A strong rebound of 140% in a single week, does Sui want to become the next "Solana"?

Original title: "SUI rose 141% in a week and was called the "Solana killer". Is the bullish view tenable?"

Original author: Frank, PANews

Sui has been very popular on social media recently. Many people compare Sui to the "Solana killer" and make many analyses of Sui's network performance and the K-line trend of SUI tokens. A bullish sentiment on SUI seems to be spreading. But is this statement really tenable? How is Sui's ecological development?

The identity behind the millions of big Vs singing bullish is the director of Sui Foundation

The earliest comment on singing bullish SUI came from Raoul Pal, the founder and CEO of Real Vision, who has millions of followers on Twitter. On August 9, he sent a series of tweets on Twitter. After comparing the trend charts of SUI tokens with the governance tokens of other mainstream public chains, he concluded that: "$SUI is starting to become very interesting from a price perspective. Although it is too early and unconfirmed, it has shown signs of a breakthrough compared to most tokens."

SUI's price trend has indeed performed well recently. Since creating a recent low of $0.4625 on August 5, it has rebounded strongly. As of August 12, data shows that the price of SUI has reached a high of $1.1174. The increase in one week exceeded 141%. The increase is the highest among the tokens of mainstream public chains. However, this price is still far from the high of $2.18 created in March this year. Previously, the SUI token has been declining since it rose to $2.18 on March 27, 2024, and fell to a minimum of $0.46. The decline in half a year exceeded 78.8%.

SUI's outstanding performance may be recognized by Grayscale. On August 7, Grayscale announced the launch of two new crypto investment products, trust products for SUI tokens. Rayhaneh Sharif-Askary, head of product and research at Grayscale, said in a statement: "We are pleased to add Bittensor and Sui to our product suite and believe that Bittensor is at the core of the development of decentralized AI, and Sui is redefining the smart contract blockchain." Influenced by this news, the price of SUI surged by 42% on August 8, setting a record high for a single day in recent times.

Grayscale currently has 18 crypto investment products, mainly including mainstream public chain projects such as Solana and Litecoin.

Raoul Pal said on Twitter, "I'm looking for the next major token for SOL-type opportunities, and SUI is one of them." However, Raoul Pal's call also raised some doubts. He also stated that he is a director of the Sui Foundation and has an interest in the Sui ecosystem.

Mechanism Capital co-founder Andrew Kang listed five reasons for Sui's recent rise on Twitter, including Raoul Pal's support, a large amount of over-the-counter trading demand, strong holders after large-scale unlocking, no pullback in SUI price trends, and Mysiceti performance upgrades. However, regarding the argument that SUI will surpass Solana, Andrew Kang said, "I don't think SUI's market value will be the same as SOL, but its market value is 3.5% of SOL."

In addition to the bullishness of many KOLs, there have been some recent developments in the Sui ecosystem. On August 9, Sui's ecological domain name service SuiNS announced its reorganization as a decentralized protocol, which will allow users to govern through the protocol token NS. And plans to airdrop 10% of the tokens to the community. On August 13, CoinList launched a staking fund, which first supported five crypto assets, including ETH, SOL, NEAR, SUI, and MINA.

The data comparison is far less than Solana, and is on par with TON

However, has the Sui ecosystem made rapid progress in the near future, or is the bullish outlook just a "smoke bomb"? PANews compared several indicators of Sui, Solana, and TON (data collection was on August 12).

From the perspective of transaction volume and number of transactions, SUI still has a big gap with Solana, especially the 24-hour transaction volume is only about 5% of Solana. Given that TON's ecological performance and secondary market price were relatively outstanding some time ago (it was also once called the Solana killer), it can be seen that Sui's overall data performance is closer to TON's performance, and Sui even seems to be slightly ahead in many aspects. However, SUI is quite different from TON in terms of circulating market value. SUI's circulating market value is only US$2.5 billion, while TON's circulating market value is about US$15.9 billion, a difference of 6.4 times. Catching up with TON's market value may be SUI's upside. However, considering that TON is backed by Telegram's 900 million users, it has more room for premium valuation than other public chains.

Large amount of unlocking is interpreted as a positive?

The unlocking of SUI tokens has also become a reason for many KOLs to be bullish. On August 1, SUI unlocked 53.89 million tokens, accounting for 2.56% of the liquidity, worth about 50.6 million US dollars. Those who are bullish on SUI believe that the market has not ushered in huge selling pressure after these tokens were unlocked, which is the reason for the market to be positive. Those who hold opposing views believe that SUI tokens will not only be unlocked in August, but will also be unlocked every month thereafter. This is just a way for the main force to create momentum before shipment to raise expectations. Some users also questioned that the Sui Foundation recently attracted KOLs to promote SUI tokens in a paid manner.

In addition, it is worth noting that since August 5, SUI's contract holdings have seen a large increase. Taking Binance perpetual contract trading pairs as an example, the SUI contract holdings on August 5 were 28.46 million, and rose to 100 million on August 12. At the same time, the funding rate remained negative. This data phenomenon shows that a large number of short positions are paying fees for holding positions.

From the data on the chain, Sui's development has indeed ushered in great progress in the past six months, especially in May, when the number of daily transactions exceeded 70 million through the SPAM (spam) model, surpassing all public chains such as Solana. Although the data has since declined to around 7 million. But it is still much higher than the hundreds of thousands before May. Similarly, the number of active addresses has also seen a significant increase. But the overall magnitude is still far behind Solana, especially the number of newly issued tokens per day, which represents the activity within the ecosystem, is only about 30, while Solana's data is around 20,000.

On the whole, it is still too early for Sui to become a "Solana killer", and TON may be the direct competitor that Sui can truly compare with.

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