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 I dig into with the community over in the 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 Money playlist. And if you want to go deeper with me directly, I'd love for you to join the community, where I host this whole conversation and my website is actually hosted on Internet Computer Protocol, something I have not seen you do on Sui.