In this episode of WuBlockchain Podcast we look at the developer backlash that followed Sui’s move to phase out JSON-RPC in July 2026. We invited several people who have built projects, operated within the Sui ecosystem, or participated in its ambassador program to discuss their experiences. Guests include former Sui Developer Ambassador Chen and Sui ecosystem developers Arthur, Mike, and Lae.
The guests broadly agree that Sui has strong technology and a good developer experience. Arthur says Move offers clear advantages in asset security, permission management, and development workflows. He also credits ecosystem projects such as Cetus and TradePort with being helpful to smaller teams. Mike says one reason he chose Sui over Aptos was that Sam Blackshear, a core creator of Move, was then at Mysten Labs.
As the conversation develops, the focus shifts to communication and management problems between the Sui Foundation and the APAC community. Arthur says an APAC lead once told him that Sui “doesn’t welcome or support memecoins” before even reviewing his project materials. He also argues that when JSON-RPC was shut down, major third-party wallets commonly used in Asia — including OKX Wallet, OneKey Wallet, and Binance Wallet — had not all finished adapting, leaving some DApps unusable. In his view, this exposed a serious information gap between headquarters and regional communities. Chen, meanwhile, stresses that Mysten Labs, the Sui Foundation, regional teams, DevRel, ambassadors, and contractors are not a single decision-making body.
The guests also discuss developer attrition, Sam Blackshear’s departure, and the broader crypto market downturn. Citing third-party GitHub statistics, Chen says Sui currently has more than 600 active developers and over 180 full-time developers, down roughly 55% year over year. Mike has decided to leave Sui, while Arthur is also considering migrating elsewhere. Arthur says the main reason is not SUI’s token price or the lack of a grant, but the long-term experience of how developers are treated: whether they receive respect, feedback, and a serious response when problems arise.
The views expressed by guests do not represent those of WuBlockchain. Some statements concerning Foundation personnel, the ambassador program, use of funds, and internal relationships are based on guests’ personal experiences, judgments, or second-hand accounts and could not be independently verified by WuBlockchain. Readers should evaluate them alongside other sources of information. Nothing in this content constitutes investment advice. Please comply with all applicable local laws and regulations.
At the request of the guests and the Sui Foundation, this episode anonymizes guest identities, related project names, and the names of non-executive Sui Foundation staff mentioned during the discussion.
All descriptions, assessments, and opinions concerning the events discussed are those of the individual guests. Before publication, WuBlockchain contacted the Sui Foundation several times regarding the issues raised in the episode and invited it to respond. As of publication, we had not received a formal statement that could be quoted publicly.
The audio transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors. Watch the full video on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/3wmXEu29aFI
Guest Introductions: Why They Started Building on Sui
Maodi: Welcome to another episode of WuBlockchain Podcast. I’m Maodi from WuBlockchain. Today we’ve invited several Sui ecosystem developers to talk about the problems and difficulties they’ve encountered while building on Sui.
First, I’d like everyone to introduce themselves and the projects they were building on Sui. One of our guests today will be speaking English, while the podcast is primarily in Chinese, so another guest will help translate during the conversation.
Arthur, why don’t you start by introducing yourself and your project?
Arthur: I’m Arthur. Cetus previously held a trading competition, and we took first place. During the competition, we noticed that there were no memecoins on Sui using an automated burn mechanism. So we built one of the earlier Sui memecoins with automatic token burning using the Cetus SDK.
We also contacted TradePort and worked with them to build the first protocol on Sui that could fractionalize NFTs. After operating for about a year, we’ve burned close to half of our token supply.
Maodi: When you say you’ve burned almost half the supply, you mean the supply of your own token, correct?
Arthur: Yes, our own token.
Lae: We’re actually from the same project. I’ll also introduce Mike’s project in Chinese.
It was a fairly active memecoin on Sui. As the Sui meme ecosystem gradually dried up, the project lost momentum, although it had been quite popular early on.
Later, we launched a new launchpad called PandaBox. One project relaunched through PandaBox and performed pretty well.
Maodi: My first formal question is: Why did you choose to build on Sui instead of another blockchain such as Ethereum or Solana? And if Move was part of the attraction, Aptos was also available at the time.
Did you choose Sui because you believed in the technology, or were there other reasons, such as ecosystem subsidies for developers?
Arthur: At the time, the blockchain industry was basically dominated by two major technology stacks. One was Solana’s SVM, and the other was the EVM used by Ethereum, BNB Chain, and others.
We believed that if crypto continued to mature, a third major development language and technology stack could emerge. After researching the space, we thought Sui had the best chance.
