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SUI Mainnet and Token Launches, Volatile Trading Pushing Price to $1.26

Tim Fries

Published: May 3, 2023 10:17 pm

SUI, the native token of the layer-1 (L1) Sui blockchain that launched on May 3, plummeted over 40% since the rollout. The token currently trades at $1.26, with a market cap below $680 million, according to CoinGecko.

Sui Mainnet and Token Finally Launch

The project’s team confirmed on its Discord server that the long-awaited launch of the Sui blockchain network finally took place at 7:30 am EST on Wednesday. Along with the mainnet, the SUI token also launched today, but not as many might have expected.

The token crashed at the launch, plunging 40% to $1.28 from $2.16 within several minutes. The drop brought the project’s market capitalization to below $680 million, while its fully diluted valuation (FDV) stood at around $12.8 billion at the time of the writing.

The FDV represents the total supply of SUI tokens, including those not in current circulation. Currently, there are around 500 million tokens in circulation.

SUI is the native token of the namesake blockchain project, developed to allow users to pay transaction fees and for governance purposes. The Sui Foundation teamed up with popular centralized exchanges (CEXs) such as Binance, OKX, Kucoin, and Bybit to sell SUI tokens to the project’s Discord members and users of other exchanges.

Developed by Mysten Labs, Sui is an L1 blockchain platform developed to address scalability issues faced by major blockchains such as Ethereum through extraordinary speed and performance. The blockchain can reportedly handle between 10,871 transactions per second (TPS) and 297,000 TPS on different workloads, significantly higher than the 4,000 TPS achieved by Solana, one of the fastest L1 chains. Mysten Labs is a Web3 firm founded by Meta’s former engineers who worked on the abandoned Novi project.

Binance CEO Warns Justin Sun Not to Attempt to Farm the SUI Airdrop

Just days before the launch, Tron founder Justin Sun tweeted on May 1 that he is planning a full refund of a $56 million transfer to Binance. The move came after the crypto exchange’s CEO, Changpeng Zhao, said his company would take action against Sun if he used any funds to purchase vast SUI tokens from Binance’s Launchpool.

“Binance LaunchPool are meant as air drops for our retail users, not just for a few whales,” Zhao said.

– CZ wrote in a tweet.

Binance Launchpad refers to the exchange’s bootstrapping portal, where users can buy or farm liquidity of newly launched crypto tokens. Binance announced the SUI token would be available on Launchpool on Sunday, enabling users to stake their cryptocurrencies to add funds into a liquidity pool in return for rewards.

This article originally appeared on The Tokenist