Why Sui is Skyrocketing: Price Surge & Growing Ecosystem | Adeniyi Abiodun, Mysten Labs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsY6uD0mNRI
Transcript:
All right, here we are with Adeni Abidoun, co-founder of Mistin Labs, which builds the Sui blockchain. Adeni, it’s so great to have you here on the Defiant podcast. Welcome. Great to be here. Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here. Awesome. Well, you know, Sui has been making headlines at the Defiant and elsewhere because it’s just been going crazy recently.
Sui token has doubled in price in the past 30 days. There’s lots of activity happening on the chain. And so we’ll get to all of that. But always I like to start with the basics if you can you know explain what SUI is of course a layer one blockchain but if you can highlight what makes it different from all the other competing layer ones out there.
Sure hey everyone my name is Adni co-founder of Mist and Labs We’re one of the contributors and major contributors to the suite protocol. Our team came from Facebook working on the Libre project where we were building a protocol that makes it easy to send money as easy as from a lot of learnings and the outcome has ended up in allowing us to really build an engineer suite, which is a global coordination layer for the internet.
Your question was, what sets SWE very different from other layer ones? And my response is really, SWE is not like any layer one that exists in the market today. SWE isn’t just trying to be a blockchain or trying to be an L1. We believe the total addressable market of L1s are in the billions, whereas if you realize real value, what we’re trying to do is build what the internet really needs.
Namely, the internet has got a problem. It’s highly centralized, and because of the centralized nature of things, it’s very hard to build new models around monetization. Users ultimately have their data owned by large organizations just because coordination is very, very difficult. And when you have coordination problems, you generally try to centralize the activity around coordination so that it makes it easy to actually allow people to drive value out of a system.
And because of that centralization, large corporates like Facebook, Google, you name it, ultimately, just by design, not because they’re evil, have to build systems that are largely controlled in a way for their own purposes to allow them to offer products and services at scale. With SWE, what SWE is, is it’s a global coordination layer for the internet.
Internet is great at sending data, but internet is really, really bad at allowing you to coordinate value or assets across the web. So in a world where things are going fully digital, where your concert ticket will be digital, where your money is going to be digital, where your intent as a user of what you want to do is largely digital around a variety of assets, we believe having a layer that allows people to coordinate their intent across the internet in an atomic way is of massive, massive value.
We think that’s trillions of dollars in value potentially than just looking at blockchains. So our remit and our mandate at Misden is to build platforms and protocols to make the internet more decentralized. And we started with SWE as a global coordination layer, and we’re now onto Warris that is built on top of SWE that allows you to coordinate data and data ownership as a whole.
So over the lifespan of MISTEN, we will build a number of platforms and protocols built on top of SWE to really realize our vision fully. More concretely on other aspects on why SWE is different, SWE doesn’t have a maximum throughput. You generally see people quote, what is the TPS of the network? What is, my network can do 100,000 transactions. My network can do 50 transactions per second. For us, that’s a red flag.
The internet doesn’t talk about those numbers because the internet largely scales horizontally. SWE is built under those same premises that we use to build search at Google, that we use to build infrastructure at Facebook. You add more hardware, the network scales. And we’ve been able to demonstrate that you add seven extra hardware, you get basically horizontal scalability.
You add seven extra hardware to validators, you get seven extra throughput with no increase in latency. So SWE, very differentiated from other platforms, does not have a max throughput, has the lowest latency by far, actual end-to-end latency of any other blockchain. And we’re starting to see that in the adoption.
Devs come onto SWE and they start to build. The programming language move makes it easy for them to understand what they’re building and requires less knowledge gap to actually get you building something really useful very, very quickly. And they become hooked because it’s hard to go back once you’ve built something that feels unnatural to an engineer.
And now we’re seeing great adoption and move. So a couple of follow-up questions on that. The first is, how exactly are you able to solve this issue that so many other blockchains have failed to do? to solve this issue that so many other blockchains have failed to do. I mean, you know, yeah, everyone talks about throughput and transactions per second.
So how is it technically possible for you to not even care about that? Yeah, I’d say it’s all to do with the team. I believe the amount of intellectual power concentrated within the MISTI team is probably the highest concentration of IP that we’ve seen in any potential company in the crypto space. To build this layer one, or as people may call it, we’re calling it a global coordination layer.
To build it, you need expertise across a number of fields in computer science product engineering you name it we have world experts in cryptography and we have world experts in distributed systems we have world experts in programming languages world experts in compiler technology and world experts in products so we you need the whole gamut of things you find most teams are highly concentrated in one particular expertise and lack in the other we We have a well-rounded team that takes care of every aspect of that. And you find that in the five founders in our company. We’re
all experts in different aspects of what we do. And that expertise you find generally you need in large corporations like Facebook. Libra was like a meld of the best brains of Facebook to come and build a platform. And a lot of those best brains are now at Midstin building SWE. So I’d say the gap between what other layer ones have built and what we’ve been doing is we’ve been able to really attract the best talent across a number of disciplines in computer science, product, and everything else I’ve named to come and build this platform.