Another reason was the Cetus security incident. After the attack, the Sui Foundation didn’t simply stand aside. It actively tried to address the situation, including measures related to compensating users. That gave us the impression that the Foundation was willing to take responsibility during major crises.
Sui also had a good reputation in the industry at the time, and on-chain activity was strong. Those were all reasons we chose it.
Sui isn’t the only Move ecosystem. Aptos and others also use Move. One reason we ultimately chose Sui was that it seemed relatively advanced on the regulatory side. For example, SUI had gained exposure through CME-linked futures products, and there were products such as 2x leveraged ETFs. We saw that as a sign that Sui was making relatively strong progress in gaining access to regulated markets.
Once we actually entered the ecosystem, we also realized that Sui projects weren’t completely isolated from one another. It wasn’t a situation where every team just built its own project and ignored everyone else.
Cetus and TradePort were already large protocols on Sui. But they didn’t refuse to talk to us just because we were a small, newly formed team working on something experimental. On the contrary, they were very willing to help with both technical issues and promotion. That was something I experienced firsthand after joining the ecosystem.
Mike was involved with BLUB, which was also a fairly large Sui project. Chen has been developing on Sui for a long time as well. I’m sure they have plenty of experiences to share.
Mike: When I joined Sui, there was a lot of liquidity on-chain, and it was also during the memecoin boom. I bought BLUB and ended up holding roughly 1% of the total supply.
Then someone from the BLUB team contacted me and invited me to Korea Blockchain Week. I met one of the Mysten Labs founders there. He was very friendly. I believe he’s the one who recently left Mysten Labs for Anthropic.
That made me feel Sui was a good place to build. I’m a software developer by background. I work in TradFi at a major bank, but I’ve always been interested in blockchain technology, so I decided to focus my development efforts on Sui.
The experience was very good at first. Then things gradually got worse.
Chen: Just to clarify, the person he met at the event was probably Sam. He was CTO at the time and recently joined Anthropic.
Maodi: Chen, could you introduce yourself and explain what you previously did on Sui? That will give us some context for the rest of the discussion.
Chen: I first learned about Sui about a week before mainnet launched. At the time, they were holding an overseas bootcamp. I initially learned Move through that bootcamp, and I also met some of the early developers who later became highly influential in the Sui ecosystem.
Those developers remain influential in the community today — for example, Jose and Thouny. They built a lot of tools that helped the broader developer community.
Later, I became a Sui Developer Ambassador. I organized online and offline developer tutorials and promotional events for Chinese-speaking communities. I also assisted the Community team under the Sui Foundation with several online initiatives.
Sui APAC Accused of Routinely Leaving Developers on Read
Maodi: You’ve explained why you chose Sui, but I also want to make a broader comparison.
As developers, you probably don’t only know Move. You’ve likely worked with other languages and blockchains as well. Have you communicated with foundation staff from other chains? Compared with other ecosystems, is there anything particularly distinctive about Sui?
Arthur: If we’re comparing communication with foundations, Lae probably has more firsthand experience. He was the first person on our team to interact with the Sui Foundation.
Lae: I’ll mainly talk from a BD and interpersonal communication perspective.
Sui Foundation staff can be difficult to approach. They often seem almost invisible. For example, there’s an APAC lead who has been mentioned on Twitter. We’ll call her “A.”
The first time I saw her, she stayed in a corner the entire time, wearing a mask and not interacting with anyone.
Later, I met an APAC developer relations lead at another Blockchain Week event, and that was somewhat better. But most of the time, when you message these people, you still get nothing back. Overall, they can come across as rather aloof.
Maodi: Besides Sui, which other blockchain foundations have you dealt with?
Lae: I’ve interacted with ecosystems such as Solana. A few days ago, when we started considering a migration, I also spoke with teams from Coinbase and Base.
For a small project like ours, we don’t expect the other side to give us a specific amount of support. We know we’re still small. But other teams will at least show basic respect: they reply, or they explain what requirements we need to meet before certain support becomes available.
By comparison, the Sui Foundation often comes across as arrogant. Messages are regularly read and ignored — or not even opened.
Maodi: From your perspective, does the Foundation treat everyone that way? Not just small development teams like yours, but larger developers as well?
There’s another possibility: perhaps the Sui Foundation simply has fewer employees than other blockchain foundations and they’re overwhelmed. Could that explain it?
Lae: The problem is especially severe with A in APAC.
It isn’t just me. Projects much larger than ours also frequently fail to get a response from her. Most messages sent to her simply disappear into a black hole.
At first, we thought maybe we were an isolated case, or that only some Sui developers had this problem. But after the recent wave of community criticism, we saw developers from different parts of the world describing similar experiences.
At least based on our experience over the past year, the Sui Foundation has not done a good job supporting developers.
