I think Sui is finished as an investment, and I have never bought it. That is my opinion, not financial advice. I hold a large amount of Internet Computer Protocol, so weigh my view with that bias in mind. What follows is my full record on Sui, from my 2024 review to my October 2026 letter to holders, so you can check my reasoning yourself.
The short version is that I agree with Sui's vision and disagree that Sui can deliver it. If you bought Sui because you believe blockchain should change the internet, I understand, because I believe the same thing. My problem is that a blockchain that mostly moves tokens around does not replace Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or the databases and servers running today's websites. A better internet needs computation, storage, websites, applications, authentication, and communication in one stack. In my analysis, Sui does not have that stack, and ICP already does.
My newest post, Dear Sui Holders, You Deserve Better, is the gentler version of my case. I start with the 40 million transactions per second record Sui announced in October 2026, which came from operations inside off-chain tunnels that settle to the chain, not from 40 million real transactions on mainnet. The same month, Sui's mainnet recorded about 40 million transactions in a whole day, roughly 460 a second, with around $500 million in DeFi TVL and daily fees that would round to zero next to Base, Robinhood Chain, Solana, or Ethereum. The benchmark was real, but I do not see what real-world problem it solves.
Then I show what I think a complete stack actually looks like, using my own website. jerrybanfield.com is served from canister smart contracts on ICP, with the front end and back end on chain and no conventional cloud server. Visitors pay nothing to use it because of the reverse gas model; I pay a tiny amount of cycles, which are created by burning ICP. I sign in and administer it through Internet Identity, which is built into the protocol. The store takes credit cards and crypto through the same checkout; while I was recording, one buyer paid 20 ICP for one of my physical Internet Computer coins right after another paid by card. I sell pay-gated games, vlogs, audiobooks, and courses there, and I deploy updates from the command line with Claude. In my view, none of that can be built on Sui, and the Sui stack of Walrus, Walrus Sites, Seal, and Nautilus is a scattered set of pieces rather than one integrated on-chain computer.
The tokenomics make the gap worse for me. Only about 41% of Sui's 10 billion supply was circulating when I wrote the letter, with most of the rest locked and largely held by insiders, while Sui's market cap was about twice ICP's and its fully diluted valuation about five times. ICP's seed unlocks are finished. I also see Sui squeezed from both directions: if technology matters, ICP wins, and if it does not, Ethereum Layer 2s like Base and Robinhood Chain already have the institutions and the money. I do not see a scenario where Sui wins either lane. I am not telling anyone to sell; I am inviting Sui holders to investigate the technology and visit a site that runs on ICP.
My view did not start this gently. In my 2024 review, I argued that Sui was a fake Web3 copycat on its way to zero. The first problem was a $9 billion fully diluted market cap against a $2 billion market cap, with only about a quarter of the supply out and massive unlocks ahead. The second was the Web3 claim itself: NFTs on Sui pointed to images hosted off chain on IPFS, often resolving back to Amazon, which to me meant no real on-chain ownership. I also walked through the Sui dashboard, where 38 million NFTs were counted by a definition that included any object with an image URL, and the 125 transactions per second I measured compared poorly with the thousands I saw on ICP. And I could not find a single named engineer or council member on the Sui Foundation site.
In 2024 I focused on dilution, off-chain NFTs, and transparency. By 2026 my objection had sharpened into one question: does Sui have the full technology stack its vision requires? My answer is still no, and my examples are no longer theoretical, because I run my business on the alternative every day.
Below this opening you will find a contents list and then the full text of both posts, newest first. If you hold Sui and want a second set of eyes on your own position, I offer a personal video review of the coins you hold, and I will send you a personalized video back.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- Dear Sui Holders, You Deserve Better (October 22, 2026)
- Sui (SUI) Crypto Review: Why I Think This Fake Web3 Copycat Is Going to Zero (June 14, 2024)
Dear Sui Holders, You Deserve Better
From my video published October 22, 2026.
