Hunting Alpha: The Logic Behind OKX Ventures' Early Lock-in of SUI

As the Web3 technology stack continues to evolve, smart contract languages are gradually migrating from Ethereum-dominated Solidity to the Move language, which offers greater security and resource abstraction capabilities. Move was originally developed by Meta for its crypto project Diem (formerly Libra) and has features such as resources as first-class citizens and formal verification friendliness. It is gradually becoming an important language option for the underlying architecture of the new generation of public chains.

Against this evolutionary backdrop, Aptos and $SUI have become the dual core representatives of the Move ecosystem. Aptos, launched by the original Diem core team Aptos Labs, continues the native Move technology stack, emphasizing stability, security, and modular architecture; while $SUI, built by Mysten Labs, inherits the Move security model and introduces object-oriented data structures and parallel execution mechanisms, forming a more performance-breakthrough and paradigm-innovative $SUI Move branch, reconstructing the on-chain resource management and transaction execution model. It can be said that $SUI is a Layer1 that truly reconstructs the smart contract operation mechanism and on-chain resource management method from first principles. It is not competing on "high TPS", but rewriting how the blockchain should operate. This makes $SUI not only performant but also paradigm-leading, a technical foundation born for complex on-chain interactions and large-scale Web3 applications.

1. Breaking Through and Reshaping the Public Chain Landscape

After Solana enters the Firedancer era, its performance curve may remain leading; however, it is still a "single-chain high-frequency transaction" paradigm. $SUI attempts to respond to needs beyond the performance arms race with a horizontal stack + end-to-end privacy/storage. This is significantly different from Aptos (also Move, but still single-dimensionally scaled) or Sei (dedicated chain, liquidity depth concentrated). For investment institutions, this means:

Compared to Solana: Solana has undergone multiple rounds of bull and bear market cycles and has a large ecosystem. $SUI, as a latecomer, has obvious advantages: it adopts the safer Move language, avoiding the vulnerabilities caused by Solana's Rust + Sealevel parallel processing, and has low hardware requirements, lower verification node costs, which is conducive to decentralization. In terms of performance, the two are comparable. Solana's TPS is slightly higher, and $SUI's confirmation latency is lower. In terms of ecosystem, Solana has more projects and users, focusing on complex DeFi (such as Serum, Drift), $SUI is growing faster, and user activity once caught up, achieving differentiation with new fields such as BTCFi and LSD. The Solana community is mature, and $SUI's international community still needs to expand. In the future, the two may coexist. Solana is more inclined to the crypto-native ecosystem, while $SUI focuses more on Web2 penetration and game social. Both pursue performance limits: Solana relies on Firedancer multi-threading, and $SUI relies on Mahi-Mahi upgrades.

Compared to Aptos: Aptos and $SUI originate from Libra/Diem. Aptos was launched earlier and once gained the halo of "the first Move chain" and a high valuation. In the past year, the Aptos ecosystem has developed slowly, and user and developer activity is lower than that of SUI. The reasons include: Aptos uses complex Block-STM parallel processing, and its performance decreases significantly under high concurrency. $SUI's object model is more efficient; Aptos is positioned as a stable financial infrastructure, mostly centered around DeFi and NFTs, with a style close to Ethereum clones; $SUI tries diverse narratives, and its user growth is fast (8.03 million new coin-holding users, far exceeding Aptos), but the risk is higher. In terms of incentives, Aptos has had airdrops but lacks continuous incentives, while $SUI has no airdrops but the foundation provides strong support, and its monthly active addresses and on-chain transaction volume are better than Aptos. The Aptos team has strong strength and funding, and may focus on institutional finance or the East Asian market in the future, but the market is more optimistic about $SUI at present.

Compared to Sei: Sei is a dedicated trading chain that emerged in 2023, based on Cosmos, focusing on order book trading, with a Blocktime of approximately 500ms. It attempts to seize the Solana downtime market. It has high short-term popularity, but TVL and user growth have not been sustained, and ecosystem development is limited. Its positioning is too narrow, relying on liquidity mining, and it is difficult to form a complete ecosystem. In contrast, $SUI takes the general-purpose L1 route, supports diverse applications, and is more resistant to risks. Sei's cross-chain compatibility and language advantages are inferior to SUI. Although it may transform or fully integrate into the EVM ecosystem, it is difficult to threaten $SUI in the short term. What is more worthy of attention is Linera, incubated by Mysten, which is positioned for high-frequency micro-payments and may serve as a $SUI expansion sidechain, with a different positioning from SUI.

