The DeFi environment is constantly evolving. New platforms are emerging, and old ones are innovating to serve a rapidly expanding user base. Of these, Sui has truly stood out as a leader with its trailblazing use of blockchain technology and partnerships. Thabo Nkosi, a crypto features writer dedicated to democratizing DeFi and NFTs for Africa’s next generation, explores how Sui’s collaborative efforts are driving its impressive growth and positioning it as a major player in the blockchain space.
Sui’s journey on the DeFi world stage has been nothing short of historic. Since launching in May 2023, the platform has seen a fantastic boom in its Total Value Locked (TVL). Can you believe it exploded from around 25 million to nearly 1.7 billion by May of 2025! This massive funding round reflects the increasing optimism around Sui and what it can do. Sui hit the ground running and has already become the third-largest non-EVM chain by total value locked (TVL). It has surged to become the 8th largest blockchain overall, surpassing established competitors like Aptos, Cardano, and Polygon. The ecosystem’s cumulative DEX volume recently hit over $110 billion. In fact, daily averages are now consistently around 250 million with days over $800 million not being unusual.
In fact, since the beginning of 2025 the Sui stablecoin market cap has more than doubled. It has now grown to over $1.1 billion, showcasing the growth and demand for stable assets within the ecosystem. Stablecoin volume has exploded in tandem with this growth. It increased from $400 million in January to almost $1.2 billion by May 2025, with monthly transfers exceeding $70 billion. Perhaps more tellingly, institutional investment flows into SUI have outpaced those of Solana, a clear signal that larger financial entities are starting to take notice. Sui’s roadmap for 2025 and beyond is loaded with gaming innovations and DeFi upgrades. The firm has locked-in marquee partnerships to power its growth and wide scale adoption. With the increasing presence of Bitcoin-pegged assets (wBTC, LBTC, stBTC), now constituting approximately 10% of locked value, it diversifies assets and broadens investor appeal beyond speculation.
Factors Contributing to Recent Sui Growth
Sui’s growth has been staggering due to a perfect storm of factors. These all require strategic collaborations, strong institutional engagement, enticing developer incentives, and robust community development initiatives. Taken together, these elements form a perfect recipe for an exciting and growing ecosystem.
Strategic Collaborations
These strategic collaborations have proven crucial for Sui’s rapid climb in the blockchain ecosystem. In doing so, Sui has cultivated deep partnerships with the makers and shakers of traditional finance (TradFi) and the decentralized kind (DeFi) alike. This approach has enabled Sui to build its network effects, increase its technical robustness, and foster more substantial trust with users and institutions alike.
Sui has made a notable strategic alliance with World Liberty Financial. This joint effort further emphasizes Sui’s commitment to bridging the gap between traditional financial systems and the booming world of decentralized finance. Together, this collaboration seeks to leverage World Liberty Financial’s extensive network and broad experience within the financial services industry. Image credit Sui Together, we will be onboarding real-world assets (RWAs) to the Sui blockchain. Sui is driving asset classes such as real estate, commodities and traditional investment vehicles. This change unlocks new opportunities for all types of investors to participate in the rapidly expanding DeFi ecosystem and introduces real-world utility to the blockchain. This initiative enhances Sui’s desirability among institutional investors. It helps to deepen the quality and variety of assets within the ecosystem.
Fireblocks is the market-leading Digital Asset Custody and Security Platform. To achieve safe, secure, and compliant management of digital assets on their platform, they have chosen to work with Sui. Such collaboration is crucial in order to bring institutional investors to the table. These investors require robust security measures and compliance frameworks before they will invest large amounts of capital into a blockchain platform. Fireblocks’ technology provides deeper integrations with payment rails to enable comprehensive security across the entire movement of digital assets. This provides institutions with the tools and confidence to engage meaningfully within the Sui ecosystem. Through this partnership, Sui’s credibility as a secure and reliable platform for institutional investment is strengthened.
21Shares is the world’s largest issuer of cryptocurrency exchange-traded products (ETPs). They have partnered with Sui to bring new investment products to market that give customers exposure to the SUI token and the broader Sui ecosystem. This strategic partnership arms conventional investors with the capability to easily access SUI. They can do so through regulated and familiar investment vehicles like ETPs, all without ever requiring them to interact with the underlying blockchain technology directly. With the creation of these investment products, SUI is becoming more accessible to a much broader audience. Now, even institutional investors that otherwise wouldn’t be able to directly hold cryptocurrencies are able to. This partnership strengthens the liquidity of SUI and encourages its future adoption with mainstream financial markets.