After Cetus was attacked, the Sui Foundation did respond very actively. But perhaps because we joined later, by the time we entered the ecosystem, relations between the Foundation and on-chain developers were already tense. You could even say there was obvious neglect.
That was extremely disappointing to us.
Maodi: So since you entered the Sui ecosystem, A has been the APAC lead you dealt with the entire time? There wasn’t someone else in that role before her?
Lae: As long as I’ve been familiar with the ecosystem, it has always been her.
Maodi: Roughly when did you enter the Sui ecosystem? In 2024 or 2025?
Lae: June 28, 2025.
As a small project, we actually did a lot on Sui. For around four or five months, we ranked first among all projects that weren’t backed by the Foundation. The only projects ahead of us were basically official Foundation projects. Excluding official projects, we were number one.
Even after reaching that level, we still couldn’t get a response. I found that very difficult to understand.
Maodi: When you say “number one,” do you mean by TVL or by user count?
Lae: We were also highly visible in terms of users and community discussion.
I’ve been active for a long time in English-speaking international communities. Our project has had a good reputation across most Sui communities and users often discussed it organically.
But over the past few months, I’ve clearly felt that more and more users and projects — not just ours — are leaving Sui.
Maodi: Are they leaving because of the Foundation’s communication and attitude, or are there other reasons?
Lae: My sense is that many speculative users simply realized it had become difficult to make money there, so they moved to other chains. That’s just my personal impression.
Maodi: Arthur, could you address the difference between Move and the development languages used on other chains?
Arthur: From a development perspective, I do believe in Move’s usability and security model. For example, it separates assets from execution logic.
When you manage assets on Ethereum or other EVM chains, you’re constantly clicking through approvals. If you grant too much permission, that can lead to stolen funds. Move’s object model reduces that type of risk. Assets and the authority to operate on them are designed differently, so you don’t have the same concern around unlimited token approvals.
In terms of design philosophy, development workflow, and SDK completeness, Move is very convenient. I genuinely like the technology.
So why did we still decide to leave? It isn’t because the entire Sui ecosystem is bad.
When we first started working with Cetus, we needed project verification. They didn’t approve us immediately. Instead, they told us directly that our data quality wasn’t good enough yet — our TVL, volume, user count, or other influence metrics still needed improvement.
They also told us what areas we should work on. The entire communication process was smooth.
TradePort and other Sui projects were also very friendly, including two of the top meme projects. Teams exchanged information, supported each other, and helped promote one another.
The real problem started when we communicated with A, the Sui Foundation’s APAC lead.
Arthur: I remember it very clearly. It happened at an event in Hong Kong. We had originally been a memecoin project and were trying to transition into a launchpad. We had already written the relevant code.
But before I even had the chance to show her the complete code, she said, “Sui doesn’t welcome or support memecoins.”
That single sentence shut down the entire conversation.
If you work for a blockchain foundation, even if you aren’t one of its top executives, what you say represents part of the Foundation’s position. When you say something like that, how are teams building meme projects on Sui supposed to interpret it?
I was genuinely angry.
I had traveled all the way from Malaysia to Hong Kong. It was a long, exhausting trip, and that was what I got in return. We had brought users, resources, and capital into the community, and we had been building on this chain the whole time.
It would have been one thing if the Foundation simply didn’t want to support us. But being told outright that we weren’t welcome was very difficult to accept.
Why the JSON-RPC Shutdown Broke Some Third-Party Wallets and DApps
Arthur: The real trigger for me was Sui shutting down JSON-RPC. That was why I was especially angry that day.
To be fair, around a year earlier, Sui had already said it planned to move toward gRPC and might eventually phase out JSON-RPC. So this wasn’t completely unannounced.
The biggest problem was that when JSON-RPC was actually shut down, many major wallets — including OKX Wallet, OneKey Wallet, and Binance Wallet — still had not completed their gRPC integration.
Sui disabled JSON-RPC before those wallets and service providers were ready, which caused many on-chain DApps to stop working properly.
The only alternative would be for every user to switch to Slush, Sui’s first-party wallet. That simply isn’t realistic.
Many users are already used to OneKey or OKX Wallet. Forcing everyone to migrate to a first-party wallet would itself be an extremely closed approach.
After JSON-RPC was shut down, development teams understood what was causing the problem, but ordinary users didn’t. All they saw was an application that suddenly stopped working or could no longer load data. They would assume the project had disappeared or the protocol had a bug.
Users aren’t naturally going to conclude that the problem comes from an infrastructure-level interface upgrade on Sui.
I was extremely angry, so I confronted Sui Foundation staff about it. Their response was essentially: “We told you a long time ago. It’s your fault if you didn’t upgrade.”
