 users per day during May-June to over 250 users during July-August. Earned fees have also shown substantial growth, increasing from 200 SUI per day to 400 SUI per day over the past five months.
DeepBook aims to provide low latency and low-cost fees for traders using its CLOB, with average gas fees for limit orders around $0.005.
Consumer Applications and Adoption
Core Primitives Driving User Adoption
Sui's core primitives and their applications continue to demonstrate value in reducing user friction and ultimately improving consumer experience. zkLogin allows users to create Sui accounts through social logins (like Google or Twitch) without these companies gaining insight into users' on-chain activities.
With the continued use of programmable transaction blocks (PTBs) and dApp-as-a-Wallet (DAWs), zkLogin's popularity continues to rise, even reaching peaks of 225,000.
Sponsored transactions, a feature that allows developers to cover user transaction fees, have helped applications like Wave Wallet and FanTV attract users by eliminating the need for users to purchase tokens in advance. Although the percentage of sponsored transactions varies, Sui has seen up to 32.3% of transactions being gas-free on certain days last quarter, enabling thousands of users to easily engage in on-chain activities.
SuiNS, a decentralized protocol that gives users human-readable names instead of default alphanumeric addresses, has seen significant adoption with over 180,000 wallets currently owning names—improving efficiency and security in asset transfers.
FanTV: Social Streaming Platform Success
FanTV, a social streaming platform powered by AI and Web3 technologies, currently ranks as the top social dApp on the Sui blockchain with over 3.5 million registered user wallets and more than 9 million transactions.
The platform's rapid growth includes over 20,000 creators and 1 million monthly active users consuming 900,000 hours of content monthly. FanTV's daily active wallets have shown healthy growth, increasing over 27% month-over-month (from 60,000 in June to 76,000 in July), reflecting a sustained upward trend.
User transactions on FanTV reflect active engagement, with users earning tokens through "watch-to-earn" and "level-up rewards" activities, while creators earn through "live-to-earn" rewards. Over 250 million tokens have been distributed to 3.5 million users across nearly 10 million historical transactions.
Wave Wallet: Dominant Wallet Solution
Wave Wallet experienced explosive growth in early May, peaking at over 1.3 million active wallets by month's end. Although active wallet numbers have declined since then, Wave Wallet consistently ranks among the top ten applications by active addresses across all applications tracked by Artemis.
Wave plays a crucial role in the Sui ecosystem—accounting for 80% of daily active address counts. This dominance has remained consistent since Wave's release.
The wallet processes between 18% to 40% of Sui transactions daily, serving as an important onboarding channel for new Sui users into both consumer and DeFi verticals.
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes Sui different from other Layer 1 blockchains?
Sui utilizes the Move programming language and features innovative consensus mechanisms that enable high throughput (up to 297,000 TPS in tests) with low latency and stable fees even during peak usage. Its unique architecture includes programmable transaction blocks and novel primitives like zkLogin for enhanced user experience.
How has Sui's DeFi ecosystem performed in 2024?
Sui's DeFi ecosystem has shown impressive growth with TVL increasing by 240% year-to-date to over $789 million. The network has seen consistent trading volume averaging over $40 million daily in recent months, with positive net bridge inflows exceeding $104 million.
What are some of the most popular applications on Sui?
Leading applications include NAVI Protocol (lending), Bluefin (trading), Aftermath Finance (DeFi aggregation), FanTV (social streaming), and Wave Wallet (consumer onboarding). These protocols have attracted millions of users and facilitated billions of dollars in transaction volume.
How does Sui improve user experience for beginners?
Sui offers several user-friendly features including zkLogin for social authentication, sponsored transactions that eliminate gas fees for users, and human-readable names through SuiNS. These innovations significantly reduce barriers to entry for new blockchain users.
What is the significance of Sui's transaction speed and latency?
Sui's high throughput and low latency (629ms P50 in tests) enable near-instant transaction finality, making it suitable for high-frequency trading and consumer applications that require responsive user experiences comparable to traditional web applications.
How does Wave Wallet dominate Sui's user activity?
Wave Wallet accounts for 80% of daily active addresses on Sui and processes 18-40% of all network transactions. Its dominance stems from its user-friendly interface and role as the primary onboarding channel for new users entering the Sui ecosystem.