Sui, which survived inside the octagonal cage, has evolved from a public blockchain into a comprehensive platform that supports a wide range of applications and services.

Writing: Deep Tide TechFlow

During Token2049 in September 2024, Sui announced it became the official blockchain partner of the fighting event ONE Championship.

This partnership covered broadcasts in over 190 countries, with the droplet-shaped Sui logo prominently displayed on the ring fence.

Looking back today, this scene seems more like a metaphor.

The public chain track in 2025 is essentially a knockout competition. Market volatility is intense, many projects that once had high visibility have fallen silent—some stopped updates, others went to zero. The remaining contenders are few.

Sui is one of them.

In the two and a half years from planning to launch, TVL peaked over $2 billion, daily active wallets reached nearly 1.6 million, and monthly transaction volume once exceeded 50 million.

After a rollercoaster ride for a whole year, if you’re a holder, you might be confused; if you’re watching from the sidelines, you might be wondering—at this point, is Sui still worth paying attention to?

To answer that, first you need to understand: what has Sui been doing this year?

What skills has this fighter in the public chain octagon been honing?

Practicing a set of combos called Sui Stack

When Sui launched its mainnet in 2023, it was essentially a high-performance L1 public chain: fast, cheap, capable of running smart contracts—everything it should have, and that’s all.

What happened in 2025 is that it started assembling a set called “Sui Stack.”

This term has been repeatedly emphasized by the official this year.

It means: Sui doesn’t just want to be a chain, but to build a complete developer tool stack—from execution, storage, permission control, to off-chain computation—all developed in-house, natively integrated, ready to use out of the box.

It sounds like a pie in the sky, but this year several key components have indeed gone live.

First, storage.

Previously, if you wanted to build a slightly complex application on Sui, like an NFT marketplace or content platform, where would you store images and videos?

On-chain storage was insufficient, so you had to connect to third-party storage like Arweave or IPFS. Usable, but cumbersome. You had to learn another set of tools and worry about compatibility on both ends.

In March 2025, Sui launched Walrus.

Walrus is a decentralized storage layer capable of storing any data type, including data from different blockchain projects. As a native component of Sui Stack, Walrus offers developers within the ecosystem ample design options without needing external data systems. Eight months after launch, Walrus’s total storage capacity has surpassed 300TB, with many well-known partners from AI, media, and entertainment fields.

For a component less than a year old, it’s already operational.

Next, permission control. This sounds technical but actually relates to every user.

You hold some crypto assets on-chain—who can see them? Who can use them? For how long?

There was no standard answer before. Most projects were either fully open or had to build permission systems off-chain, which was complex and prone to vulnerabilities.

Last year, Sui launched Seal to address this. It moved access control logic onto the chain, allowing developers to define “who can access, under what conditions, and for how long” directly in smart contracts.

I think this is more like a prerequisite for privacy, which both a16z and Vitalik have emphasized recently:

If you want on-chain transfers to be as private as bank transfers, where only the involved parties know, you first need a reliable encryption and decryption authorization mechanism.

Finally, off-chain computation. Some tasks are not suitable for smart contracts—they’re either too expensive, too slow, or require access to off-chain data sources.

But how do you trust the results if you do it off-chain?

Nautilus is Sui’s solution, representing another layer of the Sui Stack. It uses Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) to run off-chain computations, then submits the results back to the chain for verification. Both off-chain computation and on-chain validation rely on cryptography, without mutual trust.

Walrus, Seal, Nautilus, plus the Sui mainnet itself form the core of this Sui Stack.

If you still find this too lengthy or complex, I’ve also prepared a diagram to quickly understand Sui’s combo:

In just one year, Sui has quietly transformed from “a single chain” into “a platform.”

The ambition is clear, but whether it can deliver remains to be seen. How well these solutions perform, whether they withstand various technical tests—these questions won’t be fully answered in 2025. But the skills are in place, and the Full Stack tactical approach is taking shape.

What does full stack mean for me?

So, what does this Sui Stack mean for an ordinary user like me?

Honestly, not much in direct impact. You won’t suddenly start trading on Sui just because Walrus is live. The updates to these underlying components are mostly invisible to regular users.

But the indirect effects are significant.

The logic is: lowering developer barriers will attract more teams to build on Sui; more applications mean more choices for users, and increased competition will push product quality higher; better experiences lead to more users, creating a positive feedback loop.

Of course, all this depends on a favorable macro environment for crypto markets. But even in today’s market, it’s not just wishful thinking.

On Sui, the native on-chain order book project DeepBook’s core developer Aslan Tashtanov mentioned in a live stream:

“Now, teams are building margin trading front-ends on DeepBook—without even writing a single line of Move code.”

With the underlying modules sufficiently mature, developers only need to focus on the product itself. This means small teams of three or five can create what previously required dozens.

Feeling a bit like Vibe Coding? More teams, more applications—ultimately benefiting users.

Another influence is institutional cooperation, often seen as a positive signal.

You may notice that in 2025, many traditional financial institutions are starting to deploy on Sui:

Grayscale has a Sui trust product, VanEck issued an ETN, Franklin Templeton is tokenizing funds on it, and 21Shares is applying for related products.

These institutions choose a chain based on technological maturity. “Full stack” sounds like a developer concept, but it actually represents the integrity of infrastructure, which provides security for institutions.

So, you don’t need to understand the details of the Sui Stack, but it will influence what you can use on this chain, how good the experience is, and how many people are building with you.

Infrastructure work often goes unnoticed until problems arise, but it’s the foundation of everything.

Compared to others, what is Sui betting on?

After explaining what Sui is doing, a natural question is: how does it differ from other public chains?

