Sui: The Universal Coordination Layer for a Decentralized Internet with Adeniyi Abiodun at KBW2025

Join me in welcoming Adeniyi Abiodun to the stage. Morning. All right, I promise I won't be too long. I know lunch is on the agenda very, very quickly. Hi, my name's Adeniyi Abiodun.

I'm one of the co-founders of a company called Mysten Labs. We are a bunch of founders that were working on Libra, building Libra at Facebook. We spent a lot of our careers building amazing technologies used by billions of users. Um while at Facebook we're working on something called Libra version two, which I'll touch on today. But ultimately, what we're doing at Mysten is ultimately revealing that goal that we had at Facebook to build an amazing developer platform for the future.

So, right now, you've heard a lot of things um with a few panels coming on. You hear there's a lot more excitement, especially in the Capitol Hill, around crypto. And we feel this is the most important time. This is the best time to be in crypto. Yes, it's great we get price movement and price action.

But what's actually more important is we have businesses that are building legitimate um competing businesses to traditional web two stacks. And I think that's only just the beginning. Um we have the crypto market structure bill that is right in front of us. Separately, we have other movements in Washington and other regulators as well that is really pushing crypto forward. And I believe we're going to see amazing levels of innovation that the world has never seen.

Financial innovation in the world where we believe everything is going to be ultimately digital. We're going to see that coming very soon. Now, while we were at Facebook, we envisioned a world where ultimately there's going to be a stack that developers can build on. Facebook has over 50,000 developers. Crypto has monthly active developers in the 9,000.

So, it's pitiful compared to what you have in traditional finance and traditional tech. We are so early. Um I'm happy to talk about today that now with Seal, Walrus, Nautilus, and all these amazing technologies, the traditional businesses that you had in web two cannot be rebuilt fully with a decentralized stack. You can see stacks like Airbnb, WhatsApp, Signal, um Instagram, YouTube. All of them can be built on the Sui stack as it is today.

Bit of background, when we left Facebook, we knew you could not solve this problem with a single stack, right? But what we knew was the most important and central piece to solve the world's problems was solve the internet problem with uh fragmentation. It's impossible for applications to communicate with each other in a trustless bound with um with boundaries of trust. And what we want to do is build a coordination layer that makes that possible. People call that an L1.

Our vision for an L1 is much grander than just allowing you to send money from person to person. That was what we wanted to do at Facebook, but we felt there was a new application development stack that controls what applications can do in terms of communicating with one another. And we believe in that world, AI and agents will be ultimately key. We believe the majority of transactions that you're going to have on the internet will be done majority by majority by um by robots or bots working on behalf of users than users themselves. Sui's already well poised for that world.

Bit of stats, um Sui's only been around for about 2 years and it's breaking every record possible. It's have It has a highest TPS of any chain. Um in a current mainnet setup, it's about 300,000 transactions per second. We've already shown in a in a white paper we recently published that you add eight times the hardware, you get eight times the throughput. The only blockchain that exists today without a single without any such of uh thing as a cap in terms of blockchain throughput.

Separately, we we've effectively had 99.999 uptime. The network is highly resilient. Latency is industry leading in 400 milliseconds. And we'll have some announcements sometime this year that would take that latency end-to-end all the way down to 200 milliseconds.

Truly game-changing stuff. More numbers, um TVL on Sui's very, very It's been growing rapidly. We've reached past 2 billion TVL. And the amount of stable coins on Sui continues to continues to grow. It's far outstripping the performance of other chains who have been around for like 4 to to years.

It is kicking well above its weight, but we know what matters more than that, right? Like it's great to have these numbers. What what really really matters is dev adoption. I touched on the fact that Web3 has something in the region of 9 and 1/2 thousand daily after monthly active devs, which is small compared to the amount of devs we had in Facebook as a whole. So, we are tailoring for developer platform that can cater to over 15 million web developers, not just crypto developers, but web developers.

We believe Sui is going to have a much greater growth in terms of dev adoption than other blockchains combined. On On those numbers, in the last 2 years, Sui has been the highest growing dev accumulator of any crypto platform or any Web3 dev platform. And the last year alone, when most ecosystems saw less developers, in fact, they lost devs, only Sui and Solana actually saw an increase in devs. So, proof point, Sui is easy to build on. Developers love building on Sui, and developers are succeeding in building differentiated applications on the Sui stack.

I showed you a slide earlier on that showed the coordination and what we're starting to see is a full embodiment and a full fulfillment of the vision of Sui. We have Sui, the coordination layer. We have DeepBook, the trading engine. We have War as the storage layer for AI. We have ZK login, a methodology that allows you to verify your Web2 session on chain.

Literally, the blockchain will verify that you're engaging with Facebook without you having to communicate with Facebook directly. We have a dynamic name system that is amazing, that's growing at a rapid rate. Nautilus, a way for you to functionally verify things happening off chain. And Seal and all these amazing techs because it's what developers are going to need to build the next WhatsApp, to build the next Facebook. Not just the ability to transact, but the ability to have a full stack app where your front end is decentralized and your back end is entirely decentralized.

