Sui Ecosystem Report Q1 2025

A Q1 Snapshot of Sui’s Growing Ecosystem, From DeFi to AI and SocialFi

The Launchy Team
May 16, 2025

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Crypto was supposed to let people manage their own money without banks, but it’s still pretty hard to use. That’s where Sui comes in.

Sui makes using blockchain as easy as apps like Twitter or Robinhood. It’s super fast (about 400ms per transaction), can handle a lot of activity (up to 297,000 transactions per second), and costs almost nothing to use.

In the past year, Sui’s token ($SUI) started around $1.22, went up to nearly $5, and now sits around $2, still much higher than where it began, showing people are still interested.

In this report, we’ll cover an overview of the Sui network in Q1’25, the top 5 projects built on Sui, introduce some exciting new projects, and wrap up with the latest updates from the ecosystem.

Key Takeaways:

Despite a dip in market cap and TVL, Sui saw a sharp rise in daily transactions (peaking at 10M+) and active addresses (reaching 2.5M+), showing strong user engagement and ecosystem usage.
Lending protocols like Suilend and NAVI dominated Sui's DeFi landscape, collectively managing over $650M in TVL and generating millions in annualized revenue, even during broader market pullbacks.
Stablecoin supply on Sui climbed to $732M, while transfer volume dropped, indicating capital is flowing into the network, but being used more for yield farming or LPs than spending.
Over $21M was raised by Sui-based projects in Q1 alone, with notable funding rounds for Momentum, FanTV, and Swarm Network, pointing to increasing developer and investor confidence.
Sui achieved major milestones with $500M bridged USDC, Ledger Live integration, and joining Babylon’s Bitcoin-secured network.

Sui Network Overview

Total Value Locked (TVL)

Source: Artemis

In Q1, the Total Value Locked (TVL) on Sui showed a clear downward trend. Starting the year at approximately $2B, TVL gradually declined throughout January and February, reflecting a cautious market sentiment and possibly some profit-taking after prior gains.

By mid-March, TVL hit a quarterly low, dipping close to $1B.
However, in late March and into early April, we saw signs of stabilisation, with TVL levelling off around the $1.2B mark.

Market Cap

Source: Artemis

In Q1, Sui's market cap followed a downward trajectory similar to its TVL movement. The quarter started at roughly $15B but consistently declined through January and February.

By mid-March, the market cap had dropped significantly, dipping below the $8B mark.
After reaching these lows, the market cap stabilised somewhat, closing the quarter at approximately $6.8B.

The decline in Sui’s TVL and market cap mirrors broader market conditions and indicates cautious sentiment from investors regarding the network's valuation in the short term. However, recent stability in TVL and market cap could be a sign of renewed confidence heading into Q2.

DEX Volume

Source: Artemis

In Q1, Sui's DEX trading volume experienced noticeable volatility. Despite a generally declining trend, there were significant volume spikes, a surge in mid-March that temporarily boosted daily volumes past $1B.

By quarter-end, volumes stabilised in the range of approximately $250–$300M daily, reflecting roughly a 30–40% decrease from early January's highs.

Comparatively, the decline in DEX volumes on other leading Layer-1 blockchains was also significant.

Ethereum's monthly DEX trading volume decreased from about $270B in January 2025 to around $150B in March, representing roughly a 45% drop.
Solana saw a decline from approximately $125B to about $65B (around 48%), and BSC volumes fell from roughly $115B to $50B (approximately 56%).

Color Mapping: Ethereum (Light Green), Solana (Dark Blue), BSC (Yellow), Base (Red/Orange), Arbitrum (Light Blue), Sui (Teal Green), Hyperliquid L1 (Purple), Sonic (Blue), Avalanche (Pink), Tron (Orange), Others (Pale Green)

Although Sui experienced notable volatility, its percentage drop in trading volume was relatively in line with broader market trends, indicating that the decline was market-wide rather than specific to the Sui ecosystem.

Transactions & Active Address

Source: Artemis

In Q1 2025, Sui’s daily transaction activity showed a gradual but clear upward trend, reflecting growing engagement on the network. Starting mid-January, daily transactions hovered around the 3 to 4M mark, with some minor fluctuations.

By late February and into March, activity began to pick up more consistently, regularly exceeding 5M txs/day.
The most notable spike occurred in early April, when daily transactions surged past 10M, the highest level seen in the quarter.