This one goes out to anybody holding Sui today. Let me see if I can talk to you for a minute, because I have a message that I think is important, and I'm going to try to make it more entertaining and educational than almost anything else you've seen in the crypto space. I'm Jerry Banfield and I review cryptos, so let me talk to you directly.
Dear Sui holders
Dear Sui holders, I get why you're excited. If you bought Sui, it's probably because you believe blockchain is supposed to change the internet. I understand that, because I believe it too. (And yes, the shirt I'm wearing while I say this is also for sale on my website.) You heard about incredibly fast transactions, near-instant finality, cheap fees, gaming, AI agents, a whole new internet running on blockchain. You've seen impressive branding, big announcements, partnerships, and record-breaking transaction numbers. These are exciting ideas, and I agree with the vision.
My problem isn't with what Sui is promising. My problem is that I don't think Sui is the best technology to deliver it, and I don't think they can actually deliver on most of their promises. So I want to show you something, because I know if you're in Sui you must like excitement. You must want the best. That's why you would buy it, right? Let me show you something I think is much more exciting.
The 40 million transactions per second marketing
Sui's 40 million transactions per second marketing was a little ridiculous. Can we agree on that? On October 7, 2026, Sui announced a record of more than 40 million transactions per second. It sounds unbelievable, and there's a very important detail behind it. Those were operations happening inside off-chain tunnels, not 40 million individual transactions executing on Sui mainnet every second. Tunnels are programmable off-chain channels that periodically settle their results to Sui. This was a deliberately organized, high-stress demonstration designed to produce extraordinary transaction throughput. The results were independently verified, but that doesn't make it equivalent to people actually doing this on the blockchain.
A controlled benchmark can genuinely show technical capability without demonstrating that there's a real use case, or that this is even the best blockchain to do it on. It is good marketing. But what we need to do is make the distinction between what a blockchain can do and how many people are actually using it. Go check the explorer and see how many people are using it. If you're a Sui investor, shouldn't you want to know the difference? Sui proved it could generate a lot of operations, but it didn't do it on the real blockchain, and it didn't prove that what Sui does actually adds value to the blockchain.
What Sui is actually doing today
So let's look at what Sui is actually doing. I have to mess around in these reviews so they are fun, because I cannot bore you. Aren't you bored watching most crypto videos? I can't stand to watch most of them. So I pulled up the live analytics on Sui, the transactions over the last 24 hours, seven days, and 30 days, and I'll give you the summary, because if I had to guess, you're thinking, "Bro, I'm driving a truck right now. Just do it for me." Okay, I'll do it for you. And if you want me to do more for you, go to jerrybanfield.com.
Before I do, a quick aside: you can schedule a call with me, and at the time I recorded this I had only one or two of the physical Internet Computer coins left that I was selling before the first edition was gone forever. I pulled one out of my pocket on camera. People were buying these like crazy, and I'm keeping one for myself. You can see the coins here.
Now, the numbers. Around October 22, Sui had about 40 million recorded mainnet transactions over an entire day. That's an average of around 460 transactions a second, which is very different from 40 million per second. Do you see it? They did 40 million over a whole day. That's what they actually do today. Forty million for a whole day, not in one second.
Next, examine the chain fees, decentralized exchange volume, active users, and total value locked. Sui has about $500 million in DeFi TVL and approximately $31K in daily fees. It's not zero, but it would round to zero compared to Robinhood Chain, wouldn't it? It would round to zero compared to Base, wouldn't it? It would be practically zero compared to Solana, and a rounding error on Ethereum. So you have this kind of marketing, and then you go look at the numbers, and these are not exactly internet-changing figures. The question is whether there is technology to support the marketing narrative. And to me, the biggest question of all is: what real-world problem is this record addressing? I don't care how many transactions you can generate in a demo. As I argued in Crypto Market Caps Are a Distraction. Only ICP Is Real, the numbers that get promoted are usually not the numbers that matter.
Why you probably got into Sui
I'm trying to stay on point here, so I've got a few talking points rather than just randomly ranting. Here is the key thing. I imagine you got into Sui because you believe blockchain is the future. And that's true. It is. And Sui sounds like water in Japanese, so that must be the future, right? Look at their branding. Look at the founder out there, and you're proud of him because you hold the coin. Well, let's talk about what you probably got interested in, and let's get real now.