And that’s why it’s demonstrating itself in the market so okay what has this uh you know very specialized team been able to produce that’s different this is my question is it like some um better cryptographic system like i don’t like i don’t know better yeah definitely so our expertise if you look at the people in our company we’ve worked on spanner at google we’ve worked on and like, I don’t know, better? Yeah, definitely.
So our expertise, if you look at the people in our company, we’ve worked on Spanner at Google, we’ve worked on Search at Google, we’ve worked on distributed systems at Facebook, programming languages, functional verification, all the things that you need within large, to build anything of scale. And when we build things at these corporations, we build it with scalability in mind as a principle, not an afterthought.
So my argument has always been the engineering in Web3 has largely not met the bar for what you need at scale. It’s always been focused on a very niche user base of maybe 60 million devs’ wallets in Web3, which I question is actually 60 real million users. I think it’s a much lower number. We’re accustomed to building things for billions of users. So we’ve not broken science by solving the speed of light.
I just think the previous systems have just been engineered rather naively. And we’ve taken the approaches of how you build distributed systems, how parallel processing has been a thing for decades. We know how to do that. We know how to build languages that are safe, and we’ve taken all those learnings and built a robust system.
So SWE is not amazing because it has a programming language that is easy to write in. It’s not amazing because it has parallel programming, parallel execution. It’s not amazing because it has a low consensus system in the world. It’s not amazing because it has a low consensus, lowest consensus system in the world.
It’s because all those things are being engineered in a way that works cohesively in one thing that allows you to actually empower developers to actually use. So that’s really it. You have the best team in the world at 100x team. They come together from the expertise they’ve had in building the systems that you use day in, day out.
And then they put that together on a platform that everybody can build upon. So it is the team. The team day in, day out. And then they put that together on a platform that everybody can build upon. So it is a team. The team is really, really differentiated. And the outcome of SWE as a product is as a result of our team.
We couldn’t have done it with less people. It’s not possible. You talked about parallel execution. I think that’s part of it that, I don’t know, would make you different from Ethereum or Solana. Can you just very briefly explain what that’s about? Sure.
So the core of SWE is the smallest thing, the smallest unit of computation in SWE are strongly typed objects. So that is very unique. No other system does that. So it’s an object. It’s really inspired by object-orientated principles in SWE. So everything in SWE is an object. My asset is an object. My coin is an object. My NFT is an object. Everything in the system is a strongly typed object with an object ID.
So because everything is a unit of compute in an object, So because everything is a unit of compute in an object, we are able to determine whether something has contention versus not in a static way. So what that means is the more processing power you have, the more things you can process in parallel, and you don’t have to do any optimistic execution to figure that out.
It costs you nothing to figure out why it’s contention versus not. This is what gives SWE not only a very natural way for developers to program, but it also gives it very, very high throughput. As I mentioned, because of the way in which the data model exists in SWE, we can allow people to process things in parallel at no extra cost from a developer standpoint.
things in parallel at no extra cost from a developer standpoint. So you writing a coin and my coin is transferring, I’m transferring you five coins and someone else is transferring the NFT to someone else. Those are two distinct transactions that can be processed in parallel without any contention whatsoever.
And that is stark contrast to every other system in Web3 that’s largely account-based. We think the account-based model is a very tough paradigm for many developers to grok. An object model is something most developers understand relatively quickly. I mean, realistically, it’s a new paradigm for Web3 devs, but people in Web2 understand that very, very quickly.
And once you start writing that program language, it becomes hard to go back to an account-based model. You can replicate an account-based model with an object model, but you cannot represent an object model in an account-based model without a lot of compromises, and it just doesn’t work. So you talked about how Move being your programming language is an asset because it allows you to attract and retain developers but having you know because move is um a very specific language that was like you said born out of this uh space for
facebook slash meta project i would have thought the opposite like it’s it’s a new language it hasn’t been kind of used very broadly. So maybe that would have been, you know, a roadblock for developers to pick up on. Why do you think it’s an asset? So the first thing is, if we just talk about the numbers, there are really only 20,000, 25,000 active developers in Web3.
That is a pitiful number. There are more developers in Facebook as a company than there are devs in Web3. So that’s a first thing. Small number of devs. And if Solidity is what they have to write in, we’re never going to get any adoption, period. It’s an impossible language to write safely and to have developers build at scale.
