What Is Sui? Object Model, SUI Token and Staking Explained

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Sui is a layer-1 blockchain that has been running on mainnet since May 3, 2023 and was developed by the US company Mysten Labs. Its token is called SUI, and supply is capped at ten billion. What sets Sui apart from older networks is its data model: the blockchain does not store account balances but individual objects, each with its own ID, owner and version number. Transactions that involve different objects can therefore be processed in parallel.

For investors, Sui is no longer a niche project. According to CoinGecko data, the token ranked 29th among the largest cryptocurrencies on Sunday, November 8, at around €0.76 per SUI and a market capitalisation of just over €3.1 billion. If you want to put the price trend into context, our Sui price prediction sets out scenarios and drivers. This profile instead explains how the network works technically, what the token is used for, which risks are known, and what applies to buying and taxation in Germany.

Sui explained: the Mysten Labs layer-1 blockchain since May 2023

A layer-1 blockchain is a standalone network with its own validators, its own consensus and its own token, rather than an extension built on top of another blockchain. Ethereum and Solana also belong to this group. Sui is a smart contract platform: developers publish programs on it that manage tokens, issue loans, represent in-game items or process payments.

Three features define the project. First, the object-centric data model, described in more detail below. Second, the Move programming language, originally created for Meta's Diem project. Third, a fee model that charges separately for computation and permanent storage. Together they are meant to deliver high throughput and low latency, meaning many transactions per second with a short wait until confirmation.

Mysten Labs markets Sui mainly for applications in which many users trigger small actions at the same time: gaming, digital collectibles as NFTs, stablecoin payments and decentralised finance (DeFi). Whether the network fills that role over time depends less on the technology than on whether users and developers stay. More on that later.

Who is behind Sui: Mysten Labs and the legacy of the Diem project

Mysten Labs was founded in 2021 by former members of the Novi research division, who had designed the Diem blockchain and the Move language at Meta (then Facebook). Diem itself never launched: the company abandoned the stablecoin project after pushback from regulators and sold the technology in early 2022. Its ideas lived on in several successors, besides Sui above all Aptos, which also uses Move.

The founders of Mysten Labs are Evan Cheng (CEO), Sam Blackshear, who led the development of Move, Adeniyi Abiodun, George Danezis and Kostas Chalkias. Danezis is a cryptographer and was previously a professor at University College London. The founders therefore come from research rather than from the world of token projects, which sets Sui apart from many competitors.

Alongside Mysten Labs there is the Sui Foundation, which supports the ecosystem, awards grants to developers and manages part of the tokens. This dual structure matters for investors, because the company and the foundation together control a large share of the SUI not yet in circulation.

Sui's object model: objects instead of account balances

Most blockchains keep accounts with a key-value store. A transfer changes two balances, and every transaction has to know where it stands in sequence relative to all the others. Sui takes a different approach. According to its technical documentation, every resource, every asset and every piece of data on the blockchain is an object.

Each object has four components: a globally unique identifier (ID), an owner, a version number that increases with every change, and metadata such as the digest of the last transaction that used the object. A token balance, an NFT or an in-game item is thus a record of its own and not just a number in a large table.

Which forms of ownership exist

The documentation distinguishes several forms. An address-owned object belongs to exactly one address, such as the SUI in your wallet. A shared object can be used by anyone, such as a liquidity pool on a decentralised exchange. An immutable object belongs to no one and can be neither changed nor deleted; published program packages, for example, are treated this way. There are also wrapped objects that sit inside other objects.

The practical advantage: when two users each move only their own objects, their transactions do not touch. The network does not have to weigh them against each other. A fixed order is only needed when several transactions access the same shared object.

Parallel transaction processing and the Mysticeti consensus

A consensus mechanism is the procedure by which the nodes of a network agree on which transactions are valid and in what order they apply. Sui uses a protocol called Mysticeti for this. It is built on a directed acyclic graph (DAG): several validators propose blocks at the same time, rather than only one taking its turn. According to the Sui documentation, Mysticeti needs only three message rounds to commit a block.

A transaction becomes valid when validators with more than two thirds of the voting power approve it. This threshold makes the network Byzantine fault tolerant: it keeps working correctly as long as less than a third of the voting power fails or behaves maliciously. Finality, the point after which a transaction can no longer be reversed, is reached as soon as a majority of validators has confirmed the result. Nobody has to wait for additional confirmations as on older networks.

The validators do not rotate constantly. Sui divides time into epochs of around 24 hours. Within an epoch, the validator set and their voting weights stay the same. At the boundary between two epochs, the protocol distributes staking rewards, sets the reference price for fees and admits new validators. Scalability therefore comes not from a single trick but from the interplay of the object model, parallel execution and a consensus that processes many proposals at once.