But the issue wasn’t whether my own protocol had upgraded.
Even if my team had completed the migration, the application still couldn’t function normally if external wallets such as OKX Wallet hadn’t added support. I can decide how my own team develops. I cannot force OKX Wallet to upgrade on my schedule.
Arthur: That’s the hardest part.
The Foundation’s senior leadership doesn’t understand what is actually happening in APAC, while the APAC team fails to relay real problems to leadership in time. That creates a serious information gap.
After I raised the issue, I didn’t receive respect, understanding, or an apology. Instead, I was challenged, and then I was muted in the community.
That was why I became so angry and decided to speak publicly. If we continued to stay silent, the community would never know what was really happening.
The Information Gap Between Sui Headquarters and APAC
Maodi: You said you know why JSON-RPC was shut down: the protocol was being upgraded.
What was the official public explanation? Had they formally announced the shutdown beforehand, or was it a sudden decision?
Arthur: It wasn’t completely sudden. When I later checked the official blog, I could find relevant information.
But JSON-RPC is a very widely used standard interface. Ethereum, BNB Chain, Solana, and even Bitcoin-related infrastructure have long used similar interfaces.
As far as I know, no major blockchain has done what Sui did and simply decided to shut down JSON-RPC.
I knew they wanted to develop gRPC, but I didn’t expect them to launch gRPC and then directly remove JSON-RPC. I hadn’t realized that was the plan, and it came as a major surprise.
For such a fundamental and widely used interface to be abruptly discontinued is almost unprecedented.
Maodi: What was their reason?
Arthur: They believed JSON-RPC was relatively outdated and wanted to move to a newer RPC architecture.
Even if the final decision was to shut it down, I could have accepted that under the right circumstances. But they should at least have ensured that OKX Wallet, other wallet providers, and middleware API providers had completed their upgrades first.
If 60% to 80% of applications, wallets, and service providers had already migrated, and then they gradually phased it out, the impact would have been much smaller.
The problem was that many providers hadn’t finished upgrading, yet the old interface was shut down anyway. I don’t think that was reasonable.
Maodi: Let me summarize your criticism.
You’re mainly questioning the professionalism of the Sui Foundation, especially the APAC team.
First, before upgrading a foundational interface, they didn’t coordinate effectively with wallets and other ecosystem service providers, leaving many users unable to use products normally.
Second, they didn’t communicate sufficiently with the community and developers, and didn’t give projects enough time to respond to the change.
Would you say those are your two main concerns?
Arthur: Yes.
When you shut down an interface this fundamental, publishing a blog post or a post on X isn’t enough.
Foundation staff in APAC should have proactively investigated which Sui protocols had not yet migrated to the new RPC.
Then they should have contacted those protocols directly and followed up on migration progress.
The attitude shouldn’t be: “I already posted about it on X. Whether you upgrade is your problem. Don’t blame me if something breaks.”
They should proactively identify who hasn’t migrated and help them complete the transition.
Maodi: I want to follow up on the Hong Kong event you mentioned.
When you spoke with A, did she explicitly say that “the Sui Foundation does not welcome memecoins”?
Arthur: Yes. She publicly said they “don’t welcome or support” them.
Maodi: When did this happen?
Arthur: A few months ago at that crypto conference in Hong Kong. There was a Sui House event at the conference.
Maodi: Was that around April or May this year?
Arthur: Yes.
Maodi: You began building on Sui around June 2025. Before that event, you had never known the Foundation’s position on meme projects, and that was the first time you heard someone say they didn’t support memes?
Arthur: Correct. We didn’t know that before, so we were surprised.
Mysten Labs co-founder Anthony had previously participated in some meme communities. He interacted with community members and had bought some memecoins.
At least from our perspective, he had never publicly opposed memes.
Maodi: Do you think “we don’t welcome or support memes” was A’s personal opinion, or was she speaking for the Foundation?
Arthur: We can’t determine that.
She is a manager at the Foundation. When someone in that position says something like that, it’s difficult for us to know whether it is her personal view or an official Foundation position.
Resource Allocation: Why Some Projects Say They Receive No Support
Maodi: Besides A, did you try contacting anyone else at the Foundation?
Arthur: Yes. We previously interacted with people responsible for developer relations in APAC.
At the time, we were looking for some media exposure, event support, or sponsorship for our project, but nothing really came of it.
Those people later left as well. They didn’t seem to have much decision-making authority themselves. They simply told us there was no grant suitable for us at the time, but that they would contact us if a new program opened later.
Maodi: In general, what kind of support do projects want from a foundation? Is it mainly money, or other resources?