So that for us, when research was done at Facebook, led by Sam Blackshare, who’s the father of the Moot language, who’s the creator of the Moot language, we’ve looked at multiple opportunities to either use an existing language and borrow from those principles and use that for Libra. But there’s no way we could have stood up to any regulatory scrutiny knowing that we are building the world’s financial system in really unsafe environments.
So we had to invent something new that made it easy for devs to build, but also had strong principles to ensure that developers don’t make mistakes and you can actually functionally verify that what you’ve written works. If you look at the programming language landscape today, Move is already 7% of the market.
So, yeah, it’s a new language, but you do not need EVM compatibility to show growth. And from 0% to 7%, in about two years, is a tremendous growth. And I think that number is only going to keep increasing. in about two years is a tremendous growth. And I think that number is only going to keep increasing.
And our hope is more L1s and more platforms, even L2s, adopt move as a language of choice. You cannot have adoption, mass adoption, when safety in smart contracts is a fundamental issue. It’s great for me to write a program and I have a million users, but if people start losing money, then adoption is going to be an existential threat.
We’re never going to have that. So Sam makes a statement that programming language safety or smart contract safety is an existential threat to the adoption of Web3. And I absolutely agree with that. We’ll keep having massive hacks in EVM and we keep having it in other languages. massive hacks in EVM and we keep having it in other languages.
But I believe the move-based chains will show that those environments are largely impenetrable to the kind of attacks you have in a traditional EVM or SVM-based ecosystem. It’s been interesting to see how there has been a paradigm shift on this concept or this perception that all smart contract chains had to be EVM based to be successful because of the network effect that Ethereum already had.
And Solana, I think, was the first to prove that wasn’t the case. And now there’s this new move ecosystem that’s you know also confirming that look there are a lot of daft vcs out there right like who just buy the kool-aid and don’t do any real research and just follow patterns and unfortunately we met a lot of them during the fundraising time they don’t understand how these things work they just and network effect of what 15 000 devs are you kidding me? What are we talking about in an industry that’s
only 20, 30 million users? So I think there’s a lot of education that has to go on. Programming languages are hard. And especially if you think about how many JavaScript developers are there? Millions, tens of millions. I think there are about 9 million to 12 million JavaScript developers. I think Sam will know the best numbers off the top of his head.
But that’s way more people in traditional languages than exists in Web3. So for me, the fight hasn’t started yet. We’re not even in the first innings yet. So to make any claim that you need EDM compatibility to have any adoption is just ridiculous. Like it’s an intellectually bankrupt argument. We’re already showing with 7% growth in move that that doesn’t make any sense and that’s only going to improve.
I love the fact that Solana uses something other than EVM. That’s great. And I love the fact that other chains are looking to adopt move. I love the fact that Aptos uses move. I love the fact that IOTA is looking to adopt move as well. So I think this is great. The more people building a move language, the more adoption I think we can see in Web3 as a whole.
So I think that’s a space people should be watching out for, right? Alternative languages really expand the surface area of developers that can be brought into the Web3 ecosystem, not just having a single unilateral language that we know is doomed to absolutely fail. Well, strong words there.
Is that a really interesting take? So, okay, so let’s talk about recent activity. Like I mentioned at the start of our chat, the ZOE token has been on an absolute tear. What is driving this price move? I don’t know. I don’t have a crystal ball. But I think I can at least go into what we’re seeing. We’re seeing an increasing number of, first, if I go from gaming, right, we’re seeing an increasing number of games who have gone to try things on other platforms who who have been promised scale is going to come in years time or scale is here now.
And as soon as it gets a taste or hint of success, the gases go through the roof and the game is no longer workable. We’ve been able to show them and they’ve been able to demonstrate on SWE that it’s a platform of choice. And once they start building, whatever happens in a chain, the chain can handle the throughput and needs that they have.
So naturalistically, the platform is seeing product market fit because it can do things other platforms can’t do. And if I go to DeFi, for example, we had Bluefin, who was previously an arbitrage, and started out of their own volition to build on SWE, and realized that traders were 20 times more profitable trading on SWE than they were on arbitrage.
that traders were 20 times more profitable trading on SWE than they were on arbitrage. Less fees, faster finality, opportunities to do more arbitrage, ultimately to better platform as a whole. So I think PMF is what’s causing this growth. And of course, we’re not going to ignore the fact that we’re seeing a growth and frenzy and people creating memes and things like that as well.
Again, for me, I don’t think it’s a first use case you want to onboard the masses to, but it’s also part of a culture and that’s happening on SWE as well. Again, for me, I don’t think it’s a first use case you want to onboard the masses to, but it’s also part of a culture and that’s happening on SWE as well. Without what you’re seeing in, I mean, you have safer tools to make sure that you’re not falling into scams.
