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Sui has earned a reputation for its technical innovations, but is it the next “Solana Killer”? Industry experts assess both platforms’ relative strengths.
Solana’s existing community provides its advantages but shouldn’t rest on its laurels.
Sui the “Solana Killer”
Sui and Solana are both Layer-1 blockchains making a buzz in the crypto space, although with very different profiles. Solana is among the largest crypto assets today, with rumors circulating that it might be a contender for the third exchange-traded fund (ETF). Sui, on the other hand, is a much younger blockchain, aiming to outcompete Solana on its most attractive features.
Sui has been dubbed the “Solana killer” due to its razor-sharp developers and growing capabilities, but overall opinions are mixed. For example, Guy Turner from the Coin Bureau podcast has stated that Sui “meets the criteria of a crypto that retail could ape into.”
He added, however, that “demand is not trending in the right direction and this spells trouble for Sui’s price.” A cursory look at Reddit shows intense skepticism from community members. But what about more prominent developers?
Tim Kravchunovsky, the CEO of Chirp, surprised the community in July when he chose Sui over Solana to build Chirp’s Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN) infrastructure. In an interview, he claimed that the number of Solana outages gave his team pause.
Sui hasn’t yet experienced the same popularity explosion as Solana, to be sure. This young protocol, however, apparently had several tech advantages that motivated Kravchunovsky’s choice.
“Solana seemed to be struggling to handle its own increase in popularity. It was a “red flag”. In an ecosystem that innovates as quickly as blockchain does, there will always be innovative developments that improve on existing offerings and surpass them. We believe Sui is exactly that – a sort of Solana 2.0, if you will. I won’t hesitate to recommend Sui as the top choice for a robust and scalable network”, Kravchunovsky said.
Raoul Pal, CEO and founder of Global Macro Investor, shared these bullish sentiments. Pal pointed to a number of positive trends in Sui’s recent performance. Most prominently, he showed how Sui has managed to trend upwards in a stagnating market, claiming that “relative strength in a sideways market is worth paying attention to.”
Solana Has a Better User Experience
Still, not everyone is convinced by these alleged technical benefits. A weekly newsletter from 21Shares drew attention to the fact that Solana’s user base is currently much more stable.
“Sui’s traction is largely driven by spikes in activity,” it claimed, but “Solana has a much more sustained growth in active addresses.”
Sui can boast several periods of impressive user growth, but they all stagnated or melted outright. Solana has a steadier progression.
Kylebuildsstuff also addressed Sui’s benefits from a developer’s perspective. He claimed to prefer Sui in his own experience and said it raised standards for a developer the same way Solana raised standards for affordability and gas prices. That alone, however, is not enough to make a “Solana killer.”
“Sui won’t replace Solana because using Solana doesn’t suck, the user experience right now on Solana is actually better in my opinion. The ecosystem is much more mature and the products reflect that. Users don’t care about the underlying tech. They care about things that make their lives better,” Kylebuildsstuff claimed.