You probably got into Sui because you're imagining a decentralized internet where people control their own applications, money, and data. You want technology that can compete with the companies running today's internet. But here's the question: why are we still so focused on transaction speeds? A blockchain processing transfers doesn't automatically replace Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, traditional databases, or the infrastructure running modern websites. A better internet needs computation, storage, websites, applications, authentication, and communication. That's what you actually need. It needs a complete tech stack.
Because Bitcoin already sends transactions. Ethereum is already utterly dominant for getting everybody involved with branding, with Base and Robinhood Chain and everything else, and probably Fidelity and everybody else will just come out with their own Ethereum Layer 2 and do all the same stuff they're doing right now on Ethereum Layer 2s. I shared how that shift changed my thinking in Robinhood Chain Changed How I See the Future of Crypto. We can't even handle any more Ethereum Layer 2s. So why do we need Sui? Does Sui truly stand out among the Ethereum-killer blockchains? If it had a complete technology stack, it would. But it doesn't.
And is there anything else that might have a complete technology stack? If nothing else existed, then maybe Sui could get there in my mind. But if Sui is going to truly be a next-generation blockchain, it needs more than a marketing demo of transactions per second. It needs a real technology stack. This is the most important point I can make, the biggest thing you need to know about in crypto that almost nobody talks about, which is why I talk about it. And this is where I believe Sui's entire investment thesis falls apart.
If you love Sui's vision, wait till you see ICP
Yes, it's the bait and switch. If you love Sui's vision, wait till you see ICP. Hey, crypto investors, wait till you see ICP. I actually have a song about this that I can't even play in my own video, because it would get claimed by my own music. If you search for "Wait and See ICP," it's on my trap album. It goes a little like the Whisper Song by the Ying Yang Twins: "Hey, crypto investor, let me whisper in your ear. Tell you something you might like to hear. Let me check your wallet and see if it's hot. How many altcoins you actually got?" Yeah, I do trap music, whatever. I had to go like my own song while I was at it.
So if you love Sui's vision, then you are going to absolutely love Internet Computer Protocol. I can't handle the truth being hidden, so here it is. If you love Sui, wait till you see ICP. The technology is what got me so excited about blockchain infrastructure in the first place, and I laid out that excitement in Why I'm Bullish on the Internet Computer (ICP) Despite the Price. Instead of focusing on moving tokens around like most coins do, ICP is built to run software and services directly on blockchain infrastructure: websites, apps, everything.
I tried to get paid to say this, and I couldn't. So I'm just telling you because it's the best information out there, and I figure in the long run giving you the best information works out well for me. At the time I recorded this, there were only two of those physical coins left, and they say Internet Computer on them, so I might have to make a new version if they're all sold by the time you get to the website. My website at jerrybanfield.com is hosted directly on Internet Computer Protocol.
What you can't do on Sui
Here's the thing: you can't host a website on Sui. Do you understand? I'm saying you cannot host a website on Sui, and I'm saying I host a full website on ICP. While I was recording this, somebody dropped 20 ICP to buy one of those coins, paid straight on my website in ICP. And what's amazing is that the person before him paid with a credit card to buy the same coin. Same checkout, same website. I've got crypto payments. I've got cards. I've got vlogs. I've got games. I have audiobooks. I've got courses. ICP's tech is next generation. If you got into Sui for next-gen tech, ICP makes Sui look like it's stuck in 2016.
On ICP, applications can run with the same code, with their front end and back end hosted on ICP, rather than requiring conventional cloud servers. Sui cannot do that. So many technical advances had to be made to make this possible, and it makes so many other things possible. For example, I can build a game, take payment for it, and pay-gate it fully on chain on my website, like my Jerry Banfield Top Fan game, my Jerry Banfield Meme Coin Dynasty game, and my Jerry Banfield Infinite Momentum game. You can't build stuff like that on Sui. I walked through exactly how the hosting side works in Build and Host a Website on ICP With AI: Cost and Setup. And I have direct messages. If you buy anything on my website, you can DM me and use the chat room for life. I have direct messages in a chat room on jerrybanfield.com.
