How Sui Is Making Blockchains Fast Without Breaking Decentralization

In Brief

In May 2025, Sui’s stablecoin market cap hit a record $1.1 billion—a 192% jump since January—while still delivering sub-second settlement and negligible fees.

Christian Thompson, Managing Director at the Sui Foundation, explains how Sui’s “born fast” architecture, built around parallel execution and object-centric design, is proving that blockchains don’t have to sacrifice decentralization for scale. From powering global financial leaders like Franklin Templeton and Ant Financial to attracting over a million new wallet users daily, Thompson breaks down why Sui is positioned to redefine finance, consumer apps, and beyond.

Is Sui proving that scalability and decentralization don’t have to be at odds? What did the XRP model get wrong?

Sui has proven that with the right architecture—parallel execution, object-centric design, and horizontal scaling – you can achieve both decentralization and high performance.

Our validator set spans 20+ countries, yet the network consistently delivers sub-second finality and high throughput, even under heavy load.

Sui’s architecture is designed so that institutions and developers can build with full programmability and trustless coordination—without compromising decentralization.

What does it mean for a blockchain to be ‘born fast’—and why do older chains struggle to evolve into that speed?

“Born fast” means Sui was architected from the ground up for performance, with parallel execution and horizontally scalable infrastructure: speed is native to Sui.

Legacy chains rely on sequential processing and monolithic designs that inherently limit scalability and throughput, and making adjustments to retrofit for speed often ends up breaking other parts of their system.

On Sui, transactions don’t compete for blockspace. Parallelization means the network grows with demand, maintaining speed even under pressure.

Sui’s architecture eliminates traditional trade-offs between decentralization, speed, and cost, which older chains struggle to reconcile.

How does Sui’s object-centric model and parallel execution make previous architectures obsolete?

On Sui, everything is treated as an object with its own ownership, allowing for fine-grained control and direct interaction, with no need to call smart contracts for every operation. This is in contrast to previous architectures that treat state as a single global store.

Sui’s object-centric model enables parallel execution, where independent transactions can process simultaneously, vastly increasing throughput and reducing latency.

This structure isn’t just a speed advantage; it enables richer, more dynamic apps with complex logic and seamless user experiences.

Sui is seeing over 1 million new wallet addresses daily. Where is this growth coming from—and what’s driving this user stickiness?

Much of the growth is driven by consumer apps built on Sui using zkLogin, which allows users to onboard with familiar credentials like Google or Facebook—no wallets or seed phrases needed.

Ecosystem innovations like Kiosk and zkSend are turning first-time users into active participants by making crypto interactions intuitive and useful.

Developers are building apps that feel familiar but are powered by the most composable blockchain: rich assets, low fees, and instant finality keep users engaged.

Sponsored transactions mean users don’t need tokens to start interacting, which removes another common barrier to stickiness.

Are you seeing more adoption from traditional fintechs, Web3 native devs, or consumer apps? Who’s leading the charge?

Web3-native builders are Sui’s early adopters, but we’re now seeing serious traction from fintech and institutional players launching products on Sui. These partners prioritize UX, an area where Sui excels.

Consumer apps are the biggest source of wallet growth. Major names like Franklin Templeton, VanEck, and Ant Financial have built on Sui for DeFi and real-world asset use cases.

Sui’s ecosystem is the intersection between Web3 natives and institutions, where innovation, scale, and distribution meet.

What’s one stat or signal from your internal roadmap that gives you confidence Sui is still underrated today?

Stablecoins are becoming the default medium for cross-border payments, value storage in inflationary economies, and institutional settlement–replacing slow, expensive traditional rails like SWIFT and ACH.

Sui’s stablecoin market cap reached a new all-time high in May 2025, peaking at over $1.1B during the month. Since the start of 2025, Sui’s stablecoin market cap has grown by over 192%. This indicates surging demand for fast, low-cost, and scalable digital dollar infrastructure.

Sui offers sub-second settlement and negligible fees, making it one of the only blockchains capable of handling stablecoins at mass-market volume without congestion or cost spikes.

Given this traction, Sui has tremendous potential in the broader market, as its architecture is uniquely suited to power the next phase of stablecoin-driven financial innovation, from remittances to enterprise payments to consumer fintech.

Does Sui aspire to become the chain for tokenized real-world assets, like many claim XRP aimed to be?

Sui is building the infrastructure that’s already earning trust from global financial leaders. Sui is already powering tokenized funds and real-world assets for institutions like Franklin Templeton and Ant Financial.

What makes Sui unique is that assets aren’t just tokens: they’re intelligent objects with built-in compliance, history, and access logic. That makes Sui ideal for RWAs, by enabling seamless, transparent, and programmable asset management without off-chain dependencies.

If you had to name one industry—finance, gaming, or digital identity—where Sui will leave the biggest mark in 2025, what would it be?

Finance. The combination of programmable assets, scalable infrastructure, and composability makes Sui the ideal foundation for next-gen financial systems. Sui is seeing high throughput in DeFi and stablecoin volumes. In May 2025, Sui’s stablecoin transfer volume reached $110B—the third-highest monthly total to date, trailing only $120B in December 2024 and $113B in January 2025.

Institutional activity is ramping, with ETFs, tokenized funds, and Bitcoin DeFi (BTCfi) now live on Sui. Finance needs performance, compliance, and trust–all areas where Sui leads.

Are you focused more on onboarding institutions or accelerating Web3-native innovation? Where’s the leverage right now?

Both. Sui’s architecture is flexible enough to serve highly regulated financial institutions and experimental builders alike. Web3-native innovation drives the bleeding edge of what’s possible, and Sui continues to provide the tools to build faster, safer, and more user-friendly apps.

Meanwhile, institutions bring credibility, capital, and distribution and they’re validating Sui through real-world deployments. Leverage comes from serving both ends of the spectrum and creating a bridge between them.