Sui and Facebook's Libra: What the Origin Story Means for Holders

My commitment is that we're not going to launch the Libra payment system here or anywhere else around the world until we get the approval from FSOC and the other relevant US financial regulators.

That was Mark Zuckerberg speaking to American lawmakers on the 23rd of October 2019. Facebook actually had a plan to launch its own global money and it was called Libra. In the end, it never launched anywhere at all, but the work behind it didn't vanish. A group of the engineers who built it left and actually started their own companies. All right, and they actually built a new blockchain.

That blockchain is called Sui, SUI. So, Sui holders, Facebook's failed money project built your coin. And here's what that means for you, right? If you own Sui, you know this. Regulators killed Facebook's coin and its engineers built yours.

And I really want to bring your attention to something because the big players lost Libra and that leaves a question for anyone with money on this chain. Who really holds the power over your coins? All right, before we go any further, guys, keep the first link in the description in mind. I'm going to tell you exactly what it is a little later and it helped me and a lot of people stop letting headlines make decisions for them. And also, let's be honest about something, all right?

A lot of us do it. We see a big name standing next to a coin, a tech giant, a famous fund, a household brand and we relax a little and they're in. It must be safe, right? But the story is a lesson in how quick big names can walk away and who's left in the coin when they do. So, let's go back to the 18th of June 2019.

Facebook unveiled Libra and the idea was a digital currency backed by a reserve of real money and short-term government debt that billions and billions of people could send to each other easily as a message. Now, Facebook set up its own wallet company called Calibra, all right? And actually lined up big names in payments to help run the network. The man leading it was David Marcus and he set out a plan in a thread on Twitter that day. Libra had three parts, he said, a blockchain, a currency backed by a reserve and a brand new programming language called Move.

Now, remember that name. It's the thread that runs all the way through this story. Governments do not like the plan at all, but a private company with billions of users issuing its own money was the kind of thing that central banks worried about. And within 4 months, the big names start to leave. And here's how CNBC told it in October 2019.

Libra is in trouble. The social media giant had lined up [music] a long list of corporate backers for the initiative, including major players in the payment space. In early October 2019, PayPal became the first company to [music] back out of the Libra coalition. That led to an exodus of other companies from the project. Mastercard, Stripe, Visa, and eBay all followed PayPal and ditched [music] Libra.

Europe pushed back, too, right? On the 12th of September 2019, France's finance minister Bruno Le Maire actually said France could not authorize the development of Libra on European soil. So, Facebook shrank the plan. In December 2020, Libra was renamed Diem. And the dream of global currency became, in effect, plan for a single dollar stablecoin.

A stablecoin is a token designed to always be worth $1. Even that didn't get through, right? On the 31st of January 2022, the Diem Association actually sold that technology and assets to Silvergate. That's an American bank that served crypto firms for about $182 million. In its statement, Diem's chief executive actually said it had become clear from talks with federal regulators that the project couldn't move forward.

And Silvergate didn't get much out of it, either, right? So, within a year, it had written the purchase down, according to its own [snorts] results. And in March 2023, the bank announced it was winding down. So, that's how Facebook's attempt issue its own money ended. Not with a launch, but with a safe to a bank that was itself winding down a little over a year later.

As always, guys, this is not financial advice. You've heard enough already, a couple of minutes of introduction. We're going to get deep into this video. We're going to roll the intro right now, but I do want to say one thing. Please stay till the end, because there's parts of this that connect together, and they're going to help you with especially how you're thinking about your bag right now.

[music]

All right, guys, I'm getting into the deep of this. So, let me put this plainly. PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard, they were the names that made Libra look safe in June 2019. Now, by October, they're gone. So, if you made a decision because of those logos, then you'd have been left holding a plan with nobody behind it.

And I'm not telling you to buy this token, right? Sui is not a token I'm telling you to buy because there might be better opportunities for your situation. I've not seen it. But, if you've ever bought a coin partly because of who's standing next to it, then that's the habit our Altcoin Pro course is designed to help break. It actually helps you build your own reasons for holding something and your own plan for when those reasons change.

So, you're not borrowing confidence from a logo. The way in is simple, right? Click the first link in the description and fill in the short form. Then, simply book your free 15-minute call and one of the team will walk you through your own strategy and your own situation. It's not going to cost you a penny.