The Move programming language: why Sui builds on Diem technology

Move is a programming language for smart contracts that treats assets as distinct data types. A token in Move cannot be copied or deleted by accident, because the language only permits such operations on assets when the code explicitly allows them. In Solidity, Ethereum's language, a token is usually just an entry in a table, and mistakes in handling it are among the most common causes of hacks.

Sui uses its own version called Sui Move, tailored to the object model: in Move, an object is created as a data structure with a unique ID as its first field. Programs are published as packages and are immutable afterwards. Anyone deploying a new version publishes a new package, and the old one remains visible on the blockchain.

For developers, this cuts both ways. Move is considered safer and easier to audit than older languages. At the same time, the number of experienced Move programmers is far smaller than that of Solidity developers, and programs cannot be ported from Ethereum without rework. That slows the arrival of large applications already running on other networks. Move does not protect against every error either: the attack on the Cetus exchange in May 2025, described further below, exploited a calculation error in a helper library, according to analyses by security firms.

The SUI token: gas, staking, governance and a ten billion cap

According to the tokenomics documentation, the SUI token has four functions. You use SUI to pay transaction fees, known as gas. You can delegate SUI to validators and so take part in proof of stake. SUI serves as a liquid means of payment and collateral in applications. And SUI entitles you to vote on the protocol, for example on upgrades.

Supply: 4.1 of 10 billion SUI in circulation

Total supply is capped at 10,000,000,000 SUI. According to CoinGecko, around 4.14 billion SUI were in circulation in early November, or about 41 percent. The rest is released over several years on fixed schedules, for example to early employees, investors in the funding rounds, the community reserve and for staking subsidies. The cliff for early investors ended in May 2024; since then, new tokens have been added every month. How differently various trackers report these releases is shown in our article on the Sui token unlock from October.

There was no airdrop at launch. Mysten Labs says it decided this deliberately because free distributions attract scammers. Instead, interested buyers could acquire tokens before launch through a public sale programme.

Staking via delegated proof of stake

Sui uses delegated proof of stake (DPoS): token holders delegate their SUI to validators who run the network. Validators lock the stake for one epoch at a time and earn rewards from fees and staking subsidies, which they pass on to delegators minus their commission. Each validator sets its own commission and can change it for the next epoch without prior notice. Rewards are only paid for epochs in which the stake was fully active.

If you want your SUI back, you send a transaction that dissolves the stake object. Principal and accrued rewards then come back as SUI. Staking subsidies are meant to phase out in the long run once the entire supply is in circulation. At that point, only fees will fund the rewards. Where staking is possible via exchanges or platforms, and how much commission providers keep, varies widely.

Transaction fees and the storage fund: who pays for permanent data

The fee for a Sui transaction has two parts: computation costs and storage costs. Computation costs are the computation units used multiplied by the gas price. The minimum price, called the reference price, is agreed by the validators at the start of each epoch. This means you know roughly in advance what a transaction will cost, instead of bidding against other users for space in the next block. Fees are settled in MIST, the smallest unit: one SUI equals one billion MIST.

Storage costs flow into the storage fund. This fund solves a problem many blockchains have: whoever creates data today pays once, but validators have to keep that data for years. On Sui, the storage fund is part of the total stake, so it earns rewards itself, and these rewards go to the validators to compensate for their storage costs.

If you delete data again, you get most of the storage fee back. According to the documentation, 99.99 percent of the storage fee is currently refundable, and only 0.01 percent is retained permanently. For applications with many short-lived objects, such as games, this lowers transaction costs markedly on balance.

One feature aimed at newcomers is zkLogin. It lets you derive a Sui address from an existing login with a provider such as Google, Facebook, Apple or Twitch, without having to write down a seed phrase. A zero-knowledge proof confirms to the blockchain that the login is genuine without revealing the login data itself. According to the documentation, these four providers are enabled on mainnet.

Convenience comes at a price, however: if you lose your account with the login provider, you may also lose access to the wallet, depending on the app. For larger amounts, classic self-custody with your own seed phrase remains the more robust solution. Which software wallets support Sui changes regularly. Phantom, for example, ended Sui support in 2026, as we reported in August in our piece on the end of Sui support at Phantom. Our software wallet comparison provides an up-to-date overview.

