Sui Token and Network Launch: What You Need to Know

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The highly touted Sui mainnet is set to officially launch on Wednesday, May 3 at 8 a.m. ET.

A layer 1 designated Proof-of-Stake (dPoS) blockchain, the protocol uses a modified version of the Move programming language initially created at Meta–formerly Facebook–before it decided to wind down its Diem project.

Sui is built by Mysten Labs, one of the two spinoffs that came from Meta’s Diem project–the second being none other than so-called Solana Killer, Aptos Labs which launched its mainnet in October. Leading up to its launch, Sui has raised enormous amounts of money. By September last year, Mysten Labs had closed a $300 million Series B round and reached a $2 billion valuation, according to CrunchBase.

The team behind Sui has said it wants the network to become the premier NFT and gaming platform for the cryptocurrency industry, by virtue of its Move programming language, which developers have said is a more intuitive way to write smart contracts.

Although Move was not initially designed with NFTs in mind, Sui Move is looking to change that by implementing certain NFT-specific functions. Unlike another popular language, like Rust—which is used by Solana and focuses on “accounts”—Sui is centered around “objects.” That has made it possible for objects on Sui to be owned by a single user or “shared,” which can then be modified by users as long as they follow certain smart contract functionalities.

By doing so, the team behind Sui said the network is poised to become an “innovative, decentralized Layer 1 blockchain that redefines asset ownership.”

Sui Move has been highly touted for its speed and transaction throughput, with Solana’s Co-Founder Anatoly Yakovenko, one of its main competitors, calling it “awesome” on Twitter.

This isn’t an argument about what chain is better. Sui is awesome. You just can’t do a 100 transactions with 1 cryptographic signature. You can do 100 transfers, but if there is only 1 signature that authenticates a state transition, it’s only 1 transaction no matter what the…

— toly (@aeyakovenko) April 21, 2023

The platform’s native asset, the SUI token, has been in the midst of an initial coin offering, or ICO, since April 20. It will end on May 3, when the mainnet goes live.

Investors have been purchasing IOU versions of the token, albeit from four smaller exchanges: BitForex, DigiFinex, HotBit and SuperEx. As of Tuesday afternoon, the token IOUs were trading at $3.20 according to CoinGecko, and had seen their price spike 14% in the past day from excitement surrounding the mainnet launch. After the token launches, it will be listed on OKX, Kucoin, Bybit, and Binance.