You have the ability to trade and not be front run by medbots continuously. You have the ability to use aggregators that allows you to execute trades at the best price possible. That is very hard to do in other ecosystems. You can do that in a fully permissionless way. So I think there’s a lot of value in the SWE ecosystem, the fact that you can always straighten your trade work.
You can always gain access to the network, so it’s not going to go down. You can build a community that’s natural. We did not do an airdrop like other ecosystems did because we felt it’s going to attract the lowest common denominator of users. And I feel our ecosystem has been better for a few benchmarks against any other ecosystem that launched in the same timeframe.
SWE is monumentally ahead in every single metric, in that sense. So that was the right decision. And now we’re seeing a really organic growth in the SWE ecosystem, in addition to all the things I’ve mentioned as well. And even before having native USDC, SWE’s TVL volume and everything was way higher than majority of chains have been here for the last three to four years.
And now with USDC being live, I think we’re going to see a rapid growth in the DeFi liquidity and ecosystem. So very, very proud of that. We have three native stablecoin, USDC, Agoraora USD and FDUSD and we think that’s going to keep growing in this space.
So very, very proud that we’re attracting some of the best partners, some of the best builders in the space. It’s really an adoption thing. Developers try SWE, it’s hard for them to go back to other ecosystems. Consumers try using SWE and they realize it just works. And they find also they’re met with a very friendly, non-toxic ecosystem, which I think all those things really matter.
20 introduces sorbonne which is stellar’s cutting edge smart contracts platform this creates new surface area for innovation and provides new opportunities for developers to build protocols and products that create access to everyday financial services so it means a gradual increase in transaction capacity and a chance to fine-tune applications and it’s the most transformative upgrade to the Stellar network to date.
Woohoo! Yeah, I think all those things are key. And I wanted to talk about specifically the USDC launch natively on ZUI. So what implications does this have? Like what use cases do you think this can unlock? Well, SWE already has probably the best chance of onboarding billions of users than any other chain.
The first thing to remember is we created something called ZK Login and also with SWE Name Service. So there are two things, actually three things. One, people can onboard into SWE just using an email address, Facebook address, Kakao, you name it, whatever you already have, Twitch. You can onboard into SWE without worrying about wallet addresses and paraphrases.
And it’s all done with a layer one verifying your credential rather than some middleware that takes all your information. And it’s done a fully private way using zero noise groups. Second, we have sponsored transactions. Not only can you onboard into SWE very, very quickly using your Web2 account, you can also transact on SWE without ever worrying about gas.
Apps can sponsor your gas fees in a fully transparent way or you can just watch ads and fees are covered for you. So that’s already an onboarding plus. Third, when you want to send money, just use a domain name system. We have an app called Stashed. If you go to getst plus. Third, when you want to send money, just use a domain name system.
We have an app called Stashed. If you go to getstashed.com, you’re onboard, you choose a username and immediately you have a SWE account. You just really provide a username at Stashed and instantly anybody in the SWE ecosystem from any wallet and ecosystem can send you money just like sending email.
So yours will be your name at Stashed and then instantly you can start sending and receive money what is amazing is the fact that you marry all these together and the fact that you have native stable currency in usdc it becomes the most compelling platform to send and receive money as fast as possible where they demonstrated that sui is the lowest latency chain by quite a margin where if you peer-to-peer transactions happen between 300 and 350 milliseconds which is end-to-end it’s faster to send a payment on SWE than a website reload it’s actually faster to send money on SWE than tapping a card to
pay at a store so we have instant payment at fast finality for the masses for the first time married with the technology that we’ve built for the blockchain namely ZKlogin, sponsored transactions, three name service, you now have probably the most powerful components to put together to build new forms of payment apps that I think the world’s never seen.
Everybody can now build a Venmo with a few lines of code. And we have a plethora of on and off ramps that are coming into the ecosystem, so not only can you attract your users without having to ask them to download wallets, right? Not only can you build attract your users without having to ask them to download wallets right um not only can you make them transact live into warbat or know that gas exists not only can you allow them to send money as easy as email now you can allow them to send receive currency on and off ramp into debit card credit cards name it bank in bank out i believe we’re
going to see a revolution in the payment space, and that’s something we’re very, very excited about for the year of 2025. Super interesting. And I’ll ask you more about that in a second. But before we get too off track, I want to go back to what you mentioned on the token and not having done an airdrop.
Yeah, that’s very different from what most chains and apps are doing right now in Web3. And I agree that the risk with airdrops is you attract a kind of volatile or fickle kind of user. But at the same time, it does help decentralize token holdings.
And one thing that SWE has been criticized for is a concentration in staked tokens. So I believe the SWE Foundation controls over 80% of the token staked. And so obviously that raises questions about how decentralized is the network. What do you think about that? Is that a risk? Is there plans to continue decentralizing token distribution? First of all, the foundation doesn’t control 80%.