Only Sui has this. So, as I mentioned, it's just not another L1. It is greater than the sum of its parts. So, as I mentioned, what is Sui? Sui is the universal coordination layer.

It is going to allow you to coordinate what you do online. Developers can build amazing products that allows you to coordinate what a user can do from one application to another on the internet without the silos and without worrying about APIs. APIs in our view are bad bad influence on how the web has been developed. We believe the future is in objects, specifically strongly typed objects that enables full composability in applications, not flimsy APIs that have no respect for trust boundaries. Deep Book is a highly flexible, highly scalable central limit order book.

It's actually the fastest central limit order book in crypto right now. It It does more volume than traditional exchanges on a regular basis. I think at times on a Sui pair it's actually higher than OKX, Bybit, and a few other exchanges on a on a regular basis. And throughout this year you're going to hear about Deep Book launching margin trading directly on chain and a few other amazing things that I'm not allowed to leak today. But

[snorts]

Deep Book is amazingly composable. You can build your own content on Deep Book. We have something to the tune of 15 to 20 different DeFi protocols already fully integrated. It's doing tremendous volumes and it has a ridiculous amount of burning that's happening as a result of the transactions. The more transactions on Deep Book the more tokens get burnt automatically.

It is an amazing protocol and nothing like it in the market today. Walrus is the programmable layer for data. We've always believed, in fact one of the last things I was working on when I left Facebook was something called trove, treasure trove. It was going to be an open that allowed every post you make on Facebook, every picture you share on Facebook, every video you create on any one of our platforms ownable by the user. So in a world that we're going to, data is going to be Bitcoin.

Data will be gold. And the content you create needs to be owned by you and you alone. So we couldn't see that vision out in Facebook but we've seen that vision through now at Mysten Labs. So we're carrying on with that meant mantra that we wanted to empower users with a programmable layer for the data. So, not no longer will organizations and institutions own your data and it sits stagnant and they monetize on your behalf.

You as a user will own your own data and can decide how you make that data available to any platform, any protocol, and monetize it directly. That is what Walrus is here to achieve. It gives amazing resilience from data from its integrity point of view. It can allow you to build verifiable front-ends for the first time. So, if I'm dealing with a DeFi protocol, I know I'm trading with a with a legitimate protocol and not some back-end that's been hacked.

This has happened and caused billions of dollars worth of losses in the crypto space and we're solving that specifically. I'll touch on verifiability and confidentiality in a bit with Seal and Walrus, but ultimately, we have for the first time a programmable layer for data. I can set rules as to who can access that data and what time. I can set the data to expire. I can set a paywall behind access to data and content.

This has never been possible at the scale that we're talking about. Walrus lets you store petabytes and petabytes of data on chain. And if you think about the entire stack, what does that mean? You have the coordination layer which is Sui to coordinate what users do on the internet, and Walrus sits as a platform as a layer that any protocol can use. There's integrations with Solana, with Sui, with with Ethereum, with Avax, you name it.

It is fully platform agnostic and it was going to it's going to enable you to coordinate any form of storage you want to do on any L1 and other service provider. Walrus is truly differentiated and it's it's in a different class of its own. We're going to be talking soon about Walrus apps, but that would I encourage you to come to our builder house where we talk about some amazing discoveries that we've we're going to be announcing there. Seal. Amazing, I can store public records on chain.

That's great. But what about private records? What about information that you I I started this world by saying that it will be it will be important that users get to own their own data. Once you put data publicly, then it becomes questionable about who owns what. With Seal, you can have private NFTs.

NFTs whereby it the full content is only visible by the owner, but private elements of the about the public elements of the content is very very fragmented or very very low quality. You can actually get data by strong rules. If you are a member of my club or my fan club, I'll I'll give you access to data. You can You can leverage paywalls in front of data. You can set any restriction on data that you want.

Even importantly, you can set exploration on access. So, I can I can put data in front of a blog and once you pay $5.99 a month, you can get an access to that blog. Once you stop paying, it cuts off automatically. You cannot do this kind of stuff automatically or programmatically with AWS, Dropbox, or any service that exists today.

You now for the first time have a fully programmable access control policy management system on chain that is fully verifiable. So, you have DRM directly on chain with Seal, Nautilus, and Walrus. So, Seal lets you put private information, very confidential information on chain. And we cannot wait to see what people build with this amazing technology. And it's an amazing augmentation of what you can do on Sui.

As I mentioned, there's a vast array of what's possible, but the most important thing to leave you here with is that now data can be gated with very very strong enforcement rules. And these rules are not fixed by any stretch of imagination. You could build it dynamically. You could effectively set the policy that matters to you directly. Nautilus, [snorts] the most important thing to say about Nautilus is there are times when you want to do inference from an AI perspective.