Arthur: We didn’t necessarily need the Foundation to give us money directly.
For a team just getting started, recognition from the Foundation, encouragement, advice, or even something as simple as following the project on X or reposting some content can be valuable.
We put a huge amount of time and effort into the project and kept building. To eventually hear, “We don’t welcome you” or “We don’t support you” is very discouraging.
There’s another Sui project called Cardz.Game related to trading cards and RWAs. As far as I know, at one point it ranked very highly on Sui by protocol revenue, and it had real users and a real use case.
But it didn’t receive Foundation support either.
Instead, we later saw the Foundation support another project that was very similar to it.
Maodi: Where does the Sui Foundation’s money mainly come from? Early token sales, or SUI tokens reserved for the Foundation?
Arthur: I don’t know the details.
Maodi: Roughly speaking, how does the Foundation operate financially? For example, does it hold ecosystem-reserved tokens and sell some of them to fund operations?
Arthur: I can only describe some things we’ve observed.
There’s now a Nasdaq-listed company called Sui Group. You can think of it as a Sui version of MicroStrategy.
Mysten Labs or the Foundation can sell tokens to Sui Group through OTC transactions. Sui Group can then raise money through equity issuance and other means and purchase SUI at a relatively low price.
But I can’t confirm the exact transaction structure, the source of the tokens, or how the Foundation’s finances work.
Maodi: Foundation spending would mainly include employee salaries, marketing, and developer grants, correct?
Arthur: Probably, but the full picture isn’t transparent. We haven’t seen a detailed and comprehensive accounting of the Foundation treasury.
Maodi: The Ethereum Foundation, for example, publishes relatively detailed annual reports covering its holdings, spending, and grants. Does the Sui Foundation have anything similar?
Arthur: The Foundation does disclose some information.
For example, it announces which events it sponsored, which projects received grants, and certain major developments. The loan the Foundation provided after the Cetus incident was also publicly disclosed.
But we haven’t seen a complete breakdown of more granular information: how much a particular event cost, the size of media promotion budgets, how much each regional team spent, where the money originally came from, or how much the Foundation still holds.
Allegations That the Sui Ambassador Program Is Unfriendly to APAC Time Zones
Maodi: Mike, I have two questions for you.
First, when you communicated with the Sui Foundation, did you encounter problems similar to what Arthur described?
Second, have you observed a significant number of developers leaving Sui?
Mike: Sam leaving Mysten Labs was not a good sign for me, because he was one of the people who developed the Move language.
Maybe the new organization he joins or creates will continue to advance Move. But in the long term, it’s unclear whether the language will continue developing at the same level.
One important reason I chose Sui over Aptos was precisely because a core Move developer was at Mysten Labs.
Now that Sam has left, that’s a major loss for Sui.
As for the Sui Foundation, I didn’t have a good experience working with them while I was involved with BLUB and other projects. They made a lot of mistakes.
I think the Foundation almost destroyed the meme and degen side of the ecosystem by simply ignoring it.
Slush also used to be unwilling to list memecoins.
The Foundation basically ignored the existence of these projects unless they belonged to teams with close internal relationships.
After I announced that I was leaving Sui, I received messages from people in other projects and communities.
People who had already left told me they felt the same way. Someone even told me, “Most of the really good people have already left.”
Some projects are still on Sui now, but they’re also watching other chains and looking for new opportunities.
I think more people are going to leave.
Mysten Labs or the Foundation may attribute the problem to the decline in SUI’s price. But I think the real issue is that they haven’t been able to build an effective relationship with the community.
Arthur: Skew participated in a Sui hackathon and advanced to the next stage. It doesn’t have some powerful institutional backer.
As far as I know, it was the first prediction market built on DeepBook on Sui, and there wasn’t any direct competitor at the time.
The community gave the project quite a bit of support, but it received no help from the Foundation.
A project still has to pay for AI services, servers, front-end development, and everything else. If all it can rely on is community support, it’s difficult to know how long the team can keep going.
Maodi: Let’s ask Chen the same two questions.
First, did you encounter similar problems when dealing with the Sui Foundation?
Second, have you observed Sui developers leaving the ecosystem?
Chen: When discussing this, the first thing we have to do is distinguish between Mysten Labs, the Sui Foundation, the APAC regional teams, DevRel — the developer relations team — community managers, and outside contractors.
These groups are not a single decision-making body and they don’t have the same authority.
Mysten Labs is essentially a technology startup. Its main role is developing the Sui Network and related products.
The Sui Foundation focuses more on ecosystem development, capital, developers, and resource allocation.
Within the Foundation, there are also different regional teams.
