A personal letter from a long-term Sui participant and Cardz.Game community member — not a founder, employee or spokesperson.
By @JJJSUI (Sui 教主)
This is not a letter about why Sam left. It is a letter about whether the people who stayed still feel seen.
This letter is not about Sam Blackshear
Sam Blackshear has announced that he is leaving Mysten Labs to join Anthropic, where he will work on defensive security research. He said he would remain close to Mysten Labs and the Sui ecosystem, while Evan Cheng said he was returning to technical leadership. [1][2]
I genuinely wish Sam well. He created Move and helped build something technically remarkable. His career decision should not be twisted into proof of a failure that he did not claim.
The news is relevant for a different reason. It arrives at a moment when Sui is being forced to think about retention—not only the retention of famous technical leaders, but the trust of the builders and community members working below the headline.
Sui has always known how to speak about world-class technology. The harder question is whether it knows how to make the people building on top of that technology feel seen.
My position, before anything else
I am not the founder of Cardz.Game. I do not work for Cardz.Game, and I do not speak on behalf of its team.
I am a Cardz.Game community member and a long-term participant in the Sui ecosystem. I am writing entirely in my personal capacity because I have reached the point where silence feels less responsible than speaking.
I am not asking for compensation. I am not trying to tell Sui Foundation or Mysten Labs how to run their organisations. I am asking for help, understanding and an honest answer: are the situations described in this letter isolated misunderstandings, or do they reflect the actual position of the ecosystem?
Why I have standing to ask
On 12 December 2024, approximately 6.27 million SUI was stolen from me. It was worth close to US$29 million at the time. The public reporting does not name the victim; the statement that this was my loss is my own first-person account. [3]
If I wanted to lose my temper, that was the day. If I wanted to FUD Sui, I had the perfect reason. If I wanted to leave and never look back, nobody could reasonably have blamed me.
But I stayed.
To be fair, I was not completely ignored. A Telegram contact displayed as “Alex Sui foundation”, using the handle @alexshelton_ML, contacted me in relation to the incident. Sui’s Developer Forum had also directed affected users to that handle as a security contact. [4]
I appreciated the contact, and I include the screenshot because I do not want to erase help that was offered merely to make my criticism sound cleaner.
Contact is not the same thing as resolution. A reply is not the same thing as meaningful practical support.
The burden of tracing what happened, dealing with the loss and living with the consequences remained largely mine. I can appreciate the person who tried to help and still be honest about the limits of that help. Both things can be true.
I stayed, and I kept showing up
My support for Sui did not begin when this controversy became popular. For roughly a year, I have maintained a recurring Tuesday-and-Friday livestream schedule, discussing Sui, its ecosystem, its market and its builders—rain or shine.
My public @JJJSUI archive shows the rhythm. The supplied archive excerpt covers months of 2026; the longer one-year continuity is my first-person statement and can be checked against the public timeline.
That record does not make every opinion of mine correct. It does establish that I am not speaking as a tourist who appeared for a viral argument and will disappear when the attention moves on.
JSON-RPC was the match, not the whole fire
Sui’s official documentation states that JSON-RPC was deprecated, that it would be disabled on Sui Foundation mainnet full nodes during the week of 27 July 2026, and that full decommission—including code removal—was planned for mid-October. [5]
So I am not claiming that no notice existed anywhere. The documentation existed.
The problem is that many developers experienced the transition as operationally abrupt and poorly absorbed. Sites and wallets encountered problems, and the anger that followed was much larger than a technical migration should normally create.
Official migration timeline
Week of 27 Jul 2026: Foundation mainnet JSON-RPC disabled • End Aug: snapshots stop • End Sep: archival fallback disconnected • Mid-Oct: code removal planned.
The JSON-RPC incident was not the whole fire. It was the match.
A public post by CindyCreation announced the end of her Sui building and investment and cited JSON-RPC, Asian-community relations and other accumulated grievances. I do not reproduce that screenshot as proof that every allegation inside it is true. I include it because it shows the scale and breadth of the frustration that had already accumulated. [15]
A river does not freeze three feet deep overnight. When even developers begin reacting with this level of anger, the API change is rarely the entire story.
Why Cardz.Game changed the question for me
What finally made me write was not my own loss. It was watching what happened around Cardz.Game.
Again, I am not its founder or spokesperson. I am a community member who watched an independent team build a consumer product around physical graded trading cards, verifiable onchain pack openings, ownership, trading and physical redemption.
During its first month, Cardz.Game publicly reported more than 200,000 card draws and over 100 physical shipments. On 5 August 2026, it published a DeFiLlama snapshot showing that it ranked #1 in 24-hour protocol fees on Sui on that date, at roughly US$158,000.
Then Cardz.Game moved beyond a purely onchain story. It announced a collaboration with Circle K, and the initial featured batch on Circle K’s ShopEasy storefront was marked sold out across the displayed PSA 10 listings. According to Cardz.Game’s public announcement, the first batch sold out almost immediately. [10]
That matters. This is not another short-term token incentive. It is a blockchain product entering an existing collector market through real retail distribution.
I am almost embarrassed that I have to use a complaint letter to introduce people to Cardz.Game. A working project should not need controversy in order to become visible. But once the contrast is seen, it becomes difficult to ignore.
The contrast that is difficult to ignore
In June 2026, Rip Station launched on Sui with real graded Pokémon cards, onchain ownership, trading and physical redemption. On 3 July, the official @SuiNetwork account promoted it directly. Earlier, Sui had also promoted Parasol’s trading-card experience; Parasol had been acquired by Mysten Labs. [8][9]
Let me be precise. I am not saying that Cardz.Game owns the idea of trading cards. I am not saying that overlapping features automatically prove plagiarism. I am not asking Sui to remove Rip Station or stop anybody from competing.
