SUI Rally Checked: Fees, Token Unlocks and ETF Buying

Sui just ran 70% in less than a month. So, the question for anyone holding it or thinking about buying is simple. Is this the start of something bigger or a rally that's about to fade? Getting that wrong is expensive. Sui's last big run went all the way to 535.

And anyone who bought near that top is still down 80% today. And this rally has a catch. Every month brand new Sui gets released into the market. And since Wall Street funds started buying Sui, those new coins have been showing up about three times faster than the funds have been buying them. So, who's getting all of those new coins?

I also worked out how long this network would need at today's fees to earn back what buyers are paying for it right now. The answer is a lot longer than 100 years. So, by the end of this video, you'll know who's really been buying this rally and the three numbers I check before putting another dollar into Sui. And this goes way beyond Sui. A lot of altcoins ran in September and every one of them faces the same question.

Did people start using the network or did the price move on its own? Sui's the cleanest test of that question because it has everything a coin is supposed to need right now. It has a Wall Street fund holding it, one of the fastest networks in all of crypto, and money flowing back into its apps. So, if Sui can't turn all of that into people paying to use it, that tells you a lot about the rest of this rally. And to see why that matters, you have to start with why everyone got so excited about Sui in the first place.

Before we get into that, if you're bullish on Sui, like the video and subscribe to the channel. And if you're going to be the first millionaire in your family tree, confirm it by commenting amen below. Also, I'm giving away my 2026 altcoin trading strategies and crypto yield generation brief to everyone who follows us on Instagram @bullrunners. The official link will be in the description below this video. Now, let's run it.

[music]

What's going on bull runners? Welcome back to the YouTube channel. If you're new here, my name is Paul and you can find me on Twitter or X @cryptopaul. So, Sui is easily one of the most recognized names in crypto blockchains. More specifically, layer one blockchains.

It's similar to Ethereum or Solana, where apps run and money moves. A company called Mysten Labs built it to be fast and cheap enough for payments, trading, and the apps ordinary people use every single day. The Sui token is what makes that network work. Every transaction on Sui pays its fee in Sui, and holders can stake their Sui, which means unlocking it up to help secure the chain and earn rewards for doing so. So, owning Sui is a bet on one thing, that a lot of people end up paying to use this network because the applications are just that good.

September wasn't driven by one headline. Sui had a lot going for it. And one of the biggest changes was that Wall Street could finally buy it. An ETF is a fund that trades like a stock. So, anyone with a normal brokerage account can own Sui through it.

There are three spot Sui ETFs in the US right now. From Grayscale, Canary, and 21 Shares. Between them, they hold about 94 million dollars worth of Sui, and all three stake the Sui they hold. So, buyers earn extra Sui on top of any price gain. The chain is also fast, and Mysten Labs keeps proving it.

In a test, Sui hit just over 6 million transactions per second. Sui made stablecoin transfers free, as well. Stablecoins are coins that are each worth $1 USD, and you can now send USDC or Sui's own dollar without paying any fee at all. That's a deliberate bet on stablecoins and payments, and about 487 million dollars in new stablecoins now sits on the chain. The money in its apps is growing again, too.

Total value locked on Sui, which means the money people have parked inside of its apps, is about 519 million dollars. That's up around 10% in the last month, and it's roughly 10 times what's sitting on Aptos, the chain it's most often compared with, because these are both parallel blockchains. And Sui has just joined a Linux Foundation group writing an open standard for tokenized assets, which means a shared rulebook for putting things like stocks and funds on a blockchain. Banks and asset managers would need rules like that before they move real money onto a chain. For now, it's just rule writing.

No bank money is currently moving on Sui because of it yet, but it shows where Mysten is pointing. Now, all of this sounds good, but there's a problem with almost every number so far. None of them tells you whether Sui holders actually get anything from all of this activity. 6 million transactions a second sounds enormous. 487 million dollars in stablecoins sounds and so does 519 in its apps alongside three US ETFs holding Sui.

But a fast chain doesn't pay Sui holders anything on its own, neither does money sitting on chain. The network has to earn enough from people using it to justify what investors are paying for the token, and that's where the story changes. Over the last 30 days, Sui's price is up 52% over the same stretch, the fees people paid to use the chain nearly doubled. And that sounds like great news, and it is a start. However, the problem is how small those fees were to begin with.

On one recent day, Sui processed about 25 million transactions. All of them together paid about 8,000 in fees. That's a lot of activity for very little money, and although it is good when it comes to paying low fees, it's not good for the value of the company or the token. On DeFi Llama's count, those transactions came from about 52,000 active addresses, which are the wallets that actually did something that day. That works out to roughly 470 transactions for every single wallet.