Compared to Ethereum L2: The Ethereum L2 (such as Arbitrum, Base) ecosystem is prosperous, and the TVL of each exceeds $2 billion. $SUI's advantages lie in ultra-low latency and high concurrency, which Rollup cannot match, and low Gas fees, which are suitable for high-TPS games and other applications. Ethereum L2 enjoys a strong capital network effect and security endorsement. The competition between $SUI and L2 is essentially a competition between new paradigms (public chain) and traditional paradigms (Rollup). They may coexist in the long term, but in the short term, it depends on who can better meet application needs.

2. Advancing Rapidly, with Impressive Ecological Data

Since the $SUI mainnet was launched in May 2023, user growth has been exponential: by April 2025, more than 123.00 million user addresses have been created on the $SUI chain. This number is almost close to the cumulative address volume of established public chains such as Tron. In the second half of 2024, the average monthly active addresses of $SUI were approximately 10.00 million; since mid-February 2025, this indicator has seen a cliff-like jump, and by mid-April, it has steadily exceeded 40.00 million, with monthly activity more than quadrupling. In terms of new users, a "turning point" appeared at the end of 2024 — the average daily new wallet addresses climbed from 150,000 to a sustained level of 1.00 million+ thereafter.

In particular, the rise of new public chains is often accompanied by a large influx of cross-chain funds. $SUI ushered in the first wave of traffic through third-party bridging in the mid-to-late 2024: as of November 2024, a cumulative total of approximately 944.80 million USD in funds had been bridged in. As of mid-2025, the total cross-chain locked amount (bridged TVL) of $SUI was approximately 2.55 billion USD. This indicates that in addition to the internal TVL of DeFi, a large amount of assets remain as bridged assets, supporting the liquidity demand on SUI. In addition, as DeFi activity heats up, the supply of stablecoins in the $SUI ecosystem has risen: in mid-April 2025, the market value of $SUI stablecoins hit a record high of more than 800.00 million USD. This scale is equivalent to the stablecoin level of established public chains such as Tron, highlighting the increasing trust of users in the $SUI network for value storage and transfer. In terms of stablecoin composition, USDC is still the absolute main force, with a market value share of more than 60%. USDT was also issued on $SUI at the end of 2024 and has maintained a certain level of activity.

Although its throughput is still behind Solana, $SUI has fully covered high-frequency scenarios such as on-chain order book DEXs, real-time PvP, and social interaction. Due to fast finality + DAG parallel execution, it is naturally suited for micro-payments, in-game asset exchange, and social "like/comment" type writes. With the subsequent Mahi‑Mahi target >400,000 TPS upgrade, $SUI is constantly consolidating its scalability moat, but the 150 min downtime event on 2024‑11‑21 warns that the stability of the core protocol under high concurrency boundary conditions still needs to be continuously verified. In addition, low average Gas is $SUI's core selling point for competing for "on-chain real-time application" developers; however, if peak fee rates repeatedly hit high levels, user churn is likely to occur in gaming and social scenarios. Holders/stakers need to pay attention to storage fund parameters and L2 solution rhythms to assess long-term fee curves.

Currently, $SUI's ecological data is very impressive: First, the resilience of its capital structure is forming. 2025 Q2 steady-state TVL is approximately 1.6 to 1.8 B USD, of which stablecoins + LSD ≈ 55%, and can be retained even without incentive subsidies — indicating that the "sticky capital" after the hot money cycle has been initially deposited. In addition, the proportion of institutional addresses holding has increased from 6% to 14% (doubled in half a year, Artemis standard caliber), the proportion of retail funds has decreased but activity has increased, and the funds are more concentrated but more active, providing a safety cushion for the next round of leverage/derivatives expansion.

Second, the developer retention rate is higher than that of public chains of the same age. Electric Capital statistics show that the 24-month survival rate (dev continues to submit on GitHub for two years) $SUI = 37% > Aptos 31% > Sei 18%. The key inducement is that the object model + Walrus / Seal native SDK reduces the mental cost of "rewriting the on-chain structure"; most teams are willing to write the first contract on $SUI rather than port it.