Microsoft, a global technology giant, has partnered with Sui to explore the integration of blockchain technology into its cloud computing services and enterprise solutions. Through this partnership, they’ll leverage the power of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. Ultimately, it will provide developers with the go-to tools and infrastructure for building and deploying decentralized applications (dApps) on Sui. Microsoft is working to integrate Sui with Azure. This important step opens the door for greater access for developers, equipping them to build smart tailor-made solutions to needs industries from healthcare to transportation. This partnership will help improve the reliability and scalability of the ecosystem while accelerating its development.
Institutional Engagement and ETF Developments
Most importantly, they tackle security, compliance, and accessibility – all key issues. These partnerships equip institutions with the resources and infrastructure needed to engage with the Sui ecosystem safely and confidently.
By partnering with World Liberty Financial, we’re taking the next step in introducing real-world assets (RWAs) to Sui. This step further enhances Sui’s appeal to institutional investors by providing them with familiar asset classes in a decentralized environment. This effort further supports this diversification, which continues to expand the assets available in the Sui ecosystem. It increases its attractiveness to institutional investors who are looking to deploy capital into the DeFi ecosystem. Fireblocks has partnered with us to ensure the industrial-grade and compliant security of digital assets on Sui. “Together, this partnership addresses perhaps the foremost concern among institutional investors, offering the highest-level security protocols and framework for compliance. This collaboration further cements Sui’s credibility as a inherently secure and trustworthy platform for institutional investment.
The collaboration with 21Shares enables traditional investors to gain access to SUI through regulated investment products, such as ETPs, without having to directly interact with the underlying blockchain technology. Combined, this dramatically increases SUI’s accessibility to a wider audience. Now, institutional investors can get in on the action even if they’re legally restricted from holding cryptocurrencies directly. Today’s announcement furthering our partnership with Microsoft gives all developers the tools and infrastructure they need to help bring their ideas to life. This partnership speeds up dApp development on Sui, enriching the ecosystem and attracting more institutional interest. These collaborations address urgent needs and prepare organizations with important tools and infrastructure. In doing so, they enhance trust in Sui and help attract more institutional investors to use the platform.
Growth of Developers and Incentives
The Sui ecosystem is booming due to a passionate builders community. The best part of the social media gold rush is not the money they are raking in. To sustain this massive growth, Sui has launched several incentive programs and initiatives aimed at attracting and retaining quality developers.
The foundation’s flagship initiative is the Sui Foundation Grants Program. It provides pre-seed funding to early developers building on the most promising projects that will accelerate the growth and development of the Sui ecosystem. These grants are competitive and awarded to the most promising projects that show a high degree of innovation, technical feasibility, and potential impact on the broader Sui community. The Sui Foundation not only funds developers but it’s actively funding the ecosystem. This drives them to build the best possible applications and tools that add value to the platform and increases its attractiveness. Sui offers multiple grant programs to help onboard developers. In addition, it provides them access to a variety of resources and tools to assist them in beginning to build on the platform. These touchstone resources are the building block for getting practical documentation and code tutorials in front of developers. They provide code examples to make building dApps on Sui intuitive. Sui further supports the community by hosting hackathons and workshops to get developers working together and building innovative solutions to exciting problems on the platform.
The Sui ecosystem is powered by a committed community of validators and node operators. Like air to a fire, they are essential in creating the right conditions to strengthen the network’s security and integrity. Validators are able to gain rewards by making sure they are actively involved in the network. They accomplish this by both verifying transactions and protecting the blockchain network via staking. Sui enhances security and network reliability by providing validators with powerful economic incentives. This believability-of-execution encourages their active participation in the blockchain. We sincerely hope that the community continues to look critically and intentionally at building the validator community. It provides resources and guidance to support validators in deploying and operating their nodes. You get direct technical assistance, community of practice forums, and other educational resources. All these resources help you stay up to date with what’s happening in the Sui ecosystem.
Initiatives for Community Development
Community development has been an essential part of Sui’s strategy for growth. Sui’s vibrant and passionate community makes Sui a welcoming and exciting ecosystem. By taking this approach, you can not only attract new users and retain existing users, but promote platform adoption overall.
