Written by DeepTide TechFlow

During Token2049 in September 2024, Sui announced its partnership as the official blockchain partner of the combat sports event ONE Championship.

This collaboration covers broadcasting in more than 190 countries, prominently displaying the water-drop-shaped Sui logo on the ring's barricade, making it highly noticeable.

This scene, when viewed today, seems more like a metaphor.

The public chain sector in 2025 is essentially an elimination competition. The market has experienced intense turbulence, with many once-prominent projects falling silent. Some have ceased updates, while others have directly gone to zero. The number of players still in the game is actually very limited.

Sui is one of them.

Within two and a half years from planning to launch, the TVL (Total Value Locked) once peaked at over $2 billion, the peak number of daily active wallets approached 1.6 million, and the highest monthly transaction volume exceeded 50 million transactions.

It's been a rollercoaster for an entire year. If you're a holder, you might already feel lost; if you're just watching from the sidelines, you might also be wondering— at this point, is Sui still worth paying attention to?

To answer this question, we first need to figure out one thing: What has Sui actually been doing over the past year?

What kind of skills has this competitor, still in the public blockchain octagon, been practicing this year?

Practice a set of combination moves, called Sui Stack.

When Sui launched its mainnet in 2023, it was essentially a high-performance L1 public blockchain: fast, cheap, and capable of running smart contracts—it had all the necessary features, but nothing more.

Events in 2025 will mark the beginning of a new set called..."Sui Stack"combination of measures.

This term has been repeatedly emphasized by the authorities since the beginning of this year.

It means that Sui doesn't just want to be a single blockchain, but rather a complete set of developer tooling, handling execution, storage, access control, and off-chain computation all in-house, natively integrated and ready to use out of the box.

It sounds like drawing sweet talk, but indeed, several key components were launched this year.

First, let's talk about storage.

In the past, if you wanted to build a slightly more complex application on Sui, such as an NFT marketplace or a content platform, where would you store the images and videos?

Storing on-chain is too expensive, so we have to connect to third-party storage solutions like Arweave or IPFS ourselves. It works, but it's a bit troublesome. You have to learn another set of tools and worry about compatibility between the two sides.

In March 2025, Sui went live. Walrus.

Walrus is a decentralized storage layer capable of storing any type of data, including data from different blockchain projects. Walrus operates as a native component of the Sui Stack, providing developers in the ecosystem with ample design options without the need to integrate external data systems. Within just eight months since its launch, Walrus is now on track to exceed a total storage capacity of 300TB and has already attracted numerous well-known brand partners from fields such as artificial intelligence, media, and entertainment.

But for a new component that has been online for less than a year, it can be considered to have gotten off the ground.

Let's talk about access control again. This may sound technical, but in fact, it's related to every user.

You have a crypto asset on the blockchain. Who can see it? Who can use it? How long can it be used?

These issues previously had no standard answers. Most projects either fully disclosed information or had to build their own permission systems off-chain, which is complex and prone to vulnerabilities.

Sui went live last year. SealIt is designed to solve this problem. It moves the logic of access control onto the blockchain, allowing developers to directly define in smart contracts "who can access, under what conditions access is allowed, and for how long the access is valid."

I think this serves more as a prerequisite for the privacy that both a16z and Vitalik have recently emphasized:

If you want on-chain transfers to be known only to the two parties involved, just like bank transfers, you first need a reliable encryption and decryption authorization mechanism..

Finally, there is off-chain computation. Some tasks are not suitable for execution within smart contracts: either they are too expensive, too slow, or require access to off-chain data sources.

But if it's done off-chain, how can the on-chain system trust the results?

Nautilus It is a solution provided by Sui, belonging to another layer of the entire Sui Stack. It uses Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to perform off-chain computations and then submits the results back to the chain for verification. Computations happen off-chain while verification occurs on-chain, and neither side needs to trust each other, as cryptography ensures security.

Walrus, Seal, Nautilus, along with the Sui mainnet itself, form the foundation of the current Sui Stack.

If you still find it too long or difficult to understand, the author has also summarized a diagram to help you quickly grasp Sui's set of strategies:

In one year, Sui has quietly evolved from "a single chain" into "a platform."