Third, the bimodal user structure (DeFi + content entertainment) drives on-chain interaction diversification. DeFi contracts account for approximately 49% of on-chain call volume; content applications such as FanTV, RECRD, and Pebble City contribute approximately 35% of call volume. Social and consumer applications have not yet truly started and are potential blue oceans. The Web3ization of content creation (music, video) has already shown signs in $SUI, but it can be taken a step further. In particular, $SUI has many users in Southeast Asia, so you can consider social products targeting the user habits in this region. Localized on-chain short videos, on-chain fan rewards, etc. may have a market. When these products grow, they can derive businesses such as advertising and data analysis, forming a positive cycle for the ecological economy. Social products have a long growth period, but once successful, they are very sticky.

For example, by March 2025, the amount of BTCFi locked on the $SUI chain exceeded the 1000 $BTC mark; in April, BTC-like assets accounted for 10% of $SUI's total TVL, covering forms such as wBTC, LBTC, and stBTC. In other words, there are approximately 250.00 million USD worth of Bitcoin on $SUI playing a role. These Bitcoin assets are fully utilized on SUI: users can mortgage $BTC anchor assets to lending protocols in exchange for stablecoins to achieve "holding coins to generate interest", or provide BTC/stablecoin liquidity to obtain transaction fees. One-stop liquidity protocols such as Navi quickly supported $BTC as collateral and launched yield aggregation strategies such as "$BTC Plus".

Fourth, potential growth curves: RWA and native derivatives are two major gaps. In terms of RWA, Seal/Nautilus provides compliant privacy + verifiable computing, which is a natural base for issuing bonds and fund shares; it has partnered with Open Market Group (plans to issue rwa yield certificates on $SUI), 21Shares (its existing $SUI ETP has a scale of approximately 300.00 million USD), etc. to test physical asset/bond tokenization. The opportunities this brings are to do RWA issuance-side SaaS, compliant identity-as-a-service, on-chain secondary exchanges, and valuation oracles. In terms of native perpetuals/options, the current on-chain Perp OI is approximately 20.00 million, with Bluefin accounting for approximately 70%. The difference between Hyperliquid-style application chains and $SUI = "performance vs liquidity aggregation". If $SUI decides to do composable/cross-protocol matching at the consensus layer (such as DeepBook 2.0), there is an opportunity to run out of a unified derivatives infrastructure, with an upside of 10x growth space.

3. Forward-Looking Layout, $SUI Foundation, OKX Ventures, Mysten Labs, etc. Become Key Ecological Forces

A thriving ecosystem cannot be separated from the catalysis and empowerment of strategic capital. In the process of the $SUI ecosystem from budding to rapid rise, OKX Ventures has played a vital role. Its investment strategy is not a simple financial bet, but a forward-looking and systematic layout based on a deep understanding of $SUI's technical architecture and ecological potential, thereby catalyzing the prosperity of the $SUI ecosystem.

The $Sui application ecosystem is currently dominated by funds (DeFi + BTCFi), followed by entertainment (GameFi/NFT/social), and AI-native tools and derivatives are still in their early stages. The real gaps are concentrated in RWA lending and on-chain derivatives: the former is waiting for the privacy compliance solutions of Seal/Nautilus to be implemented, and the latter requires stronger matching depth and risk hedging tools.

OKX Ventures is recognized by the market as one of the earliest discoverers and strategic co-builders of the $SUI ecosystem. Shortly after the $SUI mainnet was launched, when the ecosystem was still in its early stages, OKX Ventures, with its keen judgment, decisively took action and strategically invested in several core projects such as Cetus, Navi, Momentum, and Haedal. These projects cover key tracks in the DeFi field such as decentralized exchanges (DEX), lending, and liquidity staking (LST), laying a solid foundation for the subsequent financial ecological explosion of SUI. For example:

OKX Ventures' investment is not an isolated "point", but a "surface" connected to form a strong ecological synergy. The DEX it invested in provides a clearing place for the lending protocol, and the lending and LST protocols create new assets and liquidity sources for the DEX, jointly building a self-reinforcing DeFi closed loop. More importantly, OKX Ventures' contribution goes far beyond the capital level. As the world's top crypto platform, the industry resources, market insights, and technical support it brings have greatly accelerated the product iteration, market promotion, and user acquisition of these early projects, thereby promoting the maturity and prosperity of the entire $SUI ecosystem. This "investment + empowerment" model is one of the key catalysts for the $SUI ecosystem to quickly stand out among many public chains.