It’s less than that. But I mean, there’s also valid criticism in the sense that the stake distribution is not where it should be today. And that’s just a product of being an early ecosystem. A world where you just airdropped a bunch of people who don’t really care about your network and go into the next chain also doesn’t make any sense. So you’ve got a balance to reach.
The number of upgrades are going into network this year. When we think about decentralization, right, it’s stake distribution and also geographic distribution and everything the like it’s not good to have state distributed across a small number of validators so one update that’s coming uh on soon as in sui is that you can join the validator set with a loss let with a lot less suite today the bar to be a validator is is embarrassingly high i think something to the tune of 20 to 25 million SWE.
We want to get that down to around a million to 2 million SWE or something close to that number. So when that upgrade goes in, you can get an increase in validator set from the 108 today, maybe to 300, 400, 500, whatever the ecosystem deems fit. So that’s going to be already a big reduction in what we see as centralization, namely the ability for people to onboard with a lot less stake than exists today.
And I think the distribution of stake is only going to improve over time. The network is what, a year and four months live? I think it’s doing pretty well for where it’s at right now. And we think it’s only going to grow, right? The more people onboard an ecosystem, the more projects onto the ecosystem, the tokens get distributed fairly across an active user base, or at least a real user base, not something that’s fickle that we see in most ecosystems today.
So yeah, criticism is accepted for sure. I’d also pencil in that, you know, for a very early ecosystem, we’re going about this in a very systematic way to ensure that we build an ecosystem that’s here for decades, not one that a tier for just one cycle, which most people plan around. I mean, I think it’s not very common that project leaders acknowledge and accept criticism.
So that was good to hear. But I mean, still like going from, you said 20 million, so we’re about for staking to 1 million. That’s still a really high number. Let me clarify, you can stake one suite today, no problem. Anybody can stake. I mean, to be a validator. To be a validator, whether stake will be 2 million, 3 million, or whatever it is, right? Because there needs to be some technical expertise and some costs that you’re going to have to put up to make sure you can run the operation.
And in fact, if you’re a very bad validator, people just won’t stake with you anyway. So there’s got to be a bar in which you allow people to enter the… Remember, the reason why you have a proof of stake system isake system is it’s really a civil prevention mechanism to prevent civil attacks. So there has to be some bar that people minimally need to join the validator set, and that bar is going to be reduced significantly from where it is today to maybe 2 to 3 million SWE.
And there’s nothing written in stone that needs to be 3. Over time, maybe it goes down less via vote and via some other mechanism of of governance but yeah i think we have to start somewhere and i think where we are right now at 25 is just way too high we need to cut that down significantly and i think that’s going to grow the value data set and then we can work from there got it and then just just to have the correct information uh you said the sweet foundation doesn’t hold over 80% just to have the correct number out there.
How much does it hold? I don’t know the exact number, but there’s a website on the SWIFT.io site that shows the token distribution. And SWIFT Foundation doesn’t own 80% of that. There’s certainly a much better distribution than that. I think Sweet Foundation, at the time, for the community treasury, is something between 45% or something like that.
That’s going to be dispersed over time to the community. It’s not a treasury for just a foundation. It’s actually a treasury for grants, for building the ecosystem, for ensuring that we can build a self-sustaining ecosystem over time. Makes sense. And a little bit more on tokenomics. So you said that users on ZOE don’t need to be paying for gas fees in ZOE.
So how is ZOE spent or burned? Can you go into how that works? So, yeah, so the use case for the SWE token is for paying for gas and also for governance. So when I said that you don’t have to pay gas fees for using SWE, what I mean in that sense is that in SWE, there’s a divorcement of who specifies an intent or writes a transaction or who wants to sign a transaction versus who pays the fees we’ve separated the two most systems don’t have that and what that means is as a user can choose to pay my own gas fees or wallet can decide to sponsor
my fee on my behalf in a way where they cannot you know restrict my transaction i think that’s very very important so um sw’s tokenomics is also very, very different from other ecosystems. Tokens like Solana, Aptos, or whoever, those are inflationary systems. Namely, they can keep printing tokens for eternity.
SWE is a fixed supply. There’s only ever going to be 10 billion SWE in circulation ever. There’s never going to be more. And in fact, I’d say SWE is more deflationary by design. The more interesting state gets stored on SWE, every time you store data on SWE, you basically hold funds in an escrow. And while that state is interesting, maybe it’s an NFT drop that you have.
And that floor price is very, very high. But if that NFT is no longer valuable, you can burn that NFT and get a rebate of a large percentage of the fund that you put in storage. So as more data gets stored in the SWE ecosystem, more SWE gets locked up as long as that data is interesting. And we’ve already seen a lot of tokens from SWE have been taken out of circulation as a result of storage.
