• Sui is a Move-based blockchain project built by Mysten Labs, which has members for the leadership team of Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency.

• Mysten Labs has raised around $336 million in the last two years. However, the latest $300 million round was led by FTX ventures which may have dented its plans.

• The team has launched a devnet and testnet version of their blockchain with mainnet launch plans in early 2023.

Facebook (now Meta) announced its plans to launch a stablecoin backed by a basket of global currencies in 2019. However, it encountered strong retaliation from the regulators. Long story short, the project faded into oblivion.

In the end, Facebook finally sold the intellectual property rights of Diem for $200 million to the U.S.-based Silvergate Bank, showing the importance of Diem's source code.

The people who put the work into it also weren't ready to give up. Two teams, Aptos Labs and Mysten Labs spun off from Meta's blockchain team and created the Aptos and Sui blockchains, respectively. Evan Cheng, who formerly headed research and development for Meta's crypto wallet, became the CEO of Mysten Labs.

On December 6th, 2021, Mysten Labs raised $36M in a series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Redpoint, Lightspeed, and Coinbase Ventures, among others.

In September 2022, it concluded its Series B investment round, raising $300M at a valuation of over $2 billion. FTX Ventures led the round with participation from others like A16z crypto, Jump Crypto, Apollo, Binance Labs, Franklin Templeton, and Coinbase Ventures. The fact that FTX led the round would have likely been a setback for the project based on recent revelations concerning ecosystem development.

The Libra team’s most important breakthrough was the development of the Move programming language. Move architects claim that the language is more secure and flexible than Solidity, the native code base of Ethereum. It provides a verification-friendly design implemented in the source to avoid hacks and other vulnerabilities.

Additionally, Move is based on the popular Rust programming language. This is why Solana developers find it easy to shift to blockchains like Aptos and Sui.

While both Sui and Aptos are Move-based, there are differences in their basic design. While Aptos implements a traditional “blockchain” design with linear transaction execution, Move has adopted a distributed ledger in a directed acyclic graph (DAG), which supports parallel execution. The DAG design has had below-average success in this industry. Currently, Nano and IOTA are the top blockchains that implement this design. Thus, it remains to be seen how Sui performs in the real world.

Sui will have a native token to pay for gas fees, store transactions, and other operations. Stakers will receive these tokens as rewards for validation. SUI token holders will also get to vote on critical matters such as protocol upgrades.

The total supply of SUI is capped at ten billion. Mysten Labs released the devnet version of Sui with four validators in May 2022. Some NFT projects like CapyBaras, Ethos, and Sui Names have launched the test version of their dApp on the devnet. It's unclear whether devnet users will get airdrop rewards. However, there's considerable community activity thanks to the airdrop anticipation. You can become potentially eligible by following some steps laid out in the SIMETRI newsletter.

On November 17, 2022, the team launched the first testnet for Sui with select public validators and node operators. The requirements for running a Sui full node were quite extensive (32 GB RAM and 10-core CPU) for an average user. Moreover, Mysten Labs selected only a few hundred node operators out of thousands of applications.

Overall, Sui represents the next blockchains based on the Move programming language. Mysten Labs borrows its reputation from Facebook's failed cryptocurrency venture and the recent launch of Aptos blockchain. Technologically, it remains to be seen how Move adoption grows within the developer community. Furthermore, Sui has tweaked the design to accommodate scalability and speed, the real-world performance of which is yet to be tested.

Finally, Sui and Aptos also drew popularity as a VC chain because of the hefty early-stage investments. In this regard, it's still concerning that Sui's most prominent investor was indeed FTX Ventures. Still, it will likely have a lesser impact than Solana because Sui was still in devnet. Thus, the FTX debacle may have slowed down its ecosystem development but at least it didn't take down the user's funds and liquidity with it.

• Sui is a Move-based blockchain project built by Mysten Labs, which has members for the leadership team of Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency.

• Mysten Labs has raised around $336 million in the last two years. However, the latest $300 million round was led by FTX ventures which may have dented its plans.

• The team has launched a devnet and testnet version of their blockchain with mainnet launch plans in early 2023.

Facebook (now Meta) announced its plans to launch a stablecoin backed by a basket of global currencies in 2019. However, it encountered strong retaliation from the regulators. Long story short, the project faded into oblivion.

In the end, Facebook finally sold the intellectual property rights of Diem for $200 million to the U.S.-based Silvergate Bank, showing the importance of Diem's source code.

The people who put the work into it also weren't ready to give up. Two teams, Aptos Labs and Mysten Labs spun off from Meta's blockchain team and created the Aptos and Sui blockchains, respectively. Evan Cheng, who formerly headed research and development for Meta's crypto wallet, became the CEO of Mysten Labs.

On December 6th, 2021, Mysten Labs raised $36M in a series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Redpoint, Lightspeed, and Coinbase Ventures, among others.

In September 2022, it concluded its Series B investment round, raising $300M at a valuation of over $2 billion. FTX Ventures led the round with participation from others like A16z crypto, Jump Crypto, Apollo, Binance Labs, Franklin Templeton, and Coinbase Ventures. The fact that FTX led the round would have likely been a setback for the project based on recent revelations concerning ecosystem development.

The Libra team’s most important breakthrough was the development of the Move programming language. Move architects claim that the language is more secure and flexible than Solidity, the native code base of Ethereum. It provides a verification-friendly design implemented in the source to avoid hacks and other vulnerabilities.

Additionally, Move is based on the popular Rust programming language. This is why Solana developers find it easy to shift to blockchains like Aptos and Sui.

While both Sui and Aptos are Move-based, there are differences in their basic design. While Aptos implements a traditional “blockchain” design with linear transaction execution, Move has adopted a distributed ledger in a directed acyclic graph (DAG), which supports parallel execution. The DAG design has had below-average success in this industry. Currently, Nano and IOTA are the top blockchains that implement this design. Thus, it remains to be seen how Sui performs in the real world.

Sui will have a native token to pay for gas fees, store transactions, and other operations. Stakers will receive these tokens as rewards for validation. SUI token holders will also get to vote on critical matters such as protocol upgrades.

The total supply of SUI is capped at ten billion. Mysten Labs released the devnet version of Sui with four validators in May 2022. Some NFT projects like CapyBaras, Ethos, and Sui Names have launched the test version of their dApp on the devnet. It's unclear whether devnet users will get airdrop rewards. However, there's considerable community activity thanks to the airdrop anticipation. You can become potentially eligible by following some steps laid out in the SIMETRI newsletter.

On November 17, 2022, the team launched the first testnet for Sui with select public validators and node operators. The requirements for running a Sui full node were quite extensive (32 GB RAM and 10-core CPU) for an average user. Moreover, Mysten Labs selected only a few hundred node operators out of thousands of applications.

Overall, Sui represents the next blockchains based on the Move programming language. Mysten Labs borrows its reputation from Facebook's failed cryptocurrency venture and the recent launch of Aptos blockchain. Technologically, it remains to be seen how Move adoption grows within the developer community. Furthermore, Sui has tweaked the design to accommodate scalability and speed, the real-world performance of which is yet to be tested.

Finally, Sui and Aptos also drew popularity as a VC chain because of the hefty early-stage investments. In this regard, it's still concerning that Sui's most prominent investor was indeed FTX Ventures. Still, it will likely have a lesser impact than Solana because Sui was still in devnet. Thus, the FTX debacle may have slowed down its ecosystem development but at least it didn't take down the user's funds and liquidity with it.