This is why ICP is important, and this is what Sui can't do. ICP's canister smart contracts can serve websites directly to users. Sui can't do that. Applications on ICP use the reverse gas model, which means you don't have to pay ICP to use my website.
Nobody who uses my website pays ICP unless they want to buy something. I just pay a tiny, tiny amount of cycles, which are burned. Cycles are created when you burn ICP, and that is what powers my website. When you visit it, it uses a tiny amount of cycles. I explained how that burn works, and whether it's real, in Internet Computer (ICP) Burn and Revenue: Is It Real? In my experience, it's the best web hosting infrastructure in the world.
ICP scales horizontally instead of running a demo
ICP, unlike Sui, is set up to scale horizontally. In theory, ICP could constantly do 40 million transactions a second right now, simply by expanding the cloud engines and adding more and more node providers, because the architecture is already built to scale out. It doesn't have to do a marketing demo. It constantly does more transactions a second than Sui does all day, every day. And ICP's transactions are not just sending one tiny bit of Sui from one account to another. They're serving my website and powering my business.
Now, ICP doesn't have unlimited capacity, but this architecture is the best I see anywhere, both in terms of real use today and the real possibility of making capacity practically infinite. These are not roadmap ideas. This is a technical reality that is powering my website right now. Sui wants to impress you with how many transactions it can process. ICP is working on replacing the entire infrastructure of the internet. Which of those do you think is a bigger market cap in the future?
That's why I have three coins in my portfolio. One is ICP, my largest position. Two is my JBBJ coin on ICP, my first meme coin on ICP. And three, I made a Jerry meme coin on Robinhood, and I've lost thousands of dollars on that so far. But I mention it every day in a video, so maybe it'll be more than a 50K market cap one day. We shall see. I break down the whole position in Internet Computer (ICP) Portfolio: What I Hold and Why I Keep Buying.
The Sui stack: Walrus, Seal, and Nautilus
Here's the thing. Sui is going around marketing itself like it's ICP. It markets its broader ecosystem as the Sui stack. That includes Walrus for decentralized storage, and honestly, Walrus for branding? Come on. I get it when the brand is water, but okay, Walrus sounds fat, which I guess is nice for decentralized storage. Then there are Walrus Sites for websites, Seal for access control, and Nautilus for off-chain computation. They're really leaning into the nautical theme.
But this is a very bad system compared to Internet Computer Protocol running everything fully on one single blockchain. To me it's a disaster. You're not going to build things and have AI use all of this. It's marketing that they're even talking about these pieces as a stack. They have legitimate uses, but Walrus, Walrus Sites, and Nautilus are marketing noise. They're a mess that, in my opinion, no sane developer who wasn't getting paid would build on. Sui has to coordinate all of this architecture, but it isn't running on an integrated on-chain computing environment.
You can't just have something like OpenAI set up a system to deploy websites straight to Sui. On ICP, I use Claude, and it just fires my website straight to the ICP blockchain. Sui's setup is such a mess that AI would not be able to build on it well. The more your system is scattered all over the place, with all these different pieces, all these different weaknesses, and separate systems, the less it's better than what we already have. ICP has everything in one setup: persistent data, code, and computation all in the same place. That matters more every month, as I argued in ICP Is the Only Real AI Coin in Crypto. If you're excited about Sui, ICP should excite you far more. It's an enormous architectural distinction if what you really want is a decentralized alternative to traditional internet infrastructure. And I didn't just describe it. I showed you an actual example: my own website.
Sui's tokenomics make it worse
Sui's tokenomics make all of this even worse. Sui has a maximum supply of 10 billion tokens, and unfortunately only about 41% of them are circulating. That means 59% of the total supply is still locked, and it appears most of it is held by insiders. That is an ongoing dilution consideration. You're looking at a massive amount of supply being dropped on top of existing investors. And yes, token unlocks don't guarantee the price will fall. Often the price seems to go up before token unlocks, however that works. Not financial advice, maybe financial engineering, I don't know.