Ambition has been shown, but whether it can be realized is another matter. How effective are these plans, and can they withstand various technical challenges?

These questions have not yet been fully answered by 2025. However, the boxing skills have already been developed, and the Full Stack strategy for stepping into the ring is also taking shape.

So what?

What's the point of creating this Sui Stack? How does it relate to me as an ordinary user?

To be honest, there's not much of a direct relationship. You won't just run to Sui tomorrow to trade something just because Walrus has launched on Sui. Updates to these underlying components are largely imperceptible to regular users.

But the indirect relationship is actually quite significant.

The logic is as follows: when the barrier for developers is lowered, more teams will be willing to build applications on Sui. With more applications, users will have more choices, and competition will drive product experiences to improve. As experiences improve, more people will use the platform, creating a positive cycle.

Of course, this is based on the premise of an improved overall environment in the cryptocurrency market. However, even in the current market conditions, this is not a fantasy.

On Sui's native on-chain order book project DeepBook, core developer Aslan Tashtanov mentioned a detail during a live stream:

Now there is already a team building a margin trading front-end on DeepBook, "Not even a single line of Move code has been written.

With a sufficiently robust underlying module, developers can focus solely on the product itself. This means that a small team of three to five people now has the opportunity to create things that previously required dozens of people.

Doesn't it feel a bit like vibe coding? More teams are joining in, more applications are emerging, and ultimately, it's the users who benefit.

Another impact is institutional collaboration, which is often an important indicator of positive news as perceived by many people.

You might have noticed that a number of traditional financial institutions are starting to move onto Sui in 2025:

Grayscale has launched a Sui trust product, VanEck has issued an ETN, Franklin Templeton is offering a tokenized fund on it, and 21Shares is also applying for related products.

These institutions choose a chain, and the technical maturity is a very important consideration."Full-stack" may sound like a developer concept, but it actually represents the integrity of infrastructure, which provides institutions with a sense of security.

So, with the Sui Stack, you don't need to understand exactly what it is, but it will influence, in ways you may not even notice, what you can use on this chain in the future, your experience, and how many people will be there playing along with you.

For infrastructure, when done well, no one praises it; it's only when problems arise that people criticize it. Yet it is indeed the foundation of everything.

After explaining what Sui is doing, a natural question arises: what makes it different from other public blockchains?

Let's talk about Ethereum first.

Ethereum's strategy can be summarized in four words:Let the ecosystem handle it.

It only manages the execution layer and consensus layer, while everything else is delegated to third parties. For storage, there's Filecoin and Arweave; for scalability, there are L2s like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base; for wallets, there's MetaMask; and for oracles, there's Chainlink.

The advantage of this model is strong ecological diversity, but the disadvantage is severe fragmentation.

You want to build a complete application, which may need to integrate with seven or eight different projects at the same time. Each project has a different documentation style, different update schedules, and it's not always clear who to contact when problems arise.

Let's talk about Solana again.

Solana's strategy is another extreme:Bear everything on your own.No sharding, no L2, just a single chain, pushing performance to the extreme.

The advantage is a unified and fast experience, which users can directly perceive. The disadvantage is that all the pressure is on the main network, and state bloat is a long-term issue. There have been several historical outages. Moreover, since everything is done in-house, if any part of the system encounters a problem, there is no backup solution available.

Sui chose the third path.

It doesn't throw everything to the ecosystem like Ethereum does, nor does it cram everything into a single chain like Solana. Its approach is:

We develop the core components ourselves, but in a modular way. They are officially produced yet maintain a certain level of independence.

Walrus is an independent storage layer but shares validator nodes with Sui; Seal is an independent access control protocol but runs within Sui's smart contracts; Nautilus is an independent off-chain computation platform, but its results can be natively verified by Sui. They form a family, but they are not a monolithic entity.

The gamble of this strategy is that"Developer Experience"It's not about who has the highest TPS, nor is it about who has the most ecosystem projects. Rather, it's about who can enable developers to build a complete application in the least amount of time and with the lowest cognitive load.

So, fundamentally, this is a trade-off: Sui has chosen "integration" at the cost of "flexibility" and "ecosystem diversity."

Whether this approach will add up remains to be seen, but this is the direction Sui is firmly betting on.