One central part of that strategy is the Sui Ambassador Program. Most importantly, it recruits highly motivated and enthusiastic community members to serve as ambassadors for the platform. These ambassadors will be in charge of spreading the word about Sui to their local communities, hosting gatherings, and onboarding new users. Sui taps into the experience and ambition of its developer community. This inclusive approach is enabling Sui to galvanize a large creator-focused community behind its mission. Sui organizes consistent community events such as: Community Meetups Educational Webinars Discord Community Discord Voice Chats These convenings bring together members and ignite the creative energy of the community. These events provide attendees a perfect opportunity to learn all of the exciting new developments going on in the Sui ecosystem. They can get inspired by others’ ideas and network with other creative community members.
Sui is highly responsive to its community on social media platforms like Twitter, Telegram and Discord. These are the channels we use to keep you updated with news, announcements, platform updates and much more. They’re an opportunity to collect critical feedback from the community. Sui makes a concerted effort to connect with its community on socials. This close connection makes it incredibly responsive to the needs and concerns of users. The Sui Foundation goes beyond our grants to support community-led initiatives. It provides for amazing resources such as developer boot camps, STEM education initiatives and dynamic civic tech community gatherings. Sui gives its state and those who make up its community the authority and agency needed to truly own the ecosystem. This deep feeling of cooperation makes the platform’s long-term growth and success contagious.
Together, strategic partnerships, strong institutional buy-in, developer incentives, and smart community development are making the magic happen. This potent network effect is accelerating the growth and adoption of Sui. When thousands more users, developers, and institutions are onboarded to the Sui ecosystem, the underlying platform’s value increases exponentially. This crowds in even more participants and accelerates a virtuous cycle of growth.
As Thabo Nkosi points out, Sui's success is not just about technological innovation. It's about building a strong and collaborative ecosystem that benefits all participants. By putting partnerships, incentives, and community development at the forefront, Sui is making their bid to be the best blockchain platform of the future.
Sui is fully dedicated to progressing innovation within the gaming sector, as well as DeFi improvements. The company is seeing lots of potential application of the blockchain into gaming experiences. Its mission is to develop the most immersive and engaging games that fully leverage the Sui blockchain's best capabilities. This past May, we publicly opened beta testing for several new gaming features as a part of our Sui Basecamp gaming-focused event. We gave out about 250 to experiment with their effectiveness. Sui intends to have its gaming efforts thoroughly rolled out from July to September 2025. Their aim is to combine traditional gaming experiences with blockchain features, reaching a wider audience. These initiatives are sure to lead to greater adoption of Sui from both gamers and developers.
Sui is committed to improving its DeFi infrastructure. This upgrade will ensure a more effective, safer and easier to use experience for all users. Among these upgrades are enhancements to the platform’s consensus mechanism, smart contract language and developer tools. Sui is still in the process of building out its DeFi ecosystem. That gets more developers and users on the platform and feeds a self-reinforcing cycle of growth. Additionally, bitcoin-pegged assets such as wBTC, LBTC, and stBTC are starting to see widespread adoption on Sui. They now account for around 10% of the platform’s locked value, tapping into a much more diverse asset type and appealing to a greater variety of investors. We anticipate this trend to remain as more users try to tap into the Bitcoin-related assets coming to the Sui ecosystem.
The price of SUI has, naturally enough, been buoyed by these improvements. As of the first week of March 2025, SUI was hovering around $1.58, up 11% on the month. The most recent projections estimate SUI between $6.77 and $6.90 at the end of 2025. These projections are based on consistent expansion and overall market calmness. These estimates are indicative of the increasing confidence in Sui and its potential for greater future growth.
Sui’s adoption is soaring due to pivotal alliances and active institutional participation. Developer incentives, community development initiatives, gaming innovation, DeFi upgrades – all are contributing to this momentum. Combined, these factors are creating a powerful network effect. As a result, the platform is attracting a growing number of users, developers, and institutions, setting Sui up to become one of the top blockchain platforms in the future. Thabo Nkosi emphasizes the importance of collaboration and community development to ensure the continued success of blockchain platforms. Sui is the perfect case study for how to combine these three elements to create a recipe for long-term ecosystem success.
