Sui vs Aptos: Competitors? Complete Guide

Like Aptos, which we reviewed previously, SUI was developed by former Meta (Facebook) employees who were involved in the Libra blockchain project (rebranded later to Diem).

The SUI Mysten Labs team also includes financial consultants, designers, and experienced cryptographers from Microsoft, Novi, Meta, and other global companies. According to LinkedIn, the company has more than 80 employees.

Early stage and funding

Right now, the SUI network runs only on the developer network (devnet). Fresh startups are actively testing their own projects and DEFI applications.

Mysten Labs raised $336 million in two funding rounds. The first round was led by Coinbase and Andreessen Horowitz. The main investor in Series B was the crypto exchange FTX's venture arm.

SUI Series B funding round (Crunchbase)

Blockchain features

The SUI's in-network Move programming language is designed to solve the problem of high cost and poor transaction throughput. SUI will handle multiple payments at the same time, rather than prioritizing and then executing sequenced transactions.

Thus, blockchain also seeks to mitigate the gas war issue, when the highest gas fee bidders secure priority for their transactions during times of high network demand.

The Move language is similar in general concepts to other components of cryptocurrency networks. It contains data structures, integers, and addresses, but no blockchain-specific attributes such as accounts, transactions, time, cryptographic elements, etc. These features must be defined by the project that is built with Move.

Current phase

As mentioned above, Mainnet and the native SUI token haven't been released yet. There are now about 4,000 nodes in Devnet, which support testing of the network. The largest nodes are installed by citizens of Germany, the USA, Ukraine, and France.

Blockchain Explorer displays about 2 million completed transactions.

Sui Blockchain Explorer

How to make money right now

While the mainnet is not live, users can accumulate activity points in Devnet. Crypto startups usually reward their early members with Airdrops and valuable prizes.

Steps that you can take right now:

Set up your own node. Very few addresses got into the first set of node operators, but it probably won't be the last opportunity. The project publishes all announcements in its Discord;

Build your own smart contracts and projects with Sui Move. See this tutorial for more details.

Test blockchain by transferring coins between wallets;

Mint NFTs for free from Sui Wallet and Suiet Wallet;

Join the project's events on social media (e.g., get roles in Discord)

Most of the steps (except installing the node) do not require money, but Devnet SUI has been repeatedly reset so that all the wallet operations have to be repeated, which takes some time.