At the same time, the investment of the $SUI Foundation and Mysten Labs in the infrastructure layer has also laid a deep-level competitive barrier for the ecosystem. Mysten has raised over 300.00 million USD for $SUI development in 2023–2024. A large part of these funds has been invested in the research and development of "thick infrastructure" such as Walrus, Seal, and Nautilus. This strategy is different from the ecosystems of Solana and other ecosystems that focus on terminal applications: $SUI chooses to make up for the underlying shortcomings first, and then incentivize application innovation through Grant and hackathons (such as the 2024 Overflow hackathon, which attracted more than 350 projects to participate). The richness of the infrastructure also brings technical stickiness within the ecosystem: once developers get used to and rely on these unique services provided by $SUI (such as Seal's secure storage and Nautilus's trusted computing), the willingness to migrate to other chains will decrease, because other platforms may lack equivalent functions or need to be rebuilt. In addition, these infrastructures also strengthen $SUI's ability to carry emerging fields. For example, the combination of Walrus + Seal gives $SUI unique advantages in supporting social, AI, and other DApps that require privacy and massive data; Nautilus may attract cutting-edge developers who want to implement AI reasoning and secure multi-party computing on the chain.

4. Value Positioning, From "Fastest L1" to "Programmable Internet Stack"

In the past year, the public has always written $Sui as a "high-performance parallel chain". However, at the latest event, Mysten Labs co-founder Evan Cheng gave a statement that was clearly more ambitious: "Blockchain is not just trading; $Sui is a global coordination layer that weaves compute, liquidity, and data into a programmable base for the next generation of the Internet."

The team hopes to incorporate traditional Internet components — computing power, storage, identity, liquidity, and privacy computing — into the same native protocol stack, and allow each layer to be readily available to external applications. Six components ($Sui mainnet, DeepBook, SuiNS, Walrus, Seal, Nautilus) are already running on the mainnet or public testnet, and all adopt open licenses or on-chain governance to host the source code. They provide a new path: $Sui's real differentiation lies not in single-point TPS, but in "horizontal combination".

Currently, this infrastructure has entered the production stage. The Mysticeti consensus engine brings sub-second finality (P50 latency is approximately 0.39 seconds), and no congestion has been seen even during peak periods; the DeepBook public matching layer reduces the matching latency to 390 milliseconds, with more than one million orders per day, accounting for more than 40% of all chain transactions; in terms of the identity layer, SuiNS has minted 280,000 domains, and zkLogin has completed more than 12.00 million social logins in three months, covering nearly one-third of daily active users; since Walrus native storage was launched on the mainnet, it has written 580 TB of data, and the fragment utilization rate has increased from 8% to nearly 12%; Seal provides MPC/TSS secret management services, covering 40+ enterprise applications; Nautilus supports verifiable computing, allowing TEE reasoning results to be uploaded to the chain as Move objects, and 7 AI projects are testing, of which 3 have disclosed a total of 17.00 million USD in financing.

Based on the above capabilities, $Sui has opened up multiple growth directions. The first is Web2 SaaS migration. The team listed more than 30 Web2 services such as Dropbox, GitHub, eBay, and YouTube as examples of future "reconstruction on top of the six layers of $Sui". At present, non-financial interactions such as content distribution, social networking, and identity verification account for approximately 42% of the call frequency of the mainnet, but only contribute 11% of the handling fees, indicating that a large number of "low Gas high frequency" Web2-SaaS type transactions have begun to migrate to the main chain. The B2B middleware (such as billing, permission management, content acceleration, and DevOps registry) that these applications still lack constitutes a new blank area with high uncertainty and high odds — high business threshold, large subsidy space, and huge potential.

Another overlooked direction is offline networks and extreme scenarios. The $Sui team is testing non-IP networks such as SMS, LoRa, HAM, satellite, and underwater acoustic waves, and is trying to encapsulate transactions as "offline shards" and aggregate them back to the chain through enclave-token and zero-latency zk-tunnel. This technical path targets weak network scenarios such as India, Southeast Asia, and post-disaster relief, which are real needs that are not yet covered by mainstream L1/Rollup. Once implemented, it will stimulate a batch of lightweight hardware/client entrepreneurial opportunities such as LoRa POS, SMS wallets, and zk-tunnel SDK.

