Sui Climbs the Layer-1 Rankings as Developer Activity and DeFi Volume Rise
Sui (SUI) ranked 23rd by market cap on May 13, sitting inside the global top 25 as on-chain DeFi activity and developer adoption continued to attract capital to the network. The token traded near $1.23 on May 13, with a 24-hour decline of under 1% against the dollar, outperforming several larger Layer-1 peers in the same window.
Sui’s total market cap stood above $3.6 billion. The network’s combination of a novel programming language and high transaction throughput has made it one of the more closely watched Layer-1 ecosystems outside of Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL).
What Is Driving Sui’s Momentum
Three intersecting forces are shaping Sui’s current trajectory.
Developer adoption of the Move programming language has broadened beyond the initial cohort of projects that launched at the network’s inception. Move, a programming language originally developed at Meta for the Diem project, is designed to make asset ownership and transfer logic safer and more explicit than traditional smart contract environments.
Developers building on Sui have cited lower exploit risk as a reason for choosing the network over Ethereum (ETH)-compatible chains.
DeFi activity on Sui has grown alongside that developer base. Total value locked on Sui-native protocols has risen through the first quarter of 2026, as liquidity providers sought yield on a chain with lower congestion than Ethereum mainnet and faster finality than most competing Layer-1 networks.
Sui’s architecture processes transactions in parallel, meaning throughput scales with demand rather than bottlenecking at a single execution queue. That design is increasingly relevant as DeFi volume concentrates on fewer, higher-performance chains.
On-chain lending, decentralized perpetual futures, and liquid staking have each gained traction on the network.
Perpetual futures, which are derivatives contracts with no expiration date that traders use to take leveraged positions on asset prices, have drawn particular volume as Sui-native exchanges compete with established platforms.
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Background
Sui launched on mainnet in May 2023, developed by Mysten Labs, a company founded by former Meta engineers who had worked directly on the Diem blockchain project. The network launched into a competitive environment that already included Solana, Aptos (APT) (a parallel Move-based chain), and a growing number of Ethereum Layer-2 networks.
Sui differentiated on object-centric state representation, meaning assets on Sui are stored as programmable objects rather than as entries in a shared global ledger. That distinction matters for certain application classes, particularly gaming and consumer apps that require frequent, low-cost state updates.
In its first year, Sui struggled to attract broad DeFi liquidity.
The ecosystem was smaller than Solana’s, and many developers remained on Ethereum-compatible chains where tooling was more mature. A turning point came in late 2024 when several larger DeFi protocols began deploying on Sui, bringing enough liquidity to sustain meaningful trading volume.
By early 2025, Sui’s TVL had crossed $1 billion for the first time, a threshold that brought the network into regular comparative analysis alongside Avalanche (AVAX), Aptos, and Injective (INJ).
The token itself has moved significantly from its first-year lows, when SUI traded below $0.50 during the broader bear market of late 2023. The recovery to above $1.20 in mid-2026 reflects both improved fundamentals and a broader rotation into Layer-1 alternatives as investors weigh Ethereum’s congestion costs against challenger networks.
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How Sui Compares to Its Peers
Sui’s rank 23 position places it above Injective (INJ), which holds rank 97, and below Avalanche (AVAX), which has historically traded in the top 15.
The more relevant comparison is with Aptos (APT), the other major Move-based chain. Aptos and Sui have competed for developer attention since both launched in 2023, with Aptos generally holding a slight edge in total developer commits early on before Sui closed the gap through 2025.
Both chains remain smaller than Solana by every meaningful metric, but each occupies a distinct enough technical niche to sustain its own community.
The DeFi competition among Layer-1 networks below Ethereum and Solana is increasingly a liquidity bootstrapping race. The protocol that accumulates the deepest liquidity across lending, spot, and derivatives markets creates a self-reinforcing cycle where traders prefer the chain with the lowest slippage.
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What to Watch
Sui’s ability to hold its top-25 position will depend on whether DeFi TVL growth continues or faces a reversal if broader market sentiment deteriorates.
The network’s roadmap includes further improvements to zkLogin, a feature that allows users to sign in with Google or Apple credentials rather than a private key, lowering onboarding friction for consumer-facing apps. If Sui-native gaming and consumer apps attract material non-DeFi users, the network’s usage case expands beyond the DeFi liquidity race.
Investors will watch whether SUI’s market cap can consolidate above $3.5 billion or whether the recent ranking reflects a temporary trending-list effect. On-chain activity data through the remainder of May will provide the clearest signal.
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