I previously had more contact with APAC Community, the Asia-Pacific community team. Within APAC, there were separate community, ecosystem, marketing, and other functions. At the time, the head of the Community team was French.
A was probably one of the people leading the ecosystem side.
But as far as I know, even some people working within the community team — or contractors working for the community — had difficulty reaching her.
We met once in Hangzhou about two years ago, before I became a Developer Ambassador. We added her on WeChat because we wanted access to some materials.
Later, when we messaged her, she would often read the messages and not respond. At the time, we could only assume she was busy.
The various teams under APAC are actually fairly fragmented, and sometimes they compete for limited resources. Different teams submit their own proposals and compete for budgets and support.
In that kind of environment, I think it’s easy for small internal circles to form. But I don’t know the internal situation in detail, so I don’t want to make overly definitive claims.
A lot of investments made in the past ultimately failed. Investment failures themselves are understandable. No ecosystem can expect every investment to succeed.
But some projects received funding and then produced almost nothing.
If a project gets support and fails to deliver anything at all, I think that at minimum suggests there were problems in resource allocation and management.
The Foundation and Mysten Labs are probably aware of these issues. We just don’t know whether they will make changes, or what those changes would look like.
As for developers leaving, yes, it is happening.
Early on, Sui invested substantial resources in developer education both in China and internationally. That attracted many developers into the ecosystem.
But on any blockchain, it’s difficult for developers to survive financially through their projects. Only a small minority of projects succeed, and the Foundation’s ability to support people is limited. So some turnover is normal.
That said, two OG developers who had been involved with Sui since testnet have already left. They had both helped me in the past.
For me, that is a signal worth paying attention to.
Maodi: When Sui developers leave, where do they generally go?
The Move ecosystem itself is relatively limited. Do they move to Aptos, or switch to EVM, Solana, or some other ecosystem?
Chen: We’re in the AI era now. Programming languages are no longer the migration barrier they once were.
What really matters is development experience, the quality of the team, and overall execution ability.
If a team has already built DeFi on Sui and wants to move to another chain, the main change may simply be the development language and tooling.
The product they built, the TVL they accumulated, and the results they achieved are all transferable evidence of competence and credibility.
Maodi: Apart from communication problems, have you observed any other operational or management issues?
Chen: Every chain has problems.
Sui is fundamentally a U.S.-origin startup project, so it tends to be strict about U.S. compliance. But once authority gets delegated layer by layer to regional teams and individual operators, many rules become less clear, and that can create opportunities for rent-seeking.
When someone controls both authority and a budget, they may not always prioritize the long-term interests of the blockchain and its ecosystem. They may prioritize their own interests first.
That’s why transparency matters so much.
The Sui Foundation is registered in the Cayman Islands. It isn’t required to file detailed reports like a U.S.-listed company filing a 10-K.
It is difficult for outsiders to know how much money it spends each year, and the flow of funds in APAC is even less transparent.
When an organization has a lot of money, hires a large number of young employees, and lacks sufficiently strong oversight and accountability, small internal circles can easily emerge.
Of course, some people care deeply about their careers and the quality of their work, and they have strong personal integrity. I’ve met people like that as well.
But we have tried to contact people at higher levels, including A and the marketing team, and the result was still often being left on read or receiving very superficial responses.
Even people inside the ecosystem struggle to reach them. For outside projects, it’s even harder.
Maodi: You used to be a Sui Ambassador, correct?
Chen: Yes. I was a Developer Ambassador. There were only a handful of Developer Ambassadors in mainland China.
The position came with a modest monthly stipend.
The main role was developer education and supporting the developer community, rather than going deep into technical troubleshooting for every individual project.
I held offline courses, gave online talks, and also helped some hackathon participants.
There were different types of ambassadors, including content ambassadors and event ambassadors.
In China at the time, I think the main roles were content ambassadors and developer ambassadors. There were probably only three or four people in total.
Maodi: Was the program managed by the Sui Foundation?
Chen: It was more of a loosely organized program.
We had a Discord group and weekly meetings.
But the meeting time was extremely unfriendly to APAC, so ambassadors in APAC almost never attended.
There were no meeting notes afterward either.
It was supposedly a global program, but the meeting schedule didn’t really accommodate different time zones.
Occasionally, when there was an event, the program managers would ask ambassadors to help promote it. But Developer Ambassadors generally didn’t have mandatory promotional duties.
Coordination in Discord was mostly North America-centered. Participation from China was relatively limited.
Maodi: Did ambassadors have specific KPIs?
Chen: Different roles had different requirements.
A Developer Ambassador might be expected to organize two offline meetups or workshops per month, although online talks, courses, and similar activities could also count toward the requirement.