But right now, Sui's market cap is twice what ICP's is, even though ICP's technology, in my view, is probably 10 or 20 times more advanced and useful, with 10 or 20, if not 100, times the potential market cap based on the use case going forward. Meanwhile, Sui has a fully diluted valuation of about $10 billion, which is five times ICP's. And on ICP, all the seed investors have already been unlocked. All the big token unlocks for ICP are finished. Now you just have people who chose to lock and are leaving their tokens locked. I covered why I think that keeps the price cheap for a while in ICP Could Stay Cheap for Years. We Don't Have to Wait.
So if you liked Sui's tokenomics, ICP is going to seem like a dream by comparison. And given the technology, it seems crazy to me to pay more for Sui. Every dollar you spend on Sui could buy about 2.6 times as much of ICP by market cap, and if you consider the fully diluted supply, every dollar spent on Sui could buy about five times as much of ICP. Your money simply goes farther. So I'm not impressed by Sui's future or its tech, and it's getting squeezed.
Sui is getting squeezed from both directions
Sui is getting squeezed from both directions. I already highlighted the technology direction. Now let's look at the other one. If you think all crypto tech is garbage and you don't care about ICP's technology, then think about where Sui sits. If all you care about is token numbers and price going up, Ethereum Layer 2s have already cornered that market. Coinbase has its Base Layer 2, which has been out for years. Robinhood just launched its Layer 2, which blew up immediately. And it's pretty clear at this point that if crypto stays the way it is and technology doesn't matter, Ethereum Layer 2s are the future. Institutions are signaling that's where they're going, because it's easy, the ecosystem is huge, and they can tap into a whole bunch of money. I went deep on that side of the market in Coinbase's Crypto AI Stack vs Everything On-Chain with ICP.
So if technology matters, ICP wins. If technology doesn't matter, Ethereum Layer 2s and centralized institutions win. And Sui doesn't matter. It doesn't win in any of these scenarios. Look at Base, for example: it has over 10 times as much in DeFi compared to Sui. That's a problem if you're holding the Sui token and hoping the price is going to go up. I don't see a future for Sui between financial activity being dominated on Ethereum Layer 2s and technological advancement being dominated by ICP.
So if you want what I consider the absolute best opportunity, I don't see why you'd choose a blockchain that's not winning in technology and not winning in potential financial adoption within our existing system. ICP has the tech lane covered, and nobody else comes close to that. And Ethereum's price is so high already that these Layer 2s can do great, print themselves money, and Ethereum's price might not even move that much.
I'm not saying Sui doesn't have talented developers, or that there's no legitimacy to what they're saying. I'm just saying the opportunity cost of holding Sui, to me, is too big. Instead of holding Sui, I'd much rather hold ICP and a couple of my meme coins, because by my calculations the risk is relatively low and the rewards are very high, and to me the risks are too high with Sui when I compare it to what's already out there. That's the same reasoning I laid out when I went ALL IN on Internet Computer Protocol.
My bottom line on Sui
My bottom-line summary is that Sui's marketing is far more exciting than its actual competitive position. Its actual competitive position seems very weak to me, because it's not winning finance and it's not winning tech. So where does it go from here? Their marketing is trying to signal tech, but they're losing. They're so far behind ICP in technology that I don't think they can catch up.
I think all of you getting into Sui are looking for the right basic things. You want to find the future of the internet. If you invested in Sui because you believe in the future of a decentralized internet, it makes sense that you found Sui attractive. But I'm here to interrupt. I'm here to interrupt your trance and say: look, if what you really want is the best of the best in the future of internet tech, that's ICP. And if you really want the best of the best in finance, my own approach would be to look for a meme coin that's drastically undervalued and has a creator behind it with millions of views, something that could 100x. If you just want technology and upside with what I consider minimal risk, then ICP. That's how it looks to me. It's not advice.
