What makes Sui a dark horse public chain that rebounds in the second anniversary of its launch?

What exactly did Sui do right, and how did it fall short of the competition? (Synopsis: Overview of Perp DEX on the Sui Chain: What are the differences between the four major protocols? (Background supplement: Delphi Digital: In-depth analysis of Sui Q1 ecological development) On May 3, 2023, the Sui mainnet was officially launched, 2 years ago. Many may remember that when Sui first launched, things weren't as rosy as they are now. The investor FTX crashed, and the fund was forced to "buy back the tokens" by itself, and the coin price fell from $1.7 to $0.4 all the way; There is no regular token airdrop, but a lottery token purchase quota, which is flooded by the community "No airdrop, no community." and even called "scam". In just two years, everything has changed. In the cycle when Bitcoin finally broke through $100,000, Sui was undoubtedly the dark horse of the new public chain. Looking at the entire public chain territory, the limelight is only slightly inferior to Solana, which is "reborn in nirvana" in this round. In fact, the FDV (Fully Floated Market Capitalization) of the Sui governance token SUI has become the sixth largest crypto asset in the industry after BTC, ETH, XRP, SOL, BNB among non-stablecoins. Cryptocurrency FDV ranking, data: CoinGecko Sui Why did it achieve such impressive results? What exactly is it doing right, and what are the competitors missing? Taking the opportunity of Sui's two-year anniversary, the author, as a participant in ecological depth, tries to uncover the growth code behind Sui's various materials with personal experience and subjective feelings as clues. The DeFi ecosystem Sui now ranks 9th among all public chains with a DeFi TVL (complete lock-up value) of $1.78 billion, surpassing the old public chain Avalanche and the Move language public chain Aptos, which was the first to launch the mainnet for a year, but Sui's DeFi ecosystem construction was not completed overnight. Public chain DeFi TVL ranking, data: DeFiLlama is the same as most "VC coins", Sui's mainnet activity data after just issuing coins is not good, DeFi lacks users can not operate, how does Sui reverse this situation? Since July 23, Mysten Labs (Sui Developers) has launched 3 issues of Bullshark Quests in less than half a year, and users can get SUI token airdrops for completing tasks, with 5 million coins per issue, accumulating 15 million coins. It is worth noting that Sui's early task incentive model was biased towards "sunshine", distributing rewards according to head rather than capital, and although the top ranking can get a large number of tokens, ordinary retail investors at the bottom of the ranking also have good returns. At this stage, a large number of retail investors and airdrop studios poured into the Sui ecology, helping Sui establish an objective early user base, and Sui's official rewards also left the impression of "non-rolling" and "retail friendly" on the airdrop track. The author was also attracted by Quest at the end of 23 and began to contact the Sui ecosystem. Quest 3 Number of tokens at different ranking levels Token incentives, coin prices strongly ease the selling pressure Sui's early TVL trend under token subsidies Sui is the first public chain in the new public chain this cycle to subsidize interest rates for DeFi protocol tokens. Early relatively niche protocols were even able to earn more than 100% annualized returns with stablecoins. The author has participated in many DeFi mining, tempted by high interest rates, and has increased the deployment of funds on Sui at this stage. In the early days, the interest rate of staking stablecoin LP on Aftermath was as high as 110%, and since then, the public chains that imitated Sui's massive subsidies for the DeFi ecology include Aptos, Starknet, Sei, ZKsync, etc., but the ecology has not achieved the prosperity of Sui, where does the difference come from? DeFi interest rates attract mining whales, and the aforementioned token coin price trend is relatively weak, large investors have to "dig, withdraw, sell" in order to lock in profits, causing continuous selling pressure on tokens, coin prices further fall, and to maintain the same interest rate it is necessary to subsidize a larger number of tokens, so in the past, a vicious circle. However, the high token subsidy of SUI was issued at the low price of the coin, and since then the coin price has steadily risen, the whale's willingness to hold SUI tokens has increased, the selling pressure has weakened, and the number of tokens required to maintain the same interest rate has also decreased, realizing a positive spiral of coin price growth and TVL growth. Referring to the SUI price at the moment, the actual annualized return of the DeFi protocol with the above 100% annualized return may be more than 300%, and "digging, lifting, selling" is selling and flying. Chinese developers, efficiency levers Because Sui developer Mysten Labs founder Evan Cheng is originally from Taiwan, Sui Ecology has a particularly large Taiwan team. The ecological lending protocol Scallop, options protocol Typus, stablecoin protocol Bucket, etc. are all behind the Taiwan team. The advantage of more Chinese developers is that the development efficiency is high and the quality of the code is guaranteed. In contrast, the European and American teams are very "Buddhist". Mysten Labs Co-creation, CEO Evan Cheng Wealth Effect Whether an ecosystem is successful is inseparable from whether it can create wealth for ordinary users and whether it has a wealth effect. If you look back at the timing of Solana's round of rise from the perspective of God, in addition to the Meme track, the wealth creation effect of Jito and the subsequent Jupiter airdrop has attracted countless retail investors to invest in Solana's unissued points project to drive the development of DeFi, which is an indispensable part. At the end of 23 and the beginning of 24, Scallop and Navi, the top lending protocol protocols on Sui at that time, also learned how to play on Solana, opened the point system and issued coins one after another. Much of the money from the Solana overflow (which admittedly remained the preferred choice at the time) involved both projects. The author participated in the last train of the Scallop airdrop for $10,000 and was airdropped a hot pot But at this time (in fact, it is now) Sui's native project could not support a high valuation, so after Solana's hundreds and thousands of dollars of airdrops, everyone received tens of thousands, hundreds, or even a few dollars of SCA, so they began to complain that users did not have a wealth effect. Unexpectedly, SCA turned out to be the "most conscientious" airdrop in the Sui ecology for a long time, and Navi next door even issued coins for a year, "forgot" about airdrop users, and used the points leaderboard PUA users for more than a year. Official end, create wealth effect The problem of wealth effect is not unique, Aptos, Starknet, Sei, ZKsync and other public chains have not achieved anything in this regard, or the public chain with wealth effect is a minority. But if there is a problem, Mysten Labs has a solution. Mysten Labs is almost unique, developing its own projects, and then issuing coins to its own life...