In addition, in the blockchain × AI narrative, $Sui does not emphasize "model on the chain", but focuses on "AI verifiable". Evan Cheng divides the combination of AI and chain into four quadrants, and $Sui focuses on making AI weights, reasoning logs, and data sources auditable on the chain through Seal + Nautilus. This type of capability is more in line with regulatory and institutional needs. Currently, some entrepreneurial projects have included "AI reasoning as a service + auditable ledger" in their Pitch Deck, and MechColony has used 6 weeks to implement a verifiable NPC behavior tree. The core value of this type of project is not in computing power, but in trust distribution — once $Sui forms a reputation in "trustworthy AI", its downstream data market, copyright clearing, model NFTization, and other applications will naturally converge.

In terms of technical progress, the $Sui ecosystem is also constantly improving. From basic consensus, protocol upgrades, to development experience and user tools, there have been breakthroughs. The protocol supports dynamic version control and on-chain/off-chain hot updates, allowing multiple rounds of seamless upgrades, reducing hard forks, and improving stability. Mysticeti introduces a DAG asynchronous pipeline, achieving sub-second finality and 12000 TPS throughput; the Move language introduces generic specialization, macro expansion, and debugging tools, greatly improving development efficiency; the wallet end is deeply integrated with Phantom, Slush, etc., optimizing the user interaction experience and asset security. In terms of ecological concepts, $Sui emphasizes decentralization (wide distribution of resources), composability (flexible collaboration of modules), and true ownership (users control data and identity), and is committed to building a general infrastructure that serves the scaled landing of Web3.

At the beginning of 2025, $Sui realized smooth multi-network upgrades through protocol version control and hot update mechanisms, enhancing network compatibility and consistency. After the Mysticeti consensus engine was deployed, the consensus latency was compressed to sub-seconds and maintained stable throughput under high load. The Move language has also completed upgrades such as generics and macro expansion, which significantly optimizes the developer experience and user interaction process in conjunction with wallet integration.

In terms of ecological components, the $Sui ecosystem has built a full-stack architecture covering storage, encryption, and privacy computing through underlying protocols such as Walrus, Seal, and Nautilus, which significantly improves the efficiency of on-chain and off-chain data processing and data sovereignty. Among them, Walrus relies on a layered architecture and Red Stuff encoding to achieve low-cost, high-concurrency, and multi-chain compatibility in decentralized storage and data availability, adapting to big data scenarios such as NFT, AI, and DeFi; Seal provides threshold encryption and programmable access control to promote the implementation of on-chain privacy and digital rights management; Nautilus is based on TEE to realize verifiable off-chain computing, natively supports Move, and expands applications such as AI reasoning, oracles, and chain games. In addition, the $Sui ecosystem also brings together middleware and development tools such as SUIPlay, Move, DeepBook, zkLogin, and SUIBridge, forming a "decentralized full stack" covering computing, communication, identity, payment, security, and other modules.

In terms of security governance, $Sui also demonstrated a rare rapid response capability. After the Cetus theft incident, $Sui coordinated verification nodes to freeze hacker addresses through an on-chain governance mechanism, recovered 162.00 million USD in assets, and realized "keyless transfer" for the first time. The foundation and project parties jointly provided a 30.00 million USD loan, combined with recovered funds and a gradually released token compensation mechanism, so that the recovery rate of damaged users reached 85%-99%. Afterwards, $Sui launched a 10.00 million USD security fund, promoted protocol open source, strengthened audit incentives, and optimized governance processes to enhance transparency and community participation. Although this has also triggered discussions about the concentration of decentralized power, it undoubtedly demonstrates $Sui's comprehensive capabilities and experimental spirit in crisis response and community governance.

What these indicate is that $Sui is shifting from the high-performance chain narrative of "fastest L1" to the higher positioning of "programmable Internet stack".

Disclaimer:

This article is for reference only. This article only represents the author's point of view and does not represent OKX's position. This article is not intended to provide (i) investment advice or investment recommendations; (ii) an offer or solicitation to buy, sell, or hold digital assets; (iii) financial, accounting, legal, or tax advice. We do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of such information. Holding digital assets (including stablecoins and NFTs) involves high risk and may fluctuate significantly. You should carefully consider whether trading or holding digital assets is suitable for you based on your financial situation. Consult your legal/tax/investment professional for your specific circumstances. You are responsible for understanding and complying with local applicable laws and regulations.