At the time, most of my work was related to a community project called Sui Passport. It was essentially more of a contractor role, but the department responsible for that project no longer exists.
Content Ambassadors might be required to publish one article per week.
The problem was that while the program had task requirements, it didn’t have a robust review process.
Someone set the requirements, but nobody really checked how well people completed them.
When we joined the program, we signed agreements and completed KYC. There were clearly defined work requirements.
But there was no strict follow-up review.
Maodi: So as long as you submitted the task, it was basically accepted? People generally wouldn’t lose their eligibility or have their stipend reduced for failing to complete the work?
Chen: Because there was so little review, they didn’t actually know whether each person had completed the required work.
Maodi: Roughly how many people were in the global ambassador program?
Chen: Looking at everyone who had accumulated in the program over time, there were about 100 people in the Discord.
Maodi: If there wasn’t strict review and the tasks weren’t particularly difficult, why would people leave?
Chen: The earliest ambassadors didn’t actually receive fixed salaries. They may have been able to apply for nodes or other forms of resources. There are a lot of stories around that period.
Later, the ambassador program was divided into different roles and began offering fixed stipends.
If you organized projects or events, you could also apply for separate reimbursement.
I’ve also heard some pretty extreme stories — for example, claims that someone reported holding a large number of events in a single day.
I only heard those stories from other people, though, so I can’t confirm whether they were true.
Sui’s Core Problems: Information Gaps and How Problems Are Handled
Maodi: Arthur, apart from communication problems and the loose internal management Chen described, have you noticed any other issues?
Arthur: Even though our recent experience with the Sui Foundation was extremely unpleasant, I still want to assess the situation as objectively as possible.
Whether we’re talking about the JSON-RPC shutdown, the Bali event, or other incidents, I think the most fundamental problem is that there is a very clear disconnect between the APAC region and Sui Foundation headquarters.
The Foundation’s core departments and headquarters may simply have no idea what is actually happening in APAC.
Take the gRPC migration as an example.
In Europe and the U.S., many Sui users may already be using Slush, Sui’s first-party wallet. But in APAC, people rely much more heavily on third-party wallets such as OKX Wallet, Binance Wallet, and OneKey Wallet.
Headquarters may not realize that APAC users depend more on third-party wallets than on the first-party wallet.
If they understood that, they might have first checked whether those third-party wallets had completed their upgrades.
If they hadn’t, the Foundation should have communicated with OKX, Binance, and other wallet providers first. Then, after those wallets had completed integration, it could have shut down the old interface with much less disruption.
That is a very clear example of an information gap.
After I raised these problems, I was muted in a Sui Telegram group.
At the time, a relatively senior Foundation manager even thought Chen was the person responsible for moderation across the entire APAC region.
But that wasn’t true.
Chen was just a volunteer.
That shows how little headquarters understands the people and the situation in APAC.
The Bali event had a similar problem.
In my view, they invited a lot of people who didn’t have much connection to the ecosystem, while failing to understand who had actually followed the community for a long time and made meaningful contributions.
In the end, it seemed like they had just thrown together an invitation list without really knowing who was who.
So the first problem is the information gap.
The second is attitude. That is what actually made me angry.
I wasn’t angry because SUI’s price went down, and I wasn’t angry because the Foundation didn’t give us support.
Plenty of assets fall in a bad market. BTC has fallen from $120,000 to just above $60,000 before. Ethereum has also dropped significantly. SUI’s decline can also be explained partly by broader market conditions.
The most important issue is how they respond when something goes wrong.
From the moment I began publicly raising questions until now, I still haven’t received a formal response.
The only official response I’ve received is that they are investigating what happened in APAC.
Beyond that, I haven’t received an apology or a specific explanation addressing the issues I raised.
When community members raise concerns, some official personnel in APAC seem to interpret that as spreading negativity.
They don’t proactively step forward and say, “We handled this badly. We made a mistake.”
Whether it was the Bali incident or anything else, I’ve never heard a single apology.
I think that is a serious problem of attitude.
So to summarize: the first problem is the information disconnect, and the second is how problems are handled.
Maodi: Lae, have you observed any other issues? And Mike, aside from the communication problems you mentioned earlier, are there any other experiences you’d like to share?
Lae: Most of my contact has been with ambassadors and marketing staff.
But I do want to add one thing. Senior executives such as Adeniyi aren’t completely opposed to meme projects. I’ve seen him publicly support some of them, including Toilet.
As for Jui, I think that situation was rather extreme. The project involved sensitive ethnic or political themes, so we always avoided interacting with it in an official project capacity.
But Adeniyi appeared to have supported it publicly.
Mike: I know someone who works inside the Sui Foundation. I actually like him a lot. He’s a very good person.
