Finance
Sui Tops $300M in TVL, Passes Bitcoin and Joins Upper Echelon of DeFi Protocols
Published by Jessica Weisman-Pitts
Posted on January 16, 2024
3 min readLast updated: January 31, 2026
Global Banking and Finance Review
Company
Published by Jessica Weisman-Pitts
Posted on January 16, 2024
3 min readLast updated: January 31, 2026
2000% increase in TVL and superior technology are causing builders to choose Sui, most recently, top lending protocol, Solend.
2000% increase in TVL and superior technology are causing builders to choose Sui, most recently, top lending protocol, Solend.
Sui, a leading Layer 1 blockchain created by the team that led Meta’s Diem stablecoin project, has surged past $300M in Total Value Locked (TVL) continuing to climb the ranks of DefiLlama’s leaderboard. This sudden milestone underscores the ecosystem’s rapid ascent and further solidifies Sui’s position as a leader in the DeFi space, surpassing Bitcoin to make it the 13th-largest blockchain in terms of TVL. This achievement marks a more than 2000% increase in TVL since August.
“$300 million in TVL is a significant milestone—one in a string of achievements the Sui ecosystem has reached only months since mainnet launch,” said Greg Siourounis, Managing Director of the Sui Foundation. “As market sentiment strengthens and focus turns to the fundamentals of the technology, it is extremely gratifying to see the work of the Sui community bear fruit and Sui’s ecosystem growth leading the industry forward.”
Besides reaching this important TVL result so soon after launching its mainnet, other recent milestones achieved by Sui include surpassing $100 million in bridged USDC, handling the most transactions in a single day by any blockchain, and achieving a demonstrated TPS of 297,000 transactions per second all without any disruption of the network or a spike in fees—clearly demonstrating the chain’s ability to scale.
The protocols contributing to Sui’s DeFi TVL are led by the Decentralized Exchange (DEX) Cetus with $62M locked in, followed by Navi Protocol ($60M, up 210% over the last 30 days), Scallop Lend ($54M), DeepBook ($33M), and FlowX Finance ($31M).
During the past few months, the Sui ecosystem has welcomed many new projects building on its blockchain. Solend—a leading lending protocol on Solana—just announced its intention to expand to Sui as its first alternative ecosystem with its upcoming Suilend, while Bluefin, a leading derivatives trading protocol that began on Arbitrum, recently shuttered its Arbitrum implementation to devote the entirety of its resources to leveraging the uniquely performant Sui platform.
Sui has also achieved some remarkable technology and infrastructure breakthroughs. After the September launch of zkLogin—which allows users to create and access Web3 wallets by simply using web2 social credentials like Google and FaceBook—the recent launch of zkSend represented a pioneering effort to make Web3 transactions as easy as sending an email.
Thanks to its object-centric model and powerful infrastructure, Sui’s unparalleled potential for mass adoption arises from its simplicity for developers, scalability, and rapid transaction processing for broader use cases.
Sui Foundation
media@sui.io
Total Value Locked (TVL) refers to the total amount of assets that are locked or staked in a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, indicating its popularity and usage.
A decentralized exchange (DEX) is a cryptocurrency exchange that operates without a central authority, allowing users to trade directly with each other using smart contracts.
A Layer 1 blockchain is a base blockchain protocol that operates independently and can process transactions and smart contracts without relying on another blockchain.
A lending protocol is a decentralized finance application that allows users to lend and borrow cryptocurrencies, often using smart contracts to facilitate transactions.
A decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol is a financial service built on blockchain technology that operates without intermediaries, enabling users to engage in activities like lending, borrowing, and trading.
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