You want to do that inference. Doing that on chain and stopping the block production makes no sense. So, the ability to do inference off chain absolutely matters. And if you want to do private computation, we have three organizations that want to compute compute maybe mean, mode, maximums on on pieces of data. Especially if it's user data, but you want to at least keep the identities of those people involved in the in the survey very very private.

You can think of medical medical devices or things of that nature. Nautilus lets you that. You can do private on off-chain computation, but a Move smart contract will verify that computation to make sure it's correct and legitimate. You can build amazing Oracle services that require no no middle middleware in the last resort. But now you have the ability to do trusted off-chain computation directly and verify it directly on chain with with smart contracts.

[snorts]

So, massive traction across this ecosystem. We've got DeFi. You've got of course Blue Fin, you've got Movement Momentum. You've got Cetus. It's a growing ecosystem.

I believe Sui land the other day reached over a billion dollars in TVL alone on Sui. A protocol that has been out for two years, we have a single protocol on Sui that's already gained over a billion TVL and the TVL on Sui keeps increasing on a daily rate. But we've got a massive partnerships with storage companies, massive partnerships with institutions. But ultimately, Sui is becoming the home for those who want to build amazing and compelling businesses. We're partnered with some of the largest institutions in the world who are building their own DeFi protocols directly on Sui.

I'm hoping I can share with you soon. Traditional tech companies, traditional finance companies are building their own on-chain protocols directly on the Sui ecosystem. In terms of use cases, Overtake will will pick one for example. Overtake are building on-chain peer-to-peer payment system and a marketplace for for selling content. So, if you want to sell game in-game assets that you have, I'm playing World of Warcraft for example, and I and I win a a particular kind of asset, I need to be able to trade it without getting scammed.

We know that on-chain that game scams happen at a very very rapid rate. But also the need for people to liquidate assets is also a use case that's growing at a rapid rate. So, Overtake is building that marketplace directly on Sui and they're able to save close to 90% on fees from a trading perspective. So, you imagine what what can be unlocked by having a coordination layer for payments, storing in-game assets directly on chain, and then having escrow contracts that allows you to facilitate the swap of assets directly using stable coins. It is an amazing opportunity to really revolutionize how gaming content is sold across the world.

Lombard, quick note on Sui today, more than 30% of the TVL on Sui is actually BTC and is growing at a rapid rate. So, Sui is quickly becoming the trusted venue for finding Bitcoin or programmable Bitcoin. Lombard is one of our biggest partners in that space and they keep growing about 1,300 BTC directly on chain directly from Lombard themselves. Playtron, Playtron will soon be sharing their agentic worldview. Playtron is going to be the only operating system that has a native agentic integration.

So, all the things you're going right now, you're playing your video game, soon you'll be able to have agents that will be able to finish games for you. Agents that will be able to make orders for you. Agents that not can now only just give you information, but they can also do. So, there are a ton of integrations that are happening right now with the move registry and lots of things we're working on the background, but we cannot wait to demo some of the amazing things that the Play OS is going to enable you to do. So, for those who have a Sui Play Zero X1, lots of amazing things that are going to be landing on your lap very, very soon.

So, institutional demand for Sui is increasing. Of course, we've got dApps and you know, there are multitude of dApps that are looking to launch on Sui very soon, but we have amazing partnerships for Grayscale, 21 Shares, who are all launching ETFs directly on Sui as well. We have partnerships with likes of VanEck, BitGo, World Liberty Financial, who was just on the stage a couple of moments ago, but our partnerships with traditional institutions runs very, very deep and we believe that's only going to continue to grow. People are finding velocity in the Sui ecosystem. Businesses are building on Sui because they're finding the just things that they can build with the entirety of the Sui stack that was never possible before.

This is what we always imagined that we'd be able to achieve while we were building out Facebook and now we're we're really really excited to see that coming to fruition. And one thing I want to discuss as well is on the notion of tokenomics. So Sui is a truly deflationary system by design. There'll only be ever 10 billion tokens in circulation and to a large extent we're starting to see tokens go out of circulation through the velocity of transactions on the blockchain. Every time you store data on the chain, every time you send a transaction, every time you burn something, every time you engage with the chain, the more use cases on the chain, the more tokens go out of circulation.

In the last 6 months alone, half of the tokens that were actually burnt were done in the last 6 months. So we're starting to see an acceleration that goes in line with the amount of adoption we're seeing with Sui. So if Sui can continue to grow, we'll even see more tokens go out of circulation. So it is a well-engineered, well-oiled machine that was designed from day one for mass adoption. We really can't wait to share more with what's going on, but we have we have an amazing event at the Sui build a house on Thursday.

We'd love to welcome you all, but it's an amazing beginning for Sui and we're really excited to see what we've been able to do so far and can't wait to tell you more. Thank you all very much. Take care.

[applause] [music]