Competition is normal. Official amplification, however, communicates what an ecosystem chooses to notice.
One Chinese-speaking community member described the situation with a deliberately crude phrase: Sui had produced a “shit-coloured competing product” while refusing to support the project with real players and traffic. [14]
The phrase is crude. The serious point underneath it is not really about brown, beige or orange.
It is about whether a product built around TCG actually understands collector culture. Collectors care about exact card identity, edition, language, grading, provenance, art, rarity, display, opening ritual, transparent odds and reliable fulfilment. The card is not a generic unit placed inside a financial wrapper; the card is the reason the user is there.
To me, Rip Station’s public presentation feels more like a financial mechanism with trading cards placed on top of it. Cardz.Game’s presentation feels more deliberately organised around collector behaviour and the identity of individual cards. That is a personal product critique, not an objective finding, and readers can compare the supplied screenshots themselves.
What feels disrespectful is not the colour palette. It is the possibility that collector culture is being treated as a skin rather than a community that needs to be understood.
A market can support more than one product. The question is why the project that first demonstrated measurable demand, physical fulfilment and retail expansion did not receive comparable official recognition.
The team asked privately. Twice.
I am not including this section to embarrass anyone. I am including it because public discussion should not begin from the false assumption that the team never tried to speak privately.
According to Cardz.Game team members, they raised the situation directly with Adeniyi Abiodun on two separate occasions: once in Dubai and once in Singapore. These were face-to-face conversations. The team says the response on both occasions was essentially, “Sure, we will follow up.”
According to the team’s account, no substantive follow-up came after Dubai, and none came after Singapore. These are reported private conversations, not independently verified transcripts, and the article labels them accordingly.
They did not only complain online. They asked in person—twice.
There is a Chinese saying: 事不过三—do not let the same thing happen a third time. After two face-to-face approaches, I do not believe a third attempt should become the test of whether the smaller team was sincere enough. At some point, responsibility for continuing the conversation cannot remain entirely with the party that has less access and fewer resources.
Is this an isolated case, or a pattern?
If Cardz.Game were the only example, I might still tell myself not to overthink it. But similar concerns have already appeared in public.
In November 2025, builders and ecosystem participants publicly debated Hashi, Mysten Labs’ Bitcoin collateral and lending infrastructure. Builder-side posts alleged overlap with independent teams and warned that unclear boundaries could make investors hesitate. Evan Cheng responded publicly, citing institutional requirements, adoption limitations, prior support for projects such as Ika and the value of healthy product competition. [12][13]
I am not declaring every builder allegation correct or every official explanation wrong. The point is that the same fear—whether a successful independent direction may later face the ecosystem’s best-resourced organisations—has surfaced more than once.
The Bali controversy became another piece of community shorthand. Long-term supporters felt that people perceived as being outside the Sui ecosystem were invited while some consistent ecosystem participants were passed over. I am not trying to litigate every invitation list here.
What matters is the joke that remained: “Keep criticising Sui and you will never make it to Bali.”
Every community eventually turns the things it is uncomfortable saying directly into jokes.
I did not turn Bali into a personal fight. A plane ticket mattered less to me than maintaining the community. But episodes like that still leave people cold, especially when they appear beside product overlap, unanswered follow-ups and developer frustration.
Any one complaint can have its own context. But when Chinese-speaking community members, overseas builders, developers and investors begin using similar language about being ignored, the question can no longer be answered by dismissing each incident as an isolated emotional reaction.
The questions I hope the official side can help us understand
I am not presenting a list of instructions. These are the questions I am genuinely asking.
Does the official side consider Cardz.Game a genuine Sui success case? If not, what is still missing?
What criteria led to official promotion of Rip Station, and was Cardz.Game ever assessed against the same criteria?
When a core-team-connected product overlaps with an existing independent builder, what principles govern communication, collaboration and competition?
After two reported face-to-face follow-ups, is there a person or channel willing to continue the conversation with the Cardz.Game team?
Does the official side see the recent Chinese-community and developer anger as isolated incidents, or as evidence of a longer trust problem?
A direction worth considering—without pretending I run Sui
Perhaps Sui does not need to manufacture its next consumer narrative from scratch. It may already have one in front of it.
Cardz.Game has measurable use, physical fulfilment, visible protocol fees, collector-facing product design and emerging retail distribution. That combination is rare enough to deserve a closer look.
Whether it ultimately becomes a flagship is not for me to dictate. But when something has already begun to run, it may be worth understanding why it is working before the ecosystem turns its attention elsewhere.
A little recognition does not guarantee a winner. It can, however, turn a proven project into a benchmark that gives the entire ecosystem a story people can understand.
I am asking to be heard, not compensated
I am not asking for compensation. I am not asking anyone to agree with every conclusion in this letter. I am asking the people leading this ecosystem to understand what some of us are seeing from the ground.
A leader does not need to accept every criticism. But a real leader should be able to recognise the pain underneath it.
The hacker did not make me leave. A difficult market did not stop me from showing up every Tuesday and Friday. What worries me is the possibility that the people who stayed may slowly stop believing that their work is visible.
And yes, English is the first language of this article—not because I understand English better. I need the Simplified Chinese version beside it so I can personally verify every sentence.
I am using English because writing only in Chinese has too often felt like speaking in a room where the people with the authority to answer are not listening.
Apparently, in a global ecosystem, a Chinese concern still needs an English passport before it can reach the right desk. Funny, isn’t it? ^^
Sam Blackshear’s next chapter will be at Anthropic, and I genuinely wish him well. Sui’s next chapter will be written by the people who remain.
I am not asking $SUI to agree with me. I am asking whether Sui is willing to hear us.