Sui ranks #18 of 504 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #30: 12 of the 29 assets ahead of it are not native coins but tokens or claims. A token is issued on a host blockchain rather than running its own; a claim stands for an asset already counted. Of the 19 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, 14 are claims on other assets and 5 are tokens.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | C · 57/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #18 |
| Rank counting claims | #30 |
| Market capitalisation | $3.8B |
| Price | $0.9243 |
| Circulating supply | 4,118,270,448 SUI |
| Maximum supply | 10,000,000,000 SUI |
| Consensus family | Proof of Stake |
| Consensus mechanism | Mysticeti (Narwhal/Bullshark) |
| Network purpose | Smart-contract platform |
| Ledger type | Multi-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | Presale |
Market figures from the 28 October 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
C — 57 out of 100, provisional (from 18 of 20 criteria, 28 October 2026 build). With what is not yet measured anywhere from nothing to full marks, the score would be 52 to 62 (C to C).
| Criterion | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Leading Consensus Mechanisms (Source) | 9.1 | group average |
| Consensus: leader ladder | 9.1 | Proof of stake: 9.1 of 10 on the ladder of consensus families ranked by their largest chain's market cap |
| Consensus: family ladder | 9.1 | Proof of stake: 9.1 of 10 on the ladder of families ranked by the combined market cap of their chains |
| Cryptocurrency Standards (Source) | 4.4 | group average, 11 of 13 measured |
| Sound Money Qualities (6 checks) | 6.3 | 3.8 of 6 points source |
| Scarcity: a fixed cap that holds, and a supply near 21 million | 8.2 | fixed maximum supply of 10 billion: supply scale 6.4, cap 10 |
| Durability: five years or more with no halt, freeze or reversal | ✗ | 3 full years since its first recorded price, 5 halts, freezes or reversals in five years |
| Fungibility: every unit interchangeable, none the protocol can freeze or set apart | ✗ | an authority can freeze funds: Validators keep a transaction deny list and in May 2025 a supermajority used it to freeze the Cetus attacker's ~$162M, later moved by a governance upgrade. |
| Divisibility: the smallest unit worth a cent or less | ✓ | 9 decimal places, the smallest unit worth $9.2e-10 |
| Portability: fees of a cent or less and capacity for real demand | ✓ | typical fee $0.0001; about 5,414 transactions a second (10 on the throughput scale; 5 is the busiest networks' median demand) |
| Verifiability: open-source nodes and checking without a trusted server | ✓ | node software open source; light clients verify from headers or proofs |
| Privacy (5 checks) | 2 | 1 of 5 passed source |
| Whitepaper privacy: keys are not tied to an identity | ✓ | Anyone can create keys and receive and send coins; the protocol carries no identity check. |
| UTXO ledger: a new key for each payment, no account linking every coin | ✗ | |
| Network-level privacy: the node hides where a transaction came from (Dandelion++, Tor or I2P, on by default) | ✗ | Transactions are submitted to validators directly; no Dandelion or Tor. |
| Hidden amounts (confidential transactions, RingCT, shielded pools, Mimblewimble) | ✗ | No confidential transactions on mainnet. |
| Hidden sender and receiver (ring signatures or zero-knowledge proofs, one-time or stealth addresses) | ✗ | No sender or receiver hiding. |
| Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space, features) | 8 | average of 5 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 10 | typical fee $0.0001 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 119, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 10 | about 5,414 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 0 | a block every 0.25 seconds |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 10 | 31.5 MB limit, 75500 MB per 10 minutes |
| Features (3 checks) | 10 | 3 of 3 passed |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | ✓ | Mysticeti consensus gives deterministic finality in under a second. |
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✓ | Sui full nodes prune old object versions and checkpoints after a configured retention window. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✓ | Checkpoints are signed by the validator committee; the sui-light-client crate verifies transactions, effects and objects from them without a full node. |
| Security (miner pay and 7 checks) | 5 | 5 of 9 points source |
| Miners paid a day ($1,000 0, $10 million or more 10), 2 points | 0 | not mined |
| Its own hashrate: at least half its algorithm's largest, not merge-mined | ✗ | not mined |
| Largest pool or validator under 50% | ✓ | 6.1% |
| Largest three under 75% | ✓ | 10.7% |
| More than one maintained client | ✗ | 1 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | Mysten Labs develops the only client in its MystenLabs/sui repository and sets the protocol roadmap with the Sui Foundation. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | ✓ | about 10,279,528 a day |