You don't have to take my word for it
You don't even have to take my word for it. You can use Claude and the ICP command line to directly build something fully on the ICP blockchain. You can have Claude fire out a website straight from the CLI, the command-line interface, and get a URL back that it pumps out and sends straight to you. In fact, ChatGPT now has an ICP integration to do that for you.
So I'm not asking you to sell your Sui if you have some and buy ICP. I've been blunter about that elsewhere, like in Sell Bitcoin, ETH, XRP, and SOL for ICP Before It's Too Late, but here what I'm inviting you to do is investigate the technology. Investigate ICP. See how blown away you are when you go to my website and realize that jerrybanfield.com is on the ICP blockchain. It is served to you through the ICP blockchain. I authenticate and administer my website through Internet Identity, which is built into the ICP blockchain.
So to me, when you look at the pathways forward in finance and tech, Sui is finished. I don't see a path where Sui wins at this point. What's left, in my view, is token unlocks, token dumping, financial engineering, and marketing, until the founders calculate that their last chance to take profits has arrived.
Where to find me
You can find me as Jerry Banfield Crypto Reviews on YouTube and Jerry Banfield Crypto on X, and this review sits alongside the others in my Crypto Reviews playlist. For the best results, go to jerrybanfield.com. If there are any of the first-edition coins left, you can buy one, and if they've sold out, I'll get more coins, not the same as these but second-edition coins, and they'll be different.
If you want to send me anything to review, you can send me your whole crypto portfolio and let me look at it, or send me a particular coin and I'll record a response. Go to jerrybanfield.com and buy a review. I'll spend up to an hour of my time looking at what you have to say. You can email me everything, audio messages, videos, and I'll look it over, take an hour, and send you a personalized video back. If you want to have a call with me, you can also schedule a call there, too, at jerrybanfield.com/call. And if you want this shirt, you can have the shirt I was wearing; it's for sale right now.
I hope to see you on jerrybanfield.com on the ICP blockchain. And I hope this was a nicer way of opening up to Sui holders and gently bringing you over to ICP, compared with the rough ways I did it in the past, like my 2024 Sui review.
Sui (SUI) Crypto Review: Why I Think This Fake Web3 Copycat Is Going to Zero
From my video published June 14, 2024.
Sui is a cryptocurrency that I see is on its way to zero, because there are some critical flaws and very obvious problems that I want to explain to you right now. Many of you have asked me to review Sui, and you've got coworkers who are just nuts about it and throwing money into it. I think that is a really bad idea. So let's look at the first huge, obvious problem.
The first problem: a $9 billion fully diluted market cap
Right now, Sui has a market cap of $2 billion, having been out for about a year or so, but the fully diluted market cap is $9 billion. That means only about 24% of the entire supply is actually out. That means massive token dumpage. And to me, that means it's not a good investment. It's not an investment that I would want to put my money into, which is why I did not buy Sui. Just this first thing alone is awful.
We've seen, even in some of the cryptos I love like Internet Computer Protocol, which I believe has the best technology and the largest research and development team, that token dumpage by itself can kill the price. So Sui has serious token dumpage. It'd be one thing if it was a smaller project, but this is already a sizable market cap, ranked around number 43. Now, if it had an amazing team and technology that was better than anything else, I might consider it. But let's actually look at it and see.
So one huge problem, as big as this is, is that $9 billion fully diluted market cap. And the marketing talks about Sui being the most innovative chain in the world, which to me just reads as the most innovative token dumpage in the world. The supply that isn't out yet has to get sold into the market eventually.
The Web3 claim is misleading: NFTs hosted off chain on IPFS
There's been a lot of talk about how companies build on Sui. This is misleading. They're saying Sui delivers the benefits of Web3 with the ease of Web2. Now, that makes it sound like you could put your website, your game, or your NFT directly on chain. But it turns out, when you go to look at how this actually works, that if you want to create an NFT on Sui, you need to do a lot of work. You need to use something like Pinata. And what is Pinata? Well, it's IPFS. And IPFS means it's not on chain.