But at least in terms of direction, it differentiates itself from Ethereum and Solana, not directly competing with them on the same level.

Three chains, three philosophies, three different experiments. Whether who is right or wrong may take another two or three years to become clear.

The above are the things Sui has already accomplished. Based on these, what exciting developments can we look forward to this year?

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

Core founders such as CEO Evan, CPO Adeniyi, chief cryptographer Kostas, along with DeepBook head Aslan, gathered together for almost an hour to discuss the theme of reviewing 2025 and looking forward to 2026.

There are usually two perspectives on such live streams: one sees it as the official making empty promises, something to just listen to; the other sees it as a rare window for information, revealing what the team is truly thinking.

No matter how you see it, I've already taken a look and found that at least a few key signals can be extracted from it.

The first signal is,"The Year of Experience."

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

The original statement roughly means: "What I can do on Robinhood, I should also be able to do on Sui DeFi. Depositing funds should be simple, payments should be smooth, and our everyday financial life can truly run on-chain."。" translates to

This sounds like a slogan that all public blockchains would claim. However, Sui has made a specific commitment: by 2026,Stablecoin transfers on Sui will be completely free.

Gas-free.

This is not a wallet subsidy, but a change at the protocol layer. If it can truly be implemented, it would mean Sui would have a strong selling point in payment scenarios—free transactions.

Second signal, stillPrivacy.

Adeniyi revealed in a live stream that Sui will support private transactions at the protocol level by 2026. This won't be a private feature of a specific wallet, but rather natively supported across the entire chain.

Chief cryptographer Kostas shared a real example during a live stream: he met a local person in Dubai who wanted to donate to a charity, but didn't want to make the transfer on-chain, because once the transfer was made, everyone could see his actual balance.

"It's going to cause problems here."

Privacy is not something that is "better to have," but rather a prerequisite for widespread adoption. The component Seal mentioned earlier will launch in 2025, and this is precisely preparing for that step.

The third signal,It is a "product-level protocol."

This is a concept repeatedly emphasized by CEO Evan. He said that the focus in 2026 is to "encapsulate" the complexity of underlying technologies, enabling developers to build products directly at a higher abstraction level without needing to understand all the primitives.

It may sound a bit abstract. To put it another way, you don't need to understand the principles of an engine to drive a car. What Sui wants to do is completely separate the act of "building an engine" from "driving a car."

At the end of the live stream, Evan said a sentence as a summary:

"Don't ask us when we'll launch new features. Just watch what we do."

This statement itself reflects the attitude. It is certain that the team views 2026 as a pivotal year, one in which the infrastructure investments made over the previous three years will be transformed into tangible products.

Adeniyi later posted a long article on Twitter titled "2026: Building for What's Inevitable."

It mentions five trends that he believes are "already locked in":

Stablecoins become the default payment channel, DeFi devours traditional finance, privacy becomes standard, automation becomes the default mode, and gaming drives the mainstream adoption of digital ownership.

Then he said that a single L1 public blockchain cannot support the convergence of these trends; a complete technology stack is needed.

This is the underlying logic of the Sui Stack. It identifies certain trends that are bound to happen and then works backward to determine what infrastructure is needed to support them.

Of course, identifying a trend and the trend actually happening are two different things. No one can accurately predict what will happen in 2026. But at least from this live stream and this long article, the team at Sui knows exactly what they're betting on.

Finally, Adeniyi said that these five already-locked trends are not predictions, but directions—things that are bound to happen.

This narrative sounds convincing.

But "inevitability" is a big word. In 2021, many people also believed that the rise of NFTs was "inevitable," and the metaverse was "inevitable." As we all know, things didn't quite turn out that way.

It's not that Sui's judgment is necessarily wrong, but rather that when a team tells you, "We are preparing for inevitability," you have the right to ask:

Why is this matter inevitable?

This question has no answer, and in fact, the execution team does not intend to provide an answer through words either.

Going back to the metaphor of the octagon ring, Sui is still in the ring, still throwing punches.

In 2025, we developed a comprehensive strategy called Sui Stack, and in 2026, we are preparing to launch a campaign focused on "experience."

Whether we can win or not, I don't know. But at least, we know what we're fighting for.

The rest is up to time.