K33: Sui network can become Solana’s main competitor due to technical performance

What’s new? K33 Research believes that the Sui Layer 1 (L1) blockchain, thanks to its high performance, could become a major competitor to Solana and eventually take the position of the best alternative to the Ethereum blockchain. Analyst David Zimmerman pointed out that since the beginning of August, the SOL exchange rate against ETH has grown by 6%, while SUI/SOL shows a growth of 115% over the same period.

K33 report

What else is known? Zimmerman writes that Sui has all the necessary technical capabilities to become a competitor to Solana. Sui’s theoretical maximum throughput is 297 000 transactions per second (TPS), while Solana has 65 000 TPS.

It is worth noting that there is a significant difference between theoretical and actual throughput. For example, in May, aggregator CoinGecko named Solana the fastest blockchain among L1- and L2 networks, its real maximum TPS was 1054. Sui is in second place with a record of 854 TPS, set in July 2023.

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The K33 expert allowed the possibility that Sui created the most impressive technology in this field, and we have yet to see Sui surpass Solana in practice in terms of metrics such as average daily TPS. In his opinion, this could become a reality shortly if Sui continues to attract users and capital to its ecosystem.

This could be facilitated by, among other things, the upcoming SuiPlay0x1 handheld game console from Mysten Labs, Sui’s main developer. It is expected to go on sale in 2025 and will come with a non-fungible token (NFT) called Eternals, which will give users access to exclusive rewards.

Zimmerman compared Sui’s console to Team Solana’s Web3 smartphone Saga, whose owners were given access to participate in numerous airdrops from ecosystem projects. This generated revenue for Saga owners that far exceeds the cost of the device itself. The company also announced the release of a new Saga Chapter 2 smartphone in the first half of 2025.

The analyst is convinced that Sui has a chance to outperform Solana, but Ethereum is not threatened by competition in the near term. He attributed this to the launch of ETH-based spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the United States, which took place on July 23. After that, according to Zimmerman, the market has separated Ethereum into a separate category.

At the same time, the analyst also pointed out the problem with the supply of SUI tokens, which could have an impact on the price in the future. For example, Sui was launched in May 2023, when high fully diluted valuation (FDV) launches became widespread.

Sui is no exception: only 27% of the total supply is outstanding, and current investors could face potentially significant sell-offs when the remaining tokens are unlocked in the future. By comparison, Solana has 80% of its total SOL supply in circulation.

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In early August, crypto investment company Grayscale, an issuer of bitcoin and Ethereum-based spot ETFs, launched a fund based on SUI.

On September 17, Circle announced the launch of its USDC stablecoin on Sui, indicating further adoption and support for the network by key industry players. USDC is the second-largest stablecoin pegged to the US dollar after Tether’s USDT and ranks sixth in the overall cryptocurrency rankings by market capitalization at $35,5 billion.

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Mysten Labs was founded by Meta descendants, with the developers positioning Sui as a competitor to the Aptos blockchain, also created by their former Meta colleagues. Sui, like Aptos, utilizes parallel transaction processing, which allows multiple transactions to be executed simultaneously, improving performance.

SUI is ranked 30th in the overall cryptocurrency ranking with a capitalization of over $3,6 billion and is trading at $1m34, having added 12,3% overnight. The weekly increase was 31,1%, and the asset has risen by 72% since the beginning of the year.