I previously told him that many projects were being ignored, and that only people with internal connections seemed able to get help.
He acknowledged that this was happening, but said there was nothing he could do about it.
That was one of the things that gradually made me feel hopeless.
Some projects do receive public support — for example, attention and promotion from accounts like Sui Community on X.
But from my perspective, most of those projects have relatively good relationships with Mysten Labs or the Sui Foundation.
For genuinely new projects trying to enter the ecosystem and make an impact, it is extremely difficult.
That has been my personal experience.
Lae: Mike’s experience is basically the same as mine.
That said, to be fair, the broader market is also weak right now.
We’ve recently been looking at projects on other chains, including ecosystems related to Robinhood, as well as projects connected to TradePort and the Uniswap Launchpad.
I don’t know whether what we’re seeing is simply a result of the market environment or a general ecosystem problem.
We’ve noticed that projects receiving strong official support on other chains sometimes also have internal connections.
So lately I’ve been reconsidering how much of this is specific to Sui.
How Many Developers Are Actually Left in the Sui Ecosystem?
Maodi: Arthur, based on what you’ve seen, roughly how many developers or development teams are still active in the Sui ecosystem?
Arthur: I haven’t done a detailed count.
But the number of developers and teams is definitely declining, and the decline is fairly obvious.
Maodi: Can you give us a rough range? Are we talking dozens, hundreds, or more?
Arthur: I really haven’t tracked the exact numbers.
But I can give a few clear examples.
Our community has been running for a year.
When we first started, there was a project in the ecosystem called Bobo. That team has already left.
There was also a project using Walrus for storage. It later shut down.
Many other meme projects have almost completely disappeared, and most of their teams have left.
One Sui OG named Varo also left.
There was also a participant from Vietnam named Mibu. He owned several valuable BNB domain names and was very active in the SuiNS domain ecosystem. He eventually left as well.
There are many similar examples.
Maodi: Based purely on your impression, what percentage do you think has left? Around 50%?
Chen: I may know a little more about the data, but we first need to define what we mean by “developers.”
Overflow was held recently, so short-term numbers may look somewhat elevated.
There are probably around 80 to 100 teams that currently have an actual product.
At the beginning of this year, there were more than 600 monthly active developers. Full-time developers were somewhere above 100 and close to 200.
There may be fewer now.
Maodi: What would you estimate the current number to be?
Chen: My guess is that the latest monthly active developer figure may be around 500.
Maodi: You mean individual developers?
Chen: Yes. People who are still actively developing each month.
Maodi: If the number fell from more than 600 to around 500, that doesn’t sound like an enormous decline.
Chen: Let me check. There’s a website that specifically tracks this type of data.
According to that site, its methodology is based on the number of developers making commits each month to Sui-related GitHub repositories.
By that definition, Sui currently has more than 600 active developers and more than 180 full-time developers.
But compared with a year ago, the number is down roughly 55%.
Maodi: The entire crypto market is cooling off, and other blockchains may be facing similar problems. AI in particular is having a major impact on the crypto industry right now.
Arthur: I agree.
Other chains are facing similar conditions.
If developers leave Sui for Robinhood, Base, or BSC, does that guarantee they’ll do better? Not necessarily.
The entire crypto market is moving into a bear market.
But why are people still deciding to leave?
The biggest issue is respect and attitude.
At least for us, the core problem is that we didn’t feel we were treated with the respect we deserved, and we were dissatisfied with how they handled problems.
Maodi: That covers all my questions. Thank you, everyone.
Arthur: I’d also like to give a final summary.
We’re actually deeply attached to the Sui ecosystem.
If we didn’t care about it this much, we wouldn’t have such strong emotions about what happened.
Even if we ultimately leave, I still hope the Sui Foundation will confront these problems seriously and fix them.
Senior leadership, in particular, shouldn’t push part-time staff or ambassadors to the front and make them take responsibility.
The people who are actually responsible should step forward and address what happened.
There is nothing frightening or humiliating about admitting a mistake.
If you openly acknowledge the problem, everything can start again.
But silence is the greatest form of contempt.
I hope Sui gets better from here.
Maodi: It sounds like you’re still fairly optimistic.
Arthur: Chen and Mike are also deeply attached to Sui.
BLUB, which Mike was involved with, was once one of the most prominent flagship projects on Sui.
Chen was also one of the early developers to join Sui.
None of them wanted to see things end up this way.
Lae: Mike, is there anything you’d like to add before we finish?
Mike: Frankly, I’m more excited about moving on to the next chain. I hope we have a better experience there.
As for Sui, I think I’m closing that chapter.
I hope things improve for the people who are still there.
But for me, I just want to move forward.
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