It’s called the storage fund. So unlike other ecosystems who print tokens forever and always inflating the amount of tokens, SWE we know is only ever going to be 10 billion. And because we know it’s only ever going to be 10 billion, every time someone spends SWE to store data or transact, a lot of SWE is taken out of circulation.
So SWE by design is actually pseudo deflationary, whereas most tokens that we’re being benchmarked against are inflationary tokens. Super interesting. Okay, and then now I want to talk about the use case. You were describing earlier the payments use case, especially now with USDC as a stable coin and with the ease of transacting on-chain.
So it looks like you have really focused on improving UX for transacting on blockchains, and it’s historically been a huge issue for onboarding newcomers into the space. So how can you actually bring those newbies in? Like through partnerships or like what’s your plan to make the pie bigger? Yeah. So when we built SWE, we built it for developers. We built for users, not developers.
We built for degents. So it means SWE really allows you to onboard existing users. So I believe SWE has already seen a growth in the DGN space in terms of user adoption. We have over 24 million active accounts, not wallets, active addresses on-chain. So you can’t misconstrue that as users, sorry. So active wallets aren’t equal to active users, and we definitely agree to that.
What we believe we’ve done with ZK Login, Sponsored Transactions, SWE NS name service, is we’ve allowed users to touch a broader surface area of, developers to attract a broader surface area of users with less friction. As I mentioned, there are only 60 million active wallets in Web3 as a whole, actual active wallets in Web3 as a whole.
We believe that now with SWE, they can touch three, four billion users in the world because everyone has email, everyone has phone number, everyone has some measure of an account online, and they can use that to onboard to SWE. And you start to see that with games onboarding to SWE, they’re using ZK Login as a mechanism for onboarding.
A large majority of our games start going live end of the year and early 2025. And you start to see mass adoption of users coming into Web3 without even knowing they’re using a blockchain. For us, when you use the internet today, you don’t say great, I love this website because it’s hosted on Google.
It’s a website. It just works. I believe ownership will be fundamental to how people build apps in the future. So we will be that infrastructure that allows you to allow apps to send value between each other using domain name systems. So we believe we’ve built the system amenable to how the internet actually works, not how we imagine the internet to be.
So we meet users where they are today, not trying to force them to jump through hoops to use a platform. Okay, so I guess the hope is that because developers on Zui have all these tools which allows them to build applications that just make more sense or are easier to use than traditional Web3 applications, that they’ll have more success in bringing in, you know, the next billion, the next 3 billion users.
Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s our hope. And we believe that traditional Web2 companies will also adopt SWE for that very reason. SWE gives you the ability to have atomicity across a number of APIs, which the web doesn’t give you today. Like if I, SWE has this utility called programmable transaction blocks.
It allows you to conjure up to 1,024 heterogeneous transactions in one. So if I want to allow myself to open a bank account, open a bank account, put $100,000 in the bank account while doing that, take a loan, a margin loan against an asset, and at the same time put money in for a for mortgage you want to do all those things at the same time across a number of different providers the internet does not let you do that today there are too many silos that make it very very difficult to do whereas with defy you have a
plethora of protocols and we’re sponsored with with um with ptbs you can you can basically build user intent across a number of protocols make it it look like a single application has done that. And that, for me, is a massive opportunity. You really disintermediate a lot of these middlemen that really prevent consumers from getting the best possible deal by any given massive imagination.
So SWE allows you to do that. And we believe Web2 companies would simply use SWE as a way in which to offer their products and services via smart contracts. And PTBs allow you to orchestrate users’ actions or demands across a number of these protocols in real time and at low cost. Are Web2 companies already looking to build on SWE? Yeah, we’ve announced quite a majority, quite a lot of them who are building on Sui and probably more will be announced very very soon.
Hey everyone, I’m Ilya and I’m inviting everyone to Bangkok, November 9th to 11th. You’ve been duped into thinking anything decentralized was ever gonna work. There’s a better way. Stop wasting your time with all this blockchain and go back to the north. Get a latte and stop trying to change the world.
Oh, and this thing in November, Redacted, the hackathon, they’re pushing office jobs out there, you know. Everything is working as it should. For our special event, Redacted. We’re going to dive into AI, we’re going to dive into Web3, chain abstraction, decentralization and user-owned AI. I’ll see you there.
I was interested in what you mentioned about you being able to guarantee that I am like wallets and accounts equal actual users? How are we able to do that? No, no, no, that’s not what I said. What I meant was certain blockchains like to talk about active users when really they’re talking about active on-chain addresses.