Let’s start with Ethereum.

Ethereum’s strategy can be summarized in four words: Let the ecosystem do.

It handles only execution and consensus layers; everything else is delegated to third parties. Storage is handled by Filecoin, Arweave; scalability by Layer 2s like Arbitrum, Optimism, Base; wallets by MetaMask; oracles by Chainlink.

This model’s advantage is a diverse ecosystem, but the downside is severe fragmentation.

If you want to build a complete application, you might need to connect to seven or eight different projects, each with its own documentation style, update rhythm, and unclear points of contact when issues arise.

Now, Solana.

Solana’s approach is the opposite extreme: everything is handled in-house. No sharding, no L2—just one chain, pushing performance to the limit.

The benefit is a unified, fast experience that users can directly perceive. The downside is all the pressure is on the mainnet; state bloat is a long-term problem, and there have been multiple outages. Also, doing everything in-house means no fallback if something breaks.

Sui chooses a third way.

It’s neither like Ethereum, which outsources to the ecosystem, nor like Solana, which consolidates everything into one chain. Its approach is:

Core components are built in-house but modularized—both as official products and maintaining independence.

Walrus is an independent storage layer but shares validation nodes with Sui; Seal is an independent permission protocol but runs within Sui’s smart contracts; Nautilus is an independent off-chain computation platform but its results can be verified natively by Sui. They are a family but not a monolith.

This strategy bets on “developer experience.” It’s not about who has the highest TPS or the most ecosystem projects, but about enabling developers to build complete applications with minimal time and mental effort.

In essence, it’s a trade-off: Sui prioritizes “integration” at the expense of “flexibility” and “ecosystem diversity.”

Whether this trade-off pays off remains to be seen, but it’s the direction Sui is firmly betting on.

At least conceptually, it differentiates itself from Ethereum and Solana, not by competing on the same dimension.

Three chains, three philosophies, three different experiments. Who’s right or wrong will probably be clearer in two or three years.

Here’s a preview of Sui’s 2026 vision, based on their annual outlook:

What has Sui already achieved? Based on these, what exciting developments are still to come in 2025?

On December 23, 2025, Sui held a year-end live stream.

Core founders like CEO Evan, CPO Adeniyi, Chief Cryptographer Kostas, plus DeepBook lead Aslan, sat together for nearly an hour, reviewing 2025 and looking ahead to 2026.

Such live streams are usually viewed in two ways: one sees them as official hype, just listening; the other sees them as rare windows into the team’s real thoughts.

Regardless of your perspective, I’ve analyzed it to extract key signals.

The first signal is “The Year of Experience.”

Aslan said during the stream that in 2026, the focus will shift from institutions to ordinary users.

The gist is: “I want what we do on Robinhood to be possible on Sui DeFi. Deposits should be simple, payments smooth, and everyday financial life truly on-chain.”

This sounds like a common slogan for all chains. But Sui made a specific promise: in 2026, transfers of stablecoins on Sui will be completely free.

No gas fees.

This isn’t a wallet subsidy but a protocol-level change. If implemented, it would be a strong selling point for Sui in payments—transfers cost nothing.

The second signal is privacy.

Adeniyi revealed that in 2026, Sui will support privacy transactions at the protocol level—not as a wallet feature, but natively on the chain.

Chief cryptographer Kostas shared a real example: he met a local in Dubai who wanted to donate to a charity but was reluctant to do on-chain transfers because everyone could see his real balance.

“That would be problematic here.”

Privacy isn’t just “better”; it’s a prerequisite for large-scale adoption. The Seal component launched in 2025 is preparing for this step.

The third signal is “product-level protocols.”

This is a concept repeatedly emphasized by CEO Evan. He said that in 2026, the focus is on encapsulating the complexity of underlying technology, so developers don’t need to understand all primitives and can build products at a higher level of abstraction.

It sounds abstract, but in other words: you don’t need to understand engine mechanics to drive a car. Sui aims to separate “building engines” from “driving.”

At the end of the live stream, Evan summarized with a phrase:

“Don’t ask us when we’ll launch features. Just watch how we do it.”

This statement itself shows their attitude. It’s clear that 2026 is a critical year for the team—a year to turn three years of infrastructure investment into real products.

Adeniyi later posted a long article on Twitter titled “2026: Building for What’s Inevitable.”

He mentioned five “locked-in” trends:

Stablecoins becoming the default payment method, DeFi swallowing traditional finance, privacy becoming standard, automation becoming the default mode, and gaming driving mainstream digital ownership.

He then said that a single L1 chain cannot support the convergence of these trends; a complete tech stack is needed.

This is the underlying logic of Sui Stack. Recognizing certain trends as inevitable, then reverse-engineering the infrastructure needed to support them.

Of course, recognizing trends doesn’t guarantee they will happen. What 2026 will look like is uncertain. But from this live stream and long article, it’s clear Sui’s team knows what they’re betting on.

Finally, Adeniyi emphasized that these five trends are not just predictions but directions—inevitable developments.

This narrative sounds very convincing.

But “inevitability” is a big word. In 2021, many believed NFT boomed as “inevitable,” and the metaverse was “inevitable.” We all know what happened afterward.

It’s not that Sui’s judgment is necessarily wrong, but when a team tells you “we’re preparing for inevitability,” you have the right to ask:

Why is this thing considered inevitable?

There’s no answer to that. An execution team doesn’t really intend to answer with words.

Returning to the octagon metaphor: Sui is still in the ring, still throwing punches.

In 2025, it practiced the Sui Stack combo; in 2026, it’s preparing for a battle about “experience.”

Whether it can win, nobody knows. But at least, it knows what it’s fighting for.

The rest is up to time.