As of 23:48 Beijing time on October 1, 2026, I acknowledge that Sui already has funding and transaction fees. The infrastructure is worth continued research, but this cannot prove high-quality user retention, nor can it directly treat collaboration of institutional assets as revenue for holders of SUI. At around 23:48, the spot price is about $1.1407. My probability-weighted fair value for SUI one year from now is about $0.9965. The current price is higher by roughly 14%, which is not enough to compensate for execution, security, and supply risks. The current choice is to wait, rather than bid up based on collaboration headlines.

Sui’s core product uses an object model and the Move execution environment to process payments, transactions, and asset issuance. SUI handles staking, payment computation, and storage fees, and it also has governance uses. Mysten Labs is the original developer; the foundation, validators, and application teams jointly shape the ecosystem’s direction. OpenAssets collaborates with Sui on an open tokenized-asset standard, aiming to make ownership, compliance status, and settlement rules understandable across systems. If this standard is truly adopted by issuers, it could reduce the onboarding costs for institutions to issue and transfer assets on Sui. However, there was already development groundwork for the standard previously; what’s confirmed today is a further collaboration direction, not that production environments already have large volumes of assets, revenue, or settlement activity.

Separate “paid activities that exist,” whether users stay, and how much value token holders can obtain. The total locked value on-chain is about $544 million, and the chain fees over the past 30 days are about $3.4 million. The former is influenced by token prices and asset migrations, so it cannot be treated as revenue. The latter is simply annualized to about $40.8 million; furthermore, fees are allocated through mechanisms such as validator rewards and storage-fund distributions, so not all of it can be counted as passive cash flow for holding SUI. Current evidence still lacks active users, retention, and net demand after filtering out incentive effects under the same methodology, so we cannot assert that user quality has been validated. Low-cost transactions help attract applications, and that also means that even if the number of transactions grows, the contribution per transaction may still be limited. Next, we need to look at usage that is sustained without subsidies, ongoing costs, and the actual on-chain transaction frequency of institutional assets.

Competition also determines the upper limit of this collaboration. Solana is a direct competitor with high throughput and transaction liquidity. Aptos also uses Move. Institutional issuers can also choose Ethereum or permissioned chains. Under the same fee-calculation methodology, Solana’s chain fees over the last 30 days are about $416 million, Aptos about $1.22 million, and Sui about $3.4 million. The three businesses have different structures, so you can’t judge technical superiority by fees alone—but it does clearly show that Sui still needs to prove it can turn technical advantages into sustainable scale. Institutions care more about custody, compliance permissions, reconciliation, distribution, and incident handling; these migration costs won’t disappear merely because a common standard is adopted. Sui already has technical capability and ecosystem resources, and it also has Bitcoin financial applications that are in testing. Whether the counterpart brings real assets, transactions, and fees to Sui needs to be answered by the issuer list, verifiable smart contracts, and transaction records.

Security is another gate for institutional adoption. The mainnet halts in January and May this year show that consensus and execution paths may still experience severe failures. Repair records can prove that the team took action, but they can’t guarantee there won’t be similar issues in the future. The protocol, cross-chain assets, and the compliant issuance modules have different permissions and attack surfaces. Public code and bug bounties don’t mean that every production deployment has completed sufficient third-party audits. In governance proposals, liquid staking, validator admission, and priority transaction mechanisms already have formal texts, and some functionality can be found to have operating basis in the current technical specifications. I separate the proposal repository’s “Final” from the actual mainnet activation. An amendment involving staking redemptions did not obtain independent execution credentials in this round, so it wasn’t included in the current valuation.