While this sharp increase was short-lived, it signalled a burst of on-chain activity, potentially driven by a specific event or dApp launch.

This surge coincided with a substantial token unlock on April 1st, where approximately 64.19M SUI ($145M) were introduced into circulation (1.98% of the total supply).

Following the peak, daily transactions tapered off but remained elevated compared to early Q1 levels, closing the quarter around 5.3M per day.

Source: Artemis

In Q1 2025, Sui’s daily active addresses steadily increased. From under 1M in January, activity picked up mid-February and remained above 1M through March. The peak came in early April with over 2.5M active addresses, driven by the April 1 token unlock.

While numbers have since cooled to around 1.2M, overall user activity remains stronger than at the start of the year.

This overall upward movement indicates increasing usage of Sui’s ecosystem and suggests that more users and applications are actively leveraging the network.

Revenue

Sui Revenue Year-to-Date

Year-to-date, Sui’s revenue has seen a notable decline. After peaking at nearly $600K around late 2024, revenue has steadily decreased throughout Q1 2025. As of the latest data, revenue sits at approximately $209K.

This drop suggests reduced on-chain activity or lower demand for storage-related operations, despite spikes in transactions and active users during the same period. It may also reflect changing user behaviour or fee optimisations across the ecosystem.

Note: Sui earns revenue from two main sources: storage fees and gas fees.

Storage fees are paid when users store data on-chain, part is burned permanently, and part is held in a Storage Fund, which is staked to validators.
Gas fees are charged for executing transactions, compensating validators for computation.

Stablecoin Supply & Transfer Volume

Source: Artemis

In Q1 2025, the stablecoin supply on Sui saw strong and consistent growth. Starting the year below $500M, it steadily climbed throughout the quarter and reached ~$732M by mid-April. This suggests increasing user confidence and deeper liquidity entering the ecosystem.

In contrast, stablecoin transfer volume was far more volatile. While January and February saw frequent spikes occasionally surpassing $4B in daily volume, activity began to taper off toward March and April.

This divergence, rising supply but falling transfer volume, may indicate that users are holding stablecoins on Sui more for liquidity provision or staking rather than for frequent transactional use.

Staked SUI

In Q1 2025, the total amount of staked SUI saw a slight decline, moving from 7.858B SUI on January 1 to 7.73B SUI by April 1, a net decrease of approximately 128M SUI, or around 1.63%.

Despite the downward trend in SUI’s price during the quarter, staking participation remained largely stable, signaling continued validator and delegator confidence in the network’s long-term prospects.

A sharp dip in early February is a data anomaly rather than an actual mass unstaking event, as staking levels quickly rebounded to their previous range.

As of Epoch 735, the Sui network has 7.68B SUI staked, with an average annual percentage yield (APY) of 2.399%. According to data from Suiscan, Sui’s total validators increased from 108 in January to 113 in April.

Overall, staking behaviour during Q1 suggests that most participants maintained their positions despite broader market volatility.

Project Funding

Project funding on Sui showed strong momentum in Q1 2025, the total raised during the quarter surpassed $21M, driven by a handful of significant rounds.

Momentum secured a $10M strategic round at the end of March.
FanTV, an AI agent platform, raised a combined $8.5M in two separate rounds on February 27.
Earlier in January, Swarm Network closed a $3M seed round.

Compared to previous months, Q1 2025 marked a clear upswing. March alone saw the highest funding volume since May 2024, when project funding also peaked at around $9M. January and February started more modestly, but February’s uptick was largely due to FanTV’s double-raise.

The continued climb in March capped off the quarter with a funding total not seen in nearly a year, pointing to renewed capital deployment in emerging Sui-based projects, particularly those focused on AI and infrastructure.

Our Take

Sui’s Q1 2025 performance reflects a network maturing beyond early hype and into a phase of more organic growth. While metrics like TVL and market cap declined, the pattern followed broader market trends, signaling a general cooldown rather than project-specific weakness.

What’s notable is that, despite capital outflows, user engagement continued to rise. Daily transactions and active addresses both climbed steadily, peaking during a major unlock event and remaining elevated even after the spike passed.

At the same time, staking activity remained steady. Although the total staked SUI slightly decreased by 1.63% during the quarter, participation held firm even as price declined, reflecting continued confidence from validators and delegators. The validator set also grew modestly, from 108 to 113.

Meanwhile, project funding showed strong momentum, with over $21M raised in Q1, led by high-profile rounds from Momentum and FanTV. This marked the most active funding quarter in nearly a year, signaling growing builder and investor interest.