The Sui ecosystem: DeFi, stablecoins and gaming in numbers

How alive a blockchain is shows in the capital that users actually deploy there. According to data from the analytics service DefiLlama, around $0.44 billion was locked in DeFi applications on Sui in early November. That ranks the network 15th among all blockchains. For comparison, Ethereum held just over $43 billion and Solana around $5.2 billion. Sui also hosted stablecoins worth just over $520 million.

The well-known application categories include decentralised exchanges, lending protocols, liquid staking providers and games. Sui also hosts projects for decentralised data storage and for loans against deposited crypto assets. For you as an investor, this mainly means that the ecosystem is small compared with the large networks, and individual applications account for a large share of activity. If one of them fails, the whole network feels the consequences.

The price reflects this situation. SUI hit its all-time high of $5.35 on January 4, 2025. In early November 2026, the token was around 84 percent below that level, having lost about 60 percent within a year and around 20 percent within 30 days. How strongly the price reacts to market swings is shown, for example, by the daily loss of 9.5 percent on November 5.

Risks with Sui: token unlocks, the Cetus hack and the question of decentralisation

The first risk is supply. Almost 59 percent of total supply is not yet in circulation. Every release increases the tradable amount, and when recipients sell, that weighs on the price. The releases run well into the 2030s.

The second risk was shown by the attack on the decentralised exchange Cetus on May 22, 2025. According to the project, an attacker made off with around $223 million. Validators froze most of it, about $162 million, the same day by ignoring transactions from the attacker's addresses. A week later, validators voted with around 91 percent in favour of transferring the frozen funds to a trust account for reimbursement, as the trade publication The Block reported.

That was good for those affected. For assessing the network, however, it raises a fundamental question: if a majority of validators can block addresses and move balances, the blockchain is less neutral than a network in which this is practically impossible. Critics have since accused Sui of being too centralised. Supporters counter that exactly this ability to act protected users. Both views belong in the assessment.

The third risk is competition. Sui competes with Solana, Aptos and Ethereum's layer-2 networks for the same developers and users. Technical advantages alone rarely decide this contest; network effects and liquidity often weigh more.

Buying, storing and paying tax on Sui in Germany

SUI can be traded on many large crypto exchanges that accept customers in Germany. The EU's MiCA crypto regulation has applied since the end of 2024. Providers that trade or hold crypto assets for customers in the EU need authorisation to do so; the transition period for providers already operating has expired in Germany. When you buy, check whether the exchange has such authorisation, how high trading and withdrawal fees are, and whether you can withdraw SUI directly to your own wallet.

For tax purposes, the same rules apply to SUI as to other crypto assets. Gains from a sale are tax-free under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act if more than one year passes between purchase and sale. Within that period, gains are taxable, subject to an exemption threshold of €1,000 a year for all private sales transactions combined. Staking rewards are taxable on receipt as other income under Section 22 No. 3 of the Income Tax Act, where the exemption threshold is €256 a year. In its letter of March 6, 2025, the Federal Ministry of Finance confirmed that staking does not extend the holding period for the coins used to ten years. Because every epoch generates new rewards with their own acquisition date, a tax tool that records these inflows automatically is worthwhile.

Sui token: only 41 percent of supply is in circulation

Technically, Sui is one of the most distinctive networks among the younger blockchains: objects instead of accounts, parallel processing, Move as a safe language and a storage fund for permanent data. Set against this are a comparatively small ecosystem, ongoing token releases and an open debate about decentralisation. If you want to buy SUI, you can proceed as follows:

Choose an authorised exchange: compare providers with a MiCA licence that offer SUI against the euro in our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.
Decide on custody: for larger amounts, a hardware wallet that supports Sui is suitable; models and prices are in our hardware wallet comparison.
Document taxes from the start: a program from our comparison of crypto tax tools records purchases, sales and every staking payout.

(As of November 8, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Frequently asked questions about Sui

Sui is a layer-1 blockchain from Mysten Labs that has been running since May 2023. Its SUI token is used to pay fees, for staking and for votes on the protocol.

On November 8, 2026, one SUI cost around €0.76 according to CoinGecko. The all-time high was $5.35 in January 2025, and the price is highly volatile.

Total supply is capped at ten billion SUI. In early November 2026, around 4.14 billion were in circulation, and the rest will be released gradually over years.

Sui stores data as objects with their own ID instead of as account balances. Transactions involving different objects can therefore be processed in parallel. Developers write programs in the Move language.

That depends on whether developers and users stay on the network. In Sui's favour are its technology and a growing stablecoin base; against it are ongoing token releases, a small ecosystem and the debate about decentralisation after the Cetus hack.

Transparency note: This article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by our editorial team before publication. All figures and claims were checked against the primary sources linked in the text. The feature image was generated with AI.

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