"Sui" of "self-adhesive tags": from user stickiness to institutional favor

At the start of 2026, Sui entered the market with a weekly growth rate of 30%. Behind this momentum lies not only the favor of traditional capital but also an internal ecosystem self-adhesion label—the kind of ecosystem resilience where users are willing to stay long-term, communities remain actively engaged, and assets continuously accumulate. As Grayscale and Bitwise consecutively file for spot ETFs with the SEC, Sui is transforming from a pure technical experiment into a mature network with real economic activity. However, under the dazzling narratives of Wall Street elites, this ecosystem is also facing a severe test: can the self-adhesion label maintain resilience amid institutional capital inflows and become the foundation for long-term valuation?

User Retention Explodes, Self-Adhesion Label Builds Ecosystem Moat

The growth data of the Sui ecosystem proves its attractiveness. Since the mainnet launched in May 2023, its TVL has surged approximately 32 times from the initial phase, reaching a peak of $2.6 billion in October 2025. Despite being impacted by the “10.11 Flash Crash,” with TVL falling back to $1 billion, market recognition of its core competitiveness remains unshaken.

On-chain fee revenue demonstrates real activity—rising from $2 million to about $23 million, an increase of 11.5 times. The peak daily throughput reached 66.2 million transactions, with the average daily throughput over the past year remaining above 4 million, fully demonstrating that Sui has successfully achieved horizontal scaling, capable of handling high-intensity large-scale user and application requests.

The most noteworthy indicator is user stickiness. Daily active users (DAU) skyrocketed from tens of thousands at launch to a peak of 2.5 million in April 2025. Although there has been some recent pullback, the monthly metrics remain healthy, with an average of around 600,000 daily active users to date. Importantly, the ratio of old users remains stable above 20%—meaning Sui is not relying solely on continuous influx of new users but has established genuine, reliable user retention capabilities. This is the core of the self-adhesion label: users are willing to revisit repeatedly and participate long-term, rather than just experiencing once and leaving.

Since early 2025, new users have been continuously flowing in, but more crucial is the quality of their retention. These data points form the basis of Sui’s appeal to institutional investors—it has evolved from a technically visionary public chain into an economy carrying real traffic and assets.

Wall Street Extends Frequent Olive Branches, Institutional Recognition of SUI Spot ETF

The ETF applications by Grayscale and Bitwise mark Sui’s official entry into the traditional capital arena.

On December 5, 2025, Grayscale submitted an S-1 registration statement to the SEC, applying to convert the Sui Trust Fund into a spot ETF, planning to list on NYSE Arca. The key innovation in this application is the integration of a staking mechanism—the ETF not only provides price exposure for investors but also can generate additional endogenous income through validator rewards on the public chain. For institutional investors seeking stable cash flow, this undoubtedly enhances the asset’s attractiveness.

Subsequently, on December 19, 2025, Bitwise submitted the Bitwise SUI ETF application, aiming to list on Nasdaq, with Coinbase as the custodian. This move formally places SUI among institutional-grade assets alongside BTC, ETH, SOL, and others, marking a market repositioning of its status.

The leadership change at the SEC has created a more relaxed regulatory environment for approving altcoin ETFs, accelerating the approval process. The favor from institutions is no coincidence—its scalability in payments, gaming, and DeFi protocols stands out among many Layer 1s.

From the market consensus, the value perception of SUI tokens has shifted from short-term speculation to long-term allocation. As of January 21, 2026, SUI’s circulating market cap reached $577 million, with a fully diluted market cap of $1.522 billion. Although about 62% of tokens are still locked, the market has smoothly digested over $60 million worth of token unlocks without significant sell-offs. The landing of Sui ETF will greatly lower the entry barrier for traditional wealth management institutions, thereby reshaping SUI’s valuation logic.

Privacy Layer Deeply Upgraded, Sui Layouts “Regulated Privacy Finance”

Alongside the influx of institutional capital, Sui is also opening new commercial territories. As privacy re-enters the main stage of crypto, Mysten Labs co-founder and Chief Product Officer Adeniyi Abiodun announced on December 30, 2025, that Sui will launch native private transaction features in 2026.

This is not an optional plugin but a core capability integrated into the consensus layer and object model. Default privacy design means transaction amounts and counterparty information are only visible to sender and receiver by default, invisible to observers. While traditional public chains’ transparency ensures fairness, it severely hinders adoption by entities needing to protect trade secrets and privacy-sensitive individual users.