And if you're watching this on your phone, just tap more under the video and it's the first link you'll see. Now, do it while this story is fresh and then come straight back to the engineers because what they did next is the part that affects your coin. Now, Libra was put together in an unusual way for Facebook, all right? Sam Blackshear, the engineer who created Move, explained how it started on Sui's own channel in December 2022. Watch this clip.

When Libra started at Facebook, it was this top secret project to build a a blockchain-powered global payments network. It was a super ambitious thing. And secret projects aren't a thing at Facebook. Almost everything is public. I can really only think of one other one uh besides this.

But, in the early stages, they were just like, "Okay, let's let's look at the technical areas that we think are relevant for this project and just pull in experts from across the company."

That team ended up inside Facebook's crypto arm, which actually was first called Calibra, all right? And later Novi. And in 2021, five people from Novi actually left to start a company called Mysten Labs, all right? There was many people in there like Evan Cheng and who became the chief executive and Sam Blackshear, all right? Many others as well.

So, when Mysten launched on the 6th of December 2021, Evan put it simply, "Founding team came from Novi research, where they led the research work for the Diem network." Now, this is where the big players come back into the story, right? That month, Mysten actually raised $36 million in a round led by the venture by Andreessen Horowitz. Then, in September 2022, it raised $300 million more in a round led by the FTX ventures, valuing the company over $2 billion. Two Two later, we all know the story. FTX collapsed.

So, the company that led Mysten's biggest funding round was suddenly bankrupt. And its stake was sitting in a bankruptcy estate in 2023. Mysten bought back that stake and its shares and token warrants for about $96 million. Think about that for a second. Facebook walked away from the project these engineers started on, and that firm that led the new one's biggest funding round went bust.

Big names came and went twice before Sui even had a chance and launched. All right, so what's special about the move? Well, here's the plain English. In a lot of smart contract languages, money is just a number in a ledger, and if the code is a mistake, then that number can be changed in ways nobody's intended. Move treats money more like a physical object, right?

Sam Blackshear explained the thinking in the same interview, so let's get him to explain it here.

There's abstractions for programming with money. You can define an object type, and you can say, "I want this thing to um not be droppable on the floor without explicit instruction. I don't want this thing to be copyable because that wouldn't be appropriate for money. Uh I want to have really restrictive creation for this."

That's the whole idea. Coin written in Move cannot be copied, and it cannot just disappear by accident. It has to be handed over deliberately destroyed, like a banknote, for example. So, for a project that wanted to move money for billions of people, that safety was the point. Now, here's the honest correction to a story you'll hear a lot.

Sui is not Libra re-launched, cuz in February 2023, and it was actually on my birthday, all right? Evan Cheng said Sui is not a fork of Diem, and that apart from the Move, which is team built, everything was built from the ground up. Sui isn't the only chain that came out of Diem, all right? Another group of former Diem engineers built Aptos, which also uses Move. So, Libra never launched, but its language ended up running at least two public blockchains.

The other word you'll hear with Sui is objects, all right? Here's a simple way to picture it. On a lot of blockchains, everything lives in one giant shared spreadsheet of balances, and transactions mostly have to take turns updating it. Sui treats each coin, each token, and each digital item as its own object with a clear owner, a bit like a coats in a cloakroom, each with its own ticket. So, if you send something that belongs only to you, it doesn't have to wait in the same queue as everyone else.

That's how Sui handles lots of transactions side by side. Sui's main network went live on the 3rd of May 2023 with a maximum supply of 10 billion Sui tokens. And when Evan Cheng actually took the stage Sui's first Basecamp conference in April 2024, he framed the whole project around the same tension that sank Libra. Check this out.

People don't trust institutions much they used to trust before. At the same time, we have massive massive centralized entities, massive companies that has more power than some nation states.

Which is a striking thing to hear from someone who used to work at one of those massive companies, right? But it brings us back to the question that really matters for holders. On the 22nd of May 2025, a trading platform built on Sui called Cetus was hacked for about $223 million. Now, the bug was in Cetus' own code. It wasn't in Sui itself.