| No 51% attack or deep reorganisation in five years | ✓ | |
| Programmability (tokens, contracts, 5 checks) | 8.9 | 8 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance at protocol level, validated by its own nodes | 2 | Move coins (the sui::coin standard) from packages any account can publish. |
| Smart contracts: a general-purpose contract system | 2 | Move packages publishable by any account, running DEXs, lending and games on mainnet. |
| Multisig and time locks | ✓ | Native k-of-n weighted multisig addresses (up to 10 keys, u16 threshold) plus time conditions in Move via the on-chain Clock. |
| Atomic swaps with other chains | ✓ | Garden lists Sui among its HTLC atomic-swap contract chains. |
| An exchange built into the protocol | ✗ | DeepBook V3, described as Sui's native liquidity layer, is a Move package rather than a ledger rule or system module. |
| Cross-chain messaging the chain verifies itself | ✓ | Sui Bridge, live on mainnet since the end of Q3 2024: code baked into the Sui framework, a committee made only of Sui validators signing transfers to and from Ethereum by voting-power threshold. |
| Non-fungible tokens | ✓ | NFTs are Move objects in the native object model, each with a unique ID and owner. |
| Decentralisation | 3.1 | section average, 6 of 8 measured |
| Censorship resistant (Source) | 0 | An authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: Validators keep a transaction deny list and in May 2025 a supermajority used it to freeze the Cetus attacker's ~$162M, later moved by a governance upgrade. source |
| No central team (Source) | 0 | A central team directs it: Mysten Labs develops the only client in its MystenLabs/sui repository and sets the protocol roadmap with the Sui Foundation. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 8.6 | Proof of stake: 8.6 of 10 on the ladder of who produces blocks |
| Nodes (Source) | — | Not yet counted |
| Holder concentration (Source) | — | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 0 | 100% of today's supply allocated at launch to founders, a company, a foundation or investors. The Sui framework's sui::new mints the entire 10,000,000,000 SUI total supply once at epoch 0 (genesis) and destroys the Supply object, so no SUI can ever be minted again; staking subsidies are paid out of that genesis allocation (current total supply is 10B). source |
| Fundraising | 0 | Sold by its issuer or insiders: 100% of supply was theirs to sell, 17% sold so far. Investors (Series A and B token warrants) hold 14% (1.4B SUI); the Community Access Program sale (KuCoin, OKX, Bybit, April-May 2023, $0.03-$0.10) came out of a 6% bucket shared with app testers, and the units actually sold are not disclosed. Range 1.4B-2.0B / 10B fixed total supply = 14.0%-20.0%; midpoint 17.0%. Mysten Labs raised $36M from a16z crypto (Dec 2021) and a $300M Series B led by FTX Ventures at a valuation above $2B (Sep 2022), with investors receiving equity and SUI token warrants. Investors hold about 14% of supply. A Community Access Program (whitelist/public sale, about 6% together with app testers) followed. source |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners or validators who produce blocks. No cut and no new issuance: the full 10B SUI was minted at genesis, and validator/staker subsidies are paid from the pre-allocated stake-subsidy fund, not minted. source |
| Supply & Demand | 7.6 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 8.7 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 43 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 8.8 | $111,331,224 traded in 24 hours; #11 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $253,313,851) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 9.7 | 5.6% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 8.6 | $14,386,748 within 2% of the price on 9 exchanges, 0.38% of its market cap, median of the last 2 days; a lower bound: the books returned by 2 of them stop short of 2% |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 9 | $3.8B, 9 on a scale of 2.5 points per tenfold |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 6.3 | futures, options and margin positions 14% of its market cap |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 6.4 | fixed maximum supply of 10 billion |
| Record | 7 | group average |
| Record (origin, claims, halts) | 9 | 2 positive, 5 negative source |
| Positive record | ||
| Launched with a stated purpose, not as a joke | ✓ | |
| No claims by its founders that contradict its own design | ✓ | |
| Negative record | ||
| Halt, freeze or reversal, 2024-11-21 | ✗ | Mainnet stopped producing checkpoints for about two hours after a crash bug in transaction scheduling; restarted after validators deployed a fix. |
| Halt, freeze or reversal, 2025-05-22 | ✗ | After the ~$223M Cetus exploit, a supermajority of validators refused transactions from the attacker addresses, freezing ~$162M; the frozen funds were later moved back by an on-chain governance vote and protocol upgrade. |