Sui’s privacy solution maintains high throughput while providing end-to-end confidentiality through zero-knowledge proof technology. More notably, its compliance-friendly design—completely different from pure privacy coins like Monero:

• Audit hooks: Allow opening specific transaction details to regulators or authorized auditors under certain compliance processes
• KYC/AML integration: Financial institutions can perform necessary anti-money laundering checks while maintaining privacy
• Post-quantum cryptography: Considering the potential threat of quantum computing to elliptic curve encryption, Sui plans to introduce post-quantum standards like CRYSTALS-Dilithium and FALCON in its 2026 upgrade

These technical components position Sui as a “regulated privacy financial network,” attracting banks and commercial entities with high data sensitivity. However, this is a double-edged sword—it must attract traditional financial institutions while facing skepticism from pure crypto advocates. The technical challenges are also significant: how to maintain high TPS while integrating zero-knowledge proofs and post-quantum cryptography.

Liquidity Infrastructure Iteration, DeFi Ecosystem Accelerates Refinement

In the fierce competition among Layer 1s, liquidity depth determines the vitality of a public chain. Recently, Sui ecosystem projects have been making moves in liquidity efficiency and architecture optimization.

As the top TVL project in the Sui ecosystem, NAVI Protocol officially launched Premium Exchange(PRE DEX) on December 29, 2025. This marks NAVI’s evolution from a single lending protocol to a comprehensive DeFi infrastructure. PRE DEX uses a market-driven algorithm to establish a premium discovery mechanism for protocol tokens with price dislocation. For institutional investors and multi-wallet users, PRE DEX significantly improves asset management efficiency—users can efficiently allocate and aggregate multi-chain and multi-protocol assets within a single interface, reducing cross-protocol friction. With PRE DEX online, asset pricing within the Sui ecosystem is expected to become more efficient.

Two financing events at the end of 2025 indicate that Sui’s liquidity management is entering an AI-driven and dynamic phase.

Magma Finance completed a $6 million strategic round(led by HashKey Capital), focusing on solving liquidity fragmentation and capital efficiency issues in the Sui ecosystem. Its architecture introduces an adaptive liquidity market maker(ALMM) model—different from traditional CLMM models, ALMM uses AI strategies to analyze market volatility in real-time and automatically adjust asset prices when market swings are intense, rebalancing LP capital into active trading zones. This not only offers traders lower slippage but also creates higher real yields for LPs. Meanwhile, AI monitors memory pools to prevent MEV attacks.

Ferra Protocol, in October 2025, completed a $2 million pre-seed funding(Comma3 Ventures), and launched the first dynamic liquidity market maker(DEX on Sui. Its innovation lies in high modularity and composability—integrating CLMM and DAMM models, and introducing dynamic joint curves, further empowering fair token issuance and liquidity guiding. Ferra aims to become Sui’s dynamic liquidity layer, making capital no longer static deposits but “living water” flowing freely with market sentiment.

DeFi Credit Crisis Emerges, Dual Challenges of Stickiness and Foundation Strength

However, Sui’s ecosystem expansion is not without obstacles. The credit crisis of Sui’s largest lending protocol, SuiLend, has cast a shadow over the entire DeFi ecosystem.

SuiLend once approached $750 million TVL, accounting for 25% of the entire chain’s share. But behind the impressive data, its token SEND has underperformed—despite generating $7.65 million annualized revenue in 2025, claiming 100% protocol fees are used for buybacks, the SEND token price has fallen over 90% in the past year.

Since February 2025, SuiLend has conducted buybacks totaling $3.47 million) accounting for about 9% of circulating supply(, but for a small-cap asset with a market cap of only $13 million, it failed to provide the expected price support. After being labeled ST by Bybit, community doubts arose over insider trading involved in buybacks, turning into accusations of the team offloading assets. Especially during the IKA event, SuiLend forcibly deducted 6% of principal from users without activating insurance funds, further damaging community trust. The protocol relies heavily on the Sui Foundation’s monthly subsidies of several million dollars to maintain operations.

The community generally believes that buyback strategies are merely a drop in the bucket—they superficially reduce token supply but cannot offset high issuance and VC dumping pressures. This case serves as a wake-up call for Sui: without genuine user growth and sustainable models, token buybacks may just be a house of cards hiding emptiness. The market should focus on protocol governance and incentive structures, rather than just TVL and revenue metrics.

Wall Street Temptations and the Ultimate Test of Self-Adhesion Label

Sui’s path to Wall Street is enticing, but ensuring a solid and reliable foundation might be a longer journey. The explosive data proves its technical potential, but trust remains the key to survival.

Sui needs to undergo a difficult transformation from a technical experiment to a mature economy—maintaining innovation sharpness and reasonable valuation, while refining the self-adhesion label into a core piece of value growth. Only when user retention, community trust, and ecosystem consensus are organically unified can Sui truly meet institutional capital expectations and become a paradigm of the next-generation Layer 1.