Some of these are bots, some of these are not, like who knows. We, from building a social media company, know that those two things aren’t true. So we are very matter-of- fact when we talk about active wallets is very different from active users. So, you know, users have multiple wallets. Some bots have multiple wallets as well.
So you have to be careful not to conduit the two. I do believe that, you know, with the advent of like ZK login and with the advent of Sweename service, you start to build a more stronger identity mechanism to really identify real users versus what exists anywhere else. And this stuff really matters, right? It really matters in the long scheme of things.
You want to know what your levers are. And one measure we care about the most is something we call capture rate. We want to see addresses using more than one app at any given time. We don’t care if you’re using just one app as a whole, but we want to see a progression of you using daily more than one application.
And we’ll start to see that a lot in this ecosystem. How do you think blockchains can achieve this of actually understanding how many real users they have? Like better reputation systems or… It’s a hard problem to solve. And I think the internet even hasn’t solved it.
So I don’t think… i think blockchains are there are an opportunity for blockchains to help there but i think you know it’s a very very difficult problem to solve the most important thing that matters i mean from my perspective is that you’re allowing users the developers to onboard users to their experiences in the most frictionless way so what if a user has 50 wallets right but as long as those 50 wallets allow the user to do what if they want to do in a very frictionless way and have access to goods and services fine that’s the most important metric that matters but we should not kid ourselves and start to say crypto’s got this amazing adoption
curve when really you know it doesn’t yet i I want to get happy when I start seeing, you know, applications that have 100 million daily active wallets who are all transacting across more than one protocol at any given time. That starts to get me really excited because I know there’s real utility. There’s really a driving factor.
And one wallet we have in this ecosystem called Wave. Wave Wallet has about 200,000 daily actives. And their users are using on a regular basis more than one app they’re using defy they’re using lending that’s real adoption so that’s when you start to see beyond just a bot hitting one thing on a regular basis you see a user using a number of apps on a regular basis that’s really encouraging and that’s the kind of pattern users pattern that really we care about more than anything else. Awesome. Yeah. So I want to ask you more about this.
Like how does the SUI ecosystem look like right now in terms of real activity? Because, yeah, looking at the charts, like you said, you see these like incredible spikes, but you start to question, you know, how real they are. but you start to question how real they are because maybe there’s one game that’s doing a bunch of transactions, but it might be gamed, it might be bots.
So what metrics do you look at and what are you seeing as real activity on Sui? Where do you estimate those number of users are at right now? Yeah, so Sui is lucky that it benefits from activity from a number of applications, not just one. So that’s one, that’s also a good sign. It’s not one particular app like other ecosystems that’s taking the majority of traffic.
Beyond that, what we look at is capture. We look at wallets that are using more than a single application because that’s a sign of actual adoption. If you’re an app that onboards users into a game but those users also do defy that’s a great sign that’s a real user then just then not right because there’s a cost associated then there’s a barrier associated there’s a bit of friction associated so that’s that’s what we measure and that’s what we care about the most that’s not to say that people aren’t going to
build crazy things right there’s one app right now that is mining Bitcoin on Swedes, driving a lot of traffic. These things happen. These things are going to grow. I believe there’s probably going to be another three or four. But communities are going to build what gets people excited. And I fully back that.
What I love about Web3, it’s a great benchmark for, it’s a great testbed for testing things in production. And I’d love to see what people build from there so from our perspective i i believe you will start i think i i keep making the statement i think we will have more daily active wallets and actual users in any other ecosystem just because the ability to onboard users is so frictionless compared to any other ecosystem exists today we’re not there yet we’re still very early I think we’re a year and five months old.
But I think we’re pushing and punching well above our weight when benchmarked across other ecosystems. DeFi TVL is real. The amount of transactions, because it’s fees associated, is better than the majority of blockchains. And we’re number two beyond Solana on TVL and also volume when you look at non-EVM chains.
So this is a chain that’s really showing a lot of growth and we think it’s going to continue. Where do you think the growth is going to come from? Like what trends are you excited about? The growth is coming from developers. Like our thesis has always been build the best developer platform and allow devs to build things that are differentiated and you win.
And that’s showing we had a product protocol that was coming from solana built called swelend they were able to become one of our top lending protocols they their explanation was three was a 10x improvement in dev experience versus lana and we’re winning people constantly over on dev experience alone it’s just a better place to build and the ecosystem is growing.
So devs are bringing users and they’re able to attract a larger user base than anywhere else just because of the concept that we built into Suite. So that adoption is coming by devs. We want to be a dev platform. That was our focus. It’s also why we got a lot of complaints. People said we’re too dev-focused, not community-focused.