This suggests that Sui isn’t just attracting temporary attention; it’s managing to retain users. However, the drop in protocol revenue reveals a disconnect between activity and monetization, likely due to the network’s fee structure prioritizing affordability and efficiency.

Stablecoin supply also grew consistently, even as transfer volume declined, indicating capital is entering the ecosystem but not yet being deployed actively. Altogether, Q1 paints a picture of a network laying the groundwork: still early, but showing signals of sticky usage and long-term potential.

Sui Top 5 Projects Based on TVL

Suilend

Suilend TVL & Revenue / DefiLlama

Suilend has emerged as a leading lending protocol on Sui, playing a key role in sustaining the network’s DeFi activity throughout Q1 2025. With a TVL of over $350M, it currently ranks as the number one protocol on Sui by TVL. This position highlights Suilend’s dominance and central role in the ecosystem’s capital flows.

Despite broader market softness, Suilend maintained strong on-chain fundamentals: its annualized revenue sits at $3.28M, with $6.56M in annualized fees, underlining steady user engagement and borrower demand.

Borrowing volume remains healthy at nearly $92M, reflecting sustained appetite for leverage and liquidity solutions within Sui’s DeFi landscape.

While the SUIL token has retraced from its all-time high, the protocol’s usage metrics have stayed resilient.

NAVI Protocol

NAVI TVL & Revenue / DefiLlama

NAVI Protocol closed Q1 2025 as the second-largest DeFi platform on Sui, with a TVL of $318.75M, just behind Suilend. Despite market volatility, NAVI maintained consistent TVL and revenue generation, reflecting its steady user base and lending activity.

The protocol posted an annualized revenue of $4.55M and annualized fees of $9.57M, surpassing Suilend on both counts, which suggests NAVI is capturing more fee-based value relative to its size.

Borrowing demand remained strong with $111.77M in cumulative volume, further validating NAVI's core function as a liquidity hub. With features like Automatic Leverage Vaults and Isolation Mode, NAVI has carved out a niche as a risk-aware, capital-efficient lending platform.

The drop in TVL, especially pronounced from mid-January to early March, suggests reduced capital commitment, possibly due to risk-off sentiment or yield compression across DeFi. Revenue also trended downward during the quarter.

Overall, its Q1 performance positions NAVI not just as a top contender in Sui DeFi, but as a protocol with growing influence and robust fundamentals.

Cetus

Cetus, one of the most prominent DEXs on the Sui blockchain, experienced a notable slowdown in Q1 2025. Despite boasting an annualized revenue of $11.71M and nearly $59M in annualized fees, its performance metrics declined during the quarter.

TVL dropped significantly, from above $220M at the start of the year to around $135M by April, highlighting liquidity outflows or user repositioning.
Revenue followed a similar downtrend, with monthly earnings decreasing steadily despite brief spikes.

This trend reflects shifting trading dynamics and possibly cooling retail activity across the broader Sui ecosystem. However, Cetus continues to play a critical infrastructural role, powering concentrated liquidity strategies and supporting cross-chain Move-based applications.

Haedal

Haedal TVL & Revenue / DefiLlam

Haedal, a liquid staking protocol on Sui, maintained a relatively steady presence throughout Q1 2025 despite broader DeFi headwinds. With over $128M in TVL and an annualized revenue of $3.72M, the protocol demonstrated solid usage.

While TVL declined from its peak in early Q1, revenue showed a sharp uptick in late March and early April, likely driven by increased DeFi composability and higher haSUI utility.
This suggests that although fewer assets were locked, those remaining were used more actively within the ecosystem.

As staking remains a foundational activity in Sui, Haedal’s growth in protocol earnings despite declining TVL points to a maturing user base focused on yield optimization.

Scallop Lend

Scallop Lend, a next-generation money market protocol on Sui, has carved out a strong position despite challenging market conditions in Q1 2025. With over $125M in TVL and $45.81M in borrowed assets, Scallop maintains a meaningful share of Sui’s lending activity.

The protocol generated an annualized revenue of $6.91M, driven by $18.57M in fees.

While its TVL followed the broader downtrend across DeFi protocols in early 2025, Scallop saw a noticeable revenue surge in late Q1, likely tied to increased borrowing or strategic platform incentives.

This performance reflects Scallop’s growing utility and its appeal to more sophisticated DeFi users, positioning it as a serious player among lending protocols on Sui.