So if you're thinking you can have Web3 on IPFS, you absolutely cannot, because anything that is not on chain is not secured at all by cryptography or the blockchain. There's no real ownership. That's why Elon Musk laughed on Joe Rogan's podcast when they were talking about NFTs, because minting some NFT token that links to something off the chain, hosted on Amazon, is obviously worthless.
So in the simplest sense, Sui is basically, technologically, a copy of Ethereum, where the basic technology works about the same as Ethereum. It has smart contracts, and they made some changes, obviously, but it's not true Web3 the way Internet Computer is.
What real on-chain Web3 looks like
If Internet Computer didn't exist, it would be a whole different world. But on Internet Computer, you can actually put all the NFTs, videos, pictures, and everything directly on chain. And this is not theoretical. It is actually working. You can use it yourself. You can put a gigabyte on chain on Internet Computer Protocol for $5 a year, which is way cheaper than Arweave. You can have an app called OpenChat that is governed by a DAO that fully controls the application. All of it is on chain, all of it is secured, there's tons of crypto in there, and the wallets work with a decentralized identity sign-in.
When you look at that technology compared to Sui, and you consider that Sui has a higher market cap than Internet Computer, that's insane to me. With Sui you're talking about putting NFTs off chain with IPFS, which many of us don't even realize, and many of these IPFS nodes, it turns out, resolve back to Amazon if you look at where they actually end up. That's not real Web3. And if it's not real Web3, it offers none of the real value that Web3 is supposed to offer. Forget tokenized assets and real ownership. The real valuable stuff is off chain, and therefore it's always controlled by a centralized entity, whether that's the developer, whoever makes the game, et cetera.
This contrast between fake on-chain claims and the real thing is exactly the kind of stuff we dig into when you join Jerry Banfield Family, where I share what I'm actually holding and why.
Digging into the Sui dashboard: a ghost chain?
Now let's go over to the Sui scan dashboard and find some more issues. It says there are 38 million NFTs that have been minted on Sui. But read their definition, because it looks to me like they've taken steps to inflate the numbers here to absolutely crazy proportions. This looks like a ghost chain at this point, from what I can see, much like the situation I found with Kaspa.
Look at the trending NFT collections: $846 in volume in the last 24 hours. And that's a trending collection. The top collection is $846 in volume. Have you seen the volume on some of these other ones? They claim 38 million NFTs, but read their own definition, which I'm actually proud they put in there: an NFT is an object that has an image URL and its attributes. I mean, any image object that has a URL and its attributes? And why does it have a URL and its attributes? Because it's hosted off chain, which means the value is not on chain. So there are all kinds of things that could be counted as an NFT, but are these actually being transacted? Hardly at all.
Inflated transactions and a TVL number that feels manipulated
Now let's look at the transactions. They're doing something to try to inflate the transactions and make it look like there's a ton of stuff happening on here. It says 24 hours right there for the total transactions, but if you click on "more," the way they're putting the numbers out is, to me, intentionally misleading. If you put in the last 12 months, you can see there are only a few hundred thousand transactions, which looks like about a day's worth on a real chain.
Look at how they present this data. It says the total transactions in 12 months have been 3.9 billion. It says "total," but you can't even really see how many there are in 24 hours very easily. And how many transactions are there per second? It says plus 10 million somewhere. What does that even mean, and what are these transactions actually doing? We know it's not on chain. They're not hosting websites on chain like ICP. The NFTs aren't on chain. So what exactly are these transactions even doing?
We can see things like Solana artificially inflate their transactions with vote transactions, to the point where explorers start to exclude them. But on Sui, you can't even see where they're coming up with all these transactions. And that leaves me looking at all of this. Take the total blocks: they feature total numbers instead of the daily numbers, which makes it so much harder to analyze. Same with total accounts, instead of telling you how many were actually made.
But then when you go over to the transactions per second, there are 125 transactions per second. With a number like that, you can easily compare it to Internet Computer, where there are around 4,000 transactions per second. You have to read through this whole dashboard to get to the realization, oh, well, this doesn't look like there's that much activity here. But if you look at all the other stuff, they've tried to inflate the perceived activity greatly.