| Halt, freeze or reversal, 2026-01-14 | ✗ | Network halted for about six hours after a consensus divergence among validators (edge-case bug in consensus commit processing); resumed after a validator-deployed fix. |
| Halt, freeze or reversal, 2026-05-28 | ✗ | Mainnet halted for roughly six to seven hours after a crash bug in the v1.72 gas-charging logic. |
| Halt, freeze or reversal, 2026-05-29 | ✗ | Further mainnet halts (over three and a half hours) from the same v1.72 bug; the Sui Foundation reported three halts across 28-29 May. |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 3 | 3 full years since 2023-05-03, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 9 | 4 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 7,271 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/MystenLabs/sui); sui mainnet-v1.82.3, 21 Oct 2026; 76 stable releases in the last 24 months. |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | Sui v1.63.3, Jan 2026: fixed a validator consensus issue; May 2026 fixes for v1.72 gas-charging bugs that halted mainnet. |
| Shipped a scaling upgrade in two years, +1 | ✓ | Sui v1.72 (protocol 125), May 2026: gasless stablecoin transfers; reference gas price down to 100 MIST by Oct 2026. |
| Shipped a new capability for users in two years, +1 | ✓ | Sui v1.72 (protocol 125), May 2026: address balances enabled on mainnet. |
Twenty criteria, weighted equally. The Cryptocurrency Standards have six sections: sound money qualities (six checks: scarcity, durability, fungibility, divisibility, portability, verifiability), privacy (five checks), scalability (four measures and three features), security (miner pay and seven checks), programmability (token issuance, smart contracts and five checks) and decentralisation (censorship resistance, no central team, who can mint, nodes, holders, premine, fundraising and developer share). Provisional: criteria marked — are not yet measured and are left out of the average. A rating of structure and market depth, not a price forecast or investment advice. How the grade is built · Highest-graded cryptocurrencies.
4,118,270,448 of a maximum 10,000,000,000 SUI are in circulation — 41.2% of the total that will ever exist.
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 100% of today's supply |
|---|---|
| Sold by the issuer or insiders | 17% of today's supply |
| Developer share received since launch | 0% of today's supply |
| Developer share of new coins today | 0% |
| Fundraising | Private or venture funding |
The Sui framework's sui::new mints the entire 10,000,000,000 SUI total supply once at epoch 0 (genesis) and destroys the Supply object, so no SUI can ever be minted again; staking subsidies are paid out of that genesis allocation (current total supply is 10B).
Mysten Labs raised $36M from a16z crypto (Dec 2021) and a $300M Series B led by FTX Ventures at a valuation above $2B (Sep 2022), with investors receiving equity and SUI token warrants. Investors hold about 14% of supply. A Community Access Program (whitelist/public sale, about 6% together with app testers) followed.
Investors (Series A and B token warrants) hold 14% (1.4B SUI); the Community Access Program sale (KuCoin, OKX, Bybit, April-May 2023, $0.03-$0.10) came out of a 6% bucket shared with app testers, and the units actually sold are not disclosed. Range 1.4B-2.0B / 10B fixed total supply = 14.0%-20.0%; midpoint 17.0%.
No cut and no new issuance: the full 10B SUI was minted at genesis, and validator/staker subsidies are paid from the pre-allocated stake-subsidy fund, not minted.
Sources: sui.io · decrypt.co · coindesk.com · docs.sui.io · github.com · raw.githubusercontent.com. Researched 2026-10-24, low confidence.
No SEC/CFTC determination — unclassified.
The regulator's position, reported as stated, not CoinSpectrum's. Assets nobody has ruled on are left unclassified rather than sorted by a guess.
Sui is #18 among cryptocurrencies and #30 in the market ranking, which lists wrapped coins, staked derivatives, stablecoins and tokens alongside them. CoinSpectrum counts an asset once, and counts only cryptocurrencies: assets with their own blockchain and their own consensus. A wrapped coin, a staked derivative or a stablecoin is a claim on something already counted; a token, memecoin or otherwise, runs on another chain's blocks. All of them are listed, each in its own section, and none is added to the total. The 12 places between Sui's two ranks are held by claims and tokens, not by other networks. The methodology sets out the rule and the counting rule argues for it.
The price above is the median of the exchanges the site reads live, checked every minute and cross-checked against a market snapshot (how market data is gathered). The grade is scored on published criteria, each with its source (the method). The site is independent, nothing on it is a paid placement, and its statements are signed (about CoinSpectrum, the manifesto).
See the 8 wrapped and staked claims on Sui →