Our Take

Sui’s DeFi leaders are showing early signs of ecosystem maturity. Lending remains the dominant vertical, with Suilend and NAVI setting the pace, each excelling in different metrics.

Cetus is feeling the squeeze as DEX volumes cool, while Haedal and Scallop are quietly gaining ground through staking utility and efficient lending growth. The divergence in TVL and revenue trends suggests users are becoming more selective and strategic with capital deployment.

New Exciting Sui Projects

Walrus (@WalrusProtocol)

Walrus is a decentralized storage and data availability protocol developed by Mysten Labs (Sui developer), tailored for handling large binary files like videos, images, and PDFs. Built with scalability and affordability in mind, Walrus supports developers building on Sui and can also be used by teams on other chains such as Ethereum or Solana.

The protocol offers a cost-efficient storage solution by using advanced erasure coding and a delegated proof-of-stake model.

Instead of full data replication, Walrus distributes encoded parts across many nodes, reducing storage costs and enhancing resilience against node failures. Each stored file becomes a programmable object on Sui.

This allows developers to verify availability, extend data lifetimes, or interact with storage assets directly via smart contracts. Users can access Walrus using a command-line interface, SDKs, or through HTTP, making it accessible to both Web3-native teams and traditional developers.

So far, over 4.5M blobs have been uploaded, with more than 78,000 GB currently used out of a total 833 TB storage capacity.
Flatlander, an NFT-based world project, is already hosting its site entirely on Walrus, showcasing its potential for fully onchain content delivery.
Walrus recently raised $140M in funding led by Standard Crypto, and its mainnet launched on March 27.

FanTV (@FanTV_official)

FanTV is a next-gen content platform that blends AI tools with blockchain technology to empower creators and reshape how content is made and monetized.

FanTV allows users to create long-form videos, music, podcasts, and more using AI, while earning rewards through personalized Creator Coins, digital tipping, and token incentives.

With over 80,000 creators, 8M wallets, and 30M transactions, FanTV is currently the largest AI-powered platform on Sui.
It uses AI agents to help creators produce smarter, audience-optimized content, making the creation process more accessible and efficient.

FanTV has raised $3M in a recent strategic round backed by Mysten Labs, Cypher Capital, and CoinSwitch Ventures, adding to its previous $5.5M from firms like Multicoin Capital and Krafton.

RECRD (@RECRDapp)

Recrd is a SocialFi platform built on the Sui blockchain, aiming to merge social networking with Web3 ownership. It empowers users to own their content, interactions, and digital identity, offering a decentralized alternative to traditional social platforms.

With nearly 28M accounts and over 42M transactions, Recrd is one of the most active applications on Sui.

Users can interact socially while earning rewards, building reputation, and monetizing content through an onchain economy that values engagement and transparency.

Recrd positions itself at the intersection of social media and finance, fostering a creator-driven community where value flows directly between participants, without relying on centralized intermediaries.

Latest Update

Sui is now integrated with Babylon, becoming one of the first Layer 1s to join the Bitcoin-Secured Network (BSN). This allows Sui to leverage Bitcoin’s security and liquidity for securing its proof-of-stake network without relying on token inflation.
Sui is now integrated into Ledger Live, allowing users to securely send, receive, and stake SUI with Ledger’s hardware wallets. This makes Sui the 73rd blockchain supported by Ledger.
Sui has hit a major milestone, surpassing $500M in bridged USDC, a fivefold increase since December 2023. The integration of USDC has significantly boosted liquidity, attracting developers and fueling the growth of lending, trading, and yield farming dApps.

Final Thoughts

Q1 2025 showed that Sui is starting to find its rhythm. While some headline numbers like TVL and market cap dropped, the fundamentals told a different story. More people are using the network, more developers are building on it, and new projects are popping up across DeFi, AI, and SocialFi.

We saw strong traction from top protocols like Suilend and NAVI, while newer ones like Haedal, Scallop, and FanTV brought fresh energy to the ecosystem. The $500M milestone in bridged USDC, plus integrations with Babylon and Ledger Live, helped push Sui deeper into the core of crypto infrastructure.

All of these points point to a network that’s growing not just in size, but in substance. Sui is moving beyond early hype and building something that might actually stick.

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Disclaimer: All the information presented in this publication and its affiliates is strictly for educational purposes only. It should not be construed or taken as financial, legal, investment, or any other form of advice.