Then when you look at more of the details, it says there's $650 million in total value locked, and there's $7 billion worth of Sui that's staked. So if you're not staking your Sui, you seem to be quite obviously losing out to dilution. Now, this is an impressive TVL number, but how exactly is it calculated? There's probably a more detailed interface for that somewhere. You can see there's one protocol here with $172 million locked. And it's like, what are you actually doing on these protocols? It's a liquidity protocol on Sui, where you can be a borrower or provide liquidity. But why do you need these huge liquidity pools on a chain where there doesn't even seem to be that much happening? It just feels manipulated to me.
There are things built to try to inflate the numbers and impress people, but I don't see very much actually happening on it. I don't see anything like an on-chain chat application, like a Telegram, that has thousands and thousands of daily active users on it. I don't see any breakthrough technology here.
No transparency: who is even building Sui?
And I see another critical problem. With the Sui Foundation, there's absolutely no transparency about who is even working on this. Their principles say the Sui Foundation exists in service of the Sui community, and the very first thing they talk about is transparency. But who's working on Sui?
When you go to Internet Computer Protocol, you find the DFINITY Foundation, and they're the largest research and development team in blockchain. They have a huge staff of actual engineers, computer programmers, superstar cryptographers, and founders who are like the Steve Jobs of crypto, with tons of videos up. And then there's the Sui Foundation, described as an independent organization dedicated to the advancement and adoption of Sui. There are pictures of people, but you don't even know their names. There's not one single person listed as a council member, not one single engineer or developer that I can see on here. That's a bad sign. It reminds me of the team page problem I ran into reviewing Humanity.
I've talked to some of the developers who work on chains like this. They don't even want to tell you who they work for, because all they do is take the money and immediately dump it. They get paid in the currency from the foundation, they work on it, they build on it, and then they dump the currency immediately, because they see it as having no future and they just want a job. Then they load up into something they think is more stable, like Bitcoin or Ethereum.
So that lack of transparency leaves me with no trust for this. It literally says transparency to ensure fairness, and open communication to build trust and direct engagement, yet there's not one person listed on here. Why is that normal in crypto? And why does having a huge team matter? Because this is hard. It is hard, and it is expensive, to build a huge team of engineers and technical staff who actually make breakthrough technology like they've done on Internet Computer.
It is very easy to set up a website and not be transparent about who's working on it, because people assume there's some impressive team behind it. But I don't see it. The total value locked, for how new Sui is, looks impressive on the surface. But what we've also seen plenty of times is that these chains will pay. They'll use token unlocks to pay a whole bunch of money to get protocols to move over and pump the total value locked. Then, as soon as the money runs out, they stop building.
The price chart, more token unlocks, and my verdict
So this, to me, just looks awful. I look through their X account, the Twitter run by the Sui Foundation, which, as I just showed, has no transparency around the token unlocks, and I don't see anything worthwhile on there. This looks like it's not going to go well. And the price chart doesn't excite people either.
I know the Internet Computer price chart is down 99% or so. And even though I believe that has the best tech and the best team in crypto, the people who criticize it only ever talk about the price chart. But look at Sui's price chart. It started at $1.40 and it's down to about 93 cents, and there are a whole bunch more token unlocks coming. I think the Sui price chart is going to stay like this pretty much indefinitely. During a time when some of these other altcoins, including ICP, have gone up multiples over the last year, Sui's price chart has gone almost nowhere. And I think that's the future.
This is another copycat token. I don't see it adding any real value to the world of crypto or technology. It's faking the ability to do Web3 by using Web2, with IPFS to host all the meaningful data and computation. This doesn't look good to me, and I've tried to explain to you exactly why. To be clear, this is my honest opinion and my own experience, not financial advice; do your own research before you put money anywhere.
If you found this honest, critical review of Sui useful, you can watch more of my coin breakdowns in my Crypto Reviews playlist. And for what it's worth, my website is actually hosted on Internet Computer Protocol, something I have not seen you do on Sui.