But what happened next is the part that every holder should understand. So, the validators, the operators who run the network and confirm transactions, froze about $162 million of each of the stolen money. Now, Sui explained how, right? Each validator has a setting file and lets it ignore transactions from a particular address. More than a third of validators, measured by the Sui staked with them, chose to ignore the two addresses linked to the attack, and that was enough to freeze the funds.

Now, at the end of May 2025, the validators voted to approve the upgrade, and that returned the frozen money to Cetus. And the Sui Foundation gave Cetus a loan so users could actually be paid back in full. So, for the people who lost money, that was a good outcome. But I'll be clear about what it showed. A group of validators on a third of the stake can stop an address from moving its coins.

So, Sui said that the power exists on any network, and it was meant as a temporary emergency measure. Critics across crypto said it raised real questions about how decentralized Sui is. Here's how Evan Cheng described Sui at Basecamp in October 2026.

All the things that settle on chain cannot be overwritten. The history does not change, regardless what happens, because it's decentralized, credible, neutral.

And to be fair, right, the Cetus fix didn't rewrite history. Sui said that the plan would return the money without rolling back the chain's history, but both things are true at once. The record didn't change, and a group of validators decided whose coins could move. So, if you hold Sui, that's worth knowing, all right? So, there are three more things a holder should know.

The first is reliability. On the 14th of January, 2026, Sui stalled for about 6 hours. Then in late May, 2026, the network halted three times in around 2 days. After a software upgrade went wrong, each time it came back, and Sui published what caused it. But, a payments network can't afford to stop.

Now, the second is supply. Sui has a maximum of 10 billion tokens, and a large share was locked at launch and released month by month. Now, according to KuCoin's research, the 3-year schedule for early investors and contributors run its course, but unlocks carry on. Now, the tracker tokenomics listed a Sui unlock on the 1st of October, 2026, worth about $15 million. The third is people.

On the 5th of August, 2026, Sam Blackshear, actually the man who created Move, like I said, announced he was leaving Mysten Labs to work on security research at the AI company Anthropic. We all know Anthropic, right? We use it every day. He said he'd stay on as a closer advisor, and Evan Chang actually took over the technical direction. Now, where does that leave Sui with the big players?

Well, here's the twist. They're back, but in a very different role. So, in February, 2026, their first American spot Sui funds started trading. That was from Canary Capital and Grayscale, with 21 shares following later that month. A spot fund holds the real coin, and you buy it like a share.

Then, on the 8th of October, 2026, Sui announced that Samsung Wallet is adding USDC on Sui, built into the wallet on 82 million Galaxy phones in America, with no network fees on transfers. Reports said it was due to arrive in late October, 2026, and Solana was named as a partner, too. So, Sui isn't the only chain involved, right? Sit with that for a moment. In 2019, the tech giant tried to put its own currency into billions of phones, and governments stopped it.

In 2026, another tech giant is putting a regulated dollar stablecoin, issued by Circle, into millions of phones on a chain built by engineers from the first project. The difference is that Samsung isn't issuing the money. It's using the existing order stablecoin, and America passed a law for stablecoins like that, called the Genius Act, in July, 2025, which we've spoke about many times. So, the way I read it, that's the real lesson of Libra. Big companies can build on crypto.

What governments wouldn't accept was a big company issuing the money itself. Here's what I'd keep an eye on as a holder. Who controls a third of the stake? Because Cita has actually showed that that's the group that can stop coins moving. Second is the uptime, especially around each upgrade.

Third, the monthly unlock which trackers like Tokenomist list ahead of the time, right? And fourth, whether the Samsung rollout in late October 2026 turns into real everyday use because a partnership is only a headline until actually people use it. None of those tell you whether to buy or sell, they tell you who and it has the power over the network your coins live on and how it's used. So, over to you in the comments guys, should validators ever be able to freeze stolen money? Yes or no?

And where would you draw the line? If you'd like the story behind a coin before the headlines decide it for you, simply subscribe. All right guys, the money Facebook planned never reached a single wallet. The language the engineers wrote it for ended up running a public chain that anyone can check. If this is something that you didn't know or you did know, please let me know.

But as always guys, crypto carries risk and past results are no guarantee of future ones. This is education, not financial advice. Stay bullish.

[music]