You can’t just gloss over supply with “the total amount is fixed.” The SUI supply cap is 10 billion coins, but the official monthly schedule has circulation of about 4.118 billion in October this year, 4.139 billion in November, 4.180 billion in January next year, 4.238 billion in April, and 4.340 billion in October. Roughly by those month-end points, the incremental circulation pressure over the next 30, 90, 180, and 365 days is about 21 million, 62 million, 120 million, and 222 million coins. A monthly table is not a day-by-day sell-off forecast, and it also doesn’t assign each month’s increase to specific determined sellers—so it can’t be directly equated with selling pressure. Liquid staking changes how tokens can be used, so you can’t simply treat staked amounts as permanently locked. Moreover, the main custody and exchange addresses can’t be directly mapped to the ultimate holders, so I don’t use unverified “whale holding ratios” to prove safety or danger.

I use the estimated circulation supply of about 4.340 billion coins one year from now as the denominator to estimate the market value that the network could bear based on paid activities, instead of forcing an earnings multiple onto cash flows of holders whose situation is still unclear. Chain fees over the past 30 days are about $3.4 million, which annualizes to about $40.8 million. Using the current circulating market cap of about $4.7 billion, the market has priced Sui at roughly 115x annualized gross chain-fee revenue. Under the same rough methodology, Aptos is about 46x and Solana about 14x. Their maturity, fee structures, and growth rates differ, so these multiples can only provide risk coordinates—not be mechanically applied. In three scenarios, I set projected one-year gross chain fees of about $30 million, $50 million, and $100 million, and then apply network market-cap proxy multiples of 50x, 80x, and 100x respectively: pessimistic is about $1.5 billion (implying about $0.35 per SUI), probability 35%; base is about $4.0 billion (about $0.92), probability 45%; optimistic is about $10.0 billion (about $2.30), probability 20%. The optimistic scenario requires institutional issuers to bring repeat-occurring transactions and fees, while also preserving a growth premium close to today’s level—this is very demanding. The pessimistic scenario converges toward valuations of early-stage comparable chains. Probability-weighted, that comes to about $0.9965. These multiples are explicitly challengeable valuation assumptions; they are not token revenue multiples. If the target market cap changes by 20%, the token price would roughly change by the same magnitude. If the circulating supply one year from now is 5% higher than planned, the price would be about 4.8% lower.

The current price is about 14% higher than the probability-weighted value. There are also wide uncertainty ranges for chain fees, partnership payouts, and security. I use the $0.9965 weighted value as the baseline, and I apply stepwise increasing discount rates for different levels of risk. I only discuss the plan total size for SUI: in the observation zone at $0.75–$0.85 (about 15%–25% discount), I add 20% after confirming actual usage and network stability. In the core zone at $0.55–$0.65 (about 35%–45% discount), I add 50% after confirming that monthly chain fees and funds are not continuing to trend downward; cumulative 70%. In the panic zone at $0.35–$0.45 (about 55%–65% discount), I add 30% only when the market is panicked but the project logic is still intact; cumulative 100%. These ranges are not technical price levels; they are safety margins inferred backward from valuation uncertainty. If assumptions about multiples or fee rates change, the calculations must be redone—you can’t simply place mechanical limit orders. Unreached tranches remain uninvested. If there is a severe incident, a sudden change in supply rules, or the adoption logic is disproven, cancel the remaining tranches. Before trading, you still need to re-check spot quotes and depth; a narrow price spread at a single moment can’t guarantee the ability to exit large size.

For readers who already hold SUI, I can’t assume your cost basis or position size. If your risk budget can tolerate the uncertainties of mainnet operations, unlock schedules, and institutional adoption, you can follow your original plan to hold and review monthly. If price appreciation relies mainly on headlines rather than on-chain activity, it’s more important to manage concentration risk than to chase new narratives. In the future, I will first look at three things: whether there is deployable code and real issuers for the standard; whether chain fees and active applications can grow continuously; and whether mainnet can maintain stability. If after two quarters you still can’t see production issuance, while fees and funds keep trending down, or if another major mainnet halt occurs that can’t be reliably explained and repaired, then this relatively positive project view and the top end of the valuation should be reduced.

$SUI