Our goal is build the best platform, build the best community. We’ve not built the best platform. Now we’re focused on building the best community over time. I think that’s going to prove itself out. In terms of use cases, yeah, what do you think will drive activity next in Sui? Is it DeFi, gaming? Like, what do you see? I think it’s going to be gaming and gaming will drive defy i actually think the mass majority of applicants like for me defy is not the product defy is a protocol it’s a piece of infrastructure and if i start to matter when it services
and silly services on top of it right so when you have games who have in-game tokens or in-game assets or NFTs or that you need to swap, DeFi needs to facilitate that, right? So I believe gaming is going to be the biggest growth area for SWE or any blockchain that really cares about growth. Gaming will be where it’s at and ownership, transfers, assets, all those things are very native within the gaming constructs and SWE is ready to drive that.
So I think gaming absolutely needs DeFi and DeFi absolutely needs gaming. But gamers don’t need to know that they’re using turbos or C-tirs or Aftermath or whatever the underlying protocol is. Games just need to know that. Gamers just need to know that I’m able to use an asset, derive value from it, swap it, represent myself as an individual, really build my own lore and history and everything else related.
So I believe those two things go hand in hand. So to answer your question succinctly, gaming is going to be the biggest driving factor for SWE, and that’s going to drive a plethora of exponential activity in DeFi. What do you think about social Fi? I’m not convinced yet. I’d love to see where it goes.
I’m a skeptic when it comes to anything social media, just because it’s very hard to get right. And when you’re mixing financials in there, it also gets very, very complex. But I’m a skeptic on the wall, but I’m open to see people do it really well. I’ve not seen something compelling yet but I’m waiting for that to bear true and I’m very open to what people are building there.
What’s immediately next for Sui? Which milestones are you working on? So our goal is growth and adoption of ecosystem. We keep looking at the amount of devs in the ecosystem, making sure that we’re carrying the feedback for problems they’re having in meeting the needs of their customers and using that as feedback to cycle back into the products that we build.
I think payments is going to be massive for SWE. It’s going to be an area we’re going to be doing a lot of work. We have a lot coming in our pipeline for payments. Now with a plethora of stables, we think we can allow devs to build the most compelling payment applications that we wanted to do at Libra.
Now we can do at SWE. So yeah, so focus is dev growth, making sure that we listen to what devs need and surfacing that in the products that we build and ensuring that the payment use case on SWE is first class. I don’t think any other blockchain lets you send transactions as fast as you can on SWE without the blockages that you see elsewhere.
So we’re going to lean heavily into that and allow people to use SWE as a platform for finance. Interesting. Okay. And then to wrap up, where would you like to see SWE in a few years if everything goes right? What’s the big picture? So for us, by 2030, we believe every major gaming application will have a wallet integrated.
And we believe that wallet integration will be by ZKLogin and Inoki, what we’ve built. We believe that’s going to be the way that everybody uses the internet. We believe that value is going to be transferable finally between boundaries of applications. So I can send assets from a Robinhood account to my Schwab account.
I can send concert tickets from Ticketmaster to another application to another wallet. It’s all going to be facilitated by the principles and primitives that we’ve built on SWE. So where SWE is going to be is going to be that coordination layer that lets you coordinate intent of users across a plethora of applications in a fully frictionless way.
It’s what our mission has been from day one. We’ve never deviated from it. And we believe the goal is in sight. We’re starting to realize on a day-to-day basis. Do you believe that there will be interoperability or bridges between blockchains to create a network for this kind of infrastructure? Or do you think like, so it will be the primary way that people are transacting on the internet? I believe ETH is always going to be here.
I believe Solana is always going to be here. I don’t know about everybody else. But generally, I do believe bridges are here to stay. We need those in TROPS to allow people to coordinate their intent or the actions across a number of ecosystems that they care about. But I believe for the mass majority of users, I’m talking about three to four billion users, they don’t care.
They just want apps that work. And I believe we’re building the platform that will allow every application at Kisbad scale to do that. I don’t think anyone else has that ability to do that. I think our mission from day one has been to coordinate all that engagement across a core set of protocols.
With Waurus launching, we believe that’s something that’s going to take it to another level where you could now have your websites fully executed, you have your APIs fully executed on chain in a way that’s very transparent. We believe data sovereignty is going to be solved by Waurus also. And over time, we’ll solve the networking problem and everything else related to community building.
So yeah, I believe we will be the dominant player when it comes to coordinating users’ engagement across the internet. But I also believe other ecosystems will be there. Like, we still have landmines today. So ISIM will still be here. We believe also, you know, some other ecosystems that we really respect will still be here solving probably more niche use cases for very specific communities.
Wow, what an ambitious vision. So very fascinating to chat. Thanks so much for sharing with me. It is really inspiring to see kind of this big, big vision that you have for SUI and yeah, the really quick progress that you’ve had so far. So yeah, thanks again for joining me. This has been great. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me. Anytime. you
