SUI Soars on ETF Speculation and DeFi Expansion—Wall Street Scrambles to Catch Up
Move over, Bitcoin—SUI’s making moves. The Layer 1 blockchain just punched through resistance levels as whispers of a potential ETF hit crypto Twitter. Meanwhile, its DeFi ecosystem quietly doubled TVL in Q2. Not bad for a chain the ’smart money’ ignored six months ago.
DeFi Summer 2.0? SUI’s lending protocols and DEXs now process $200M daily—still small fries next to Ethereum, but growth’s outpacing Solana. Developers cite Move language’s security edge as the secret sauce.
Wall Street’s latest dilemma: how to explain to clients why they dismissed ’yet another altcoin’ now flirting with top 15 market cap. Bonus irony: the same institutions chasing SUI ETFs still can’t custody it properly. The revolution will be tokenized—with or without their permission.
SUI grows the DeFi lending sector
SUI is a multipurpose L1 chain, which adapted to the shifting Web3 demand. Previously, the chain marketed itself through NFT collections. SUI also carries meme assets and Bitcoin-based DeFi tokens, including several types of wrapped BTC.
SUI total value locked increased by nearly 40% in the past week, tracking the token’s rally. Currently, the protocol carries $1.63B locked in lending protocols and in the form of stablecoins. SUI has been a long-running project, going through multiple bull and bear cycles. In Q1 2025, SUI expanded its daily active addresses, with a baseline of 1.5M to 2.5M daily active users.
SUI receives over $125M flowing in from the Ethereum ecosystem. Of those inflows, over $115M come from stablecoins, with around $10M from other tokens.
Despite the slowdown, SUI is now boosting its liquidity. The stablecoin supply on SUI grew from $714M in the past week up to a new high of over $879M. Most of the growth comes from USDC inflows, as the SUI protocol aims to track Solana’s success in building liquidity.
SUI also carries a growing array of tokens, including BTC liquid staking tokens. The chain carries Lorenzo stBTC, as well as Lombard Staked BTC (LBTC). The SUI ecosystem currently carries 165 tokens with significant liquidity.
Other native SUI tokens linked to memes and DeFi expanded between 45% and 145% in the past week. Cetus Protocol (CETUS) is up 49.6% in the past day, recovering to $0.21 after months of trading NEAR all-time lows.
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