No person sends that many in a day, so it's obvious that most of this is automated or likely bot trading and programs. Some of that is fine because trading apps and the firm that keep prices steady on exchanges are real users, but it means the transaction count tells you how busy the bots are, not how many people showed up. This thing needs real users. Now, put that $8,000 next to Solana. On the same day, Solana's chain collected about $1 million in fees.

Sui chose to make transfers cheap and free for stable coins. So, low fees are partly the design. That's a fair bet for a payments chain, but then the value has to show up somewhere else, like dollars parked on the chain, and it isn't showing up yet. The amount of stablecoins on Sui has barely moved, and Solana holds about 33 times as many as Sui does. So, let's work out what buyers are actually paying for.

Over the last 30 days, Sui collected about 228,000 in fees. That's roughly 7,600 per day, and over a full year, it comes to about 2.8 million. Now, the price tag. The market cap is the price tag on the whole project, which means every Sui that's out there times today's price, and right now, that's about $4.3 billion. So, people buying Sui are paying about $1,550 for every $1 the chain brings in each year in revenue.

Remember when I said the answer was a lot longer than 100 years? Say a farm brings in 10,000 a year. Buying it at Sui's price would mean paying a 15.5 million, and it would take that farm 1,500 plus years to earn back what you paid. Trading on Sui's own exchanges isn't picking up, either. Daily volume there is running about 12% below its average for the past week.

So, even after nearly doubling, the fees are nowhere near what the price already assumes. Now, remember those new coins I mentioned at the start of this video? Let's find out where they're coming from and who's getting them. On the day the first Sui ETF started trading, CoinGecko counted around 3.85 billion Sui in circulation. Today, it's close to 4.12 billion.

So, roughly 272 million new Sui reached the market since the ETFs launched. Over the same stretch, the three US funds built up around 90 million Sui. So, for every one Sui the ETFs took in about three new Sui came onto the market and the ETFs still aren't keeping up. Over the last month, about 21 million new Sui entered circulation while the ETFs have averaged around 12 million a month since they launched. And on the latest day of the fund data, two of the three funds had money going out.

That supply isn't finished either. 59% of all Sui still hasn't been released and we still have years left until it's fully released. That's why you'll see two very different numbers on any price site. The market cap counts only the Sui that's out today and that's about 4.3 billion. The however, the fully diluted value counts all 10 billion Sui that will ever exist at today's price, which is 10.4 billion.

So, who's getting all of those new coins? On tokenomics.com's breakdown of the next monthly release, about 59% goes to the community, about 9% goes to the foundation, and almost a third to early insiders and investors. I don't know where the price goes from here and nobody does. Sui has rallied on stories before and it still sits about 80% below that $5.35 high. What you can measure is whether fees, stable coins, and ETF buying catch up this time.

So, what would change my mind? Three things and they're worth watching over the next couple of months if you hold Sui or you've been thinking about buying it. First, the fees. They nearly doubled last month, which is a good start. Check Sui's chain fees on DeFi Llama once a month.

If they keep climbing even when the price cools off, people are paying to use the chain and the rally has something beneath it. Second, stable coins. The free transfers only matter if the money stays. Watch that $487 million. If it grows month after month, especially Sui's own USD Sui, the payments bet is working.

And third, the ETF ratio. To keep up with the new supply at last month's pace, the funds would need to take in about 21 million Sui a month. That's close to twice their average since launch. If ETF holdings start growing faster than the supply, the buying has finally caught up. Right now, Sui sits in the middle of the pack.

It's well ahead of Aptos on the money in its apps and far behind Solana on fees and stable coins, which are the numbers that actually earn money. So, whether Sui becomes a serious competitor comes down to closing that gap on fees and stable coins, not on speed. If those three move, Sui becomes one of the few chains where a big altcoin rally was backed by people actually using it. And that would matter well beyond Sui. So, I wouldn't call September fake.

I just call it a bit early. Today's price already assumes Sui turns into a major chain, and the usage that would prove it hasn't really showed up yet. So, whatever you hold, decide how much you're willing to lose before you buy, make sure you don't put everything into one coin just because you like the narrative or the story, and of course you do need an exit plan in the case that this thing does rally. Because like all cryptos, more often than not people hold them too long and they round trip a bag. They buy at a good price, hold all the way through new all-time highs, only to watch the crypto dump back to where they got started.

Oh, and as a marketing narrative, most people assume you need a fast chain in order for the token to do well. But a fast chain doesn't automatically mean anyone needs to own the token or even use it. That said, if you bought Sui on the way up, you weren't wrong. The chart was moving. The ETFs are real and the chain does what Mysten says it does.

What was missing was the usage underneath and that rarely shows up on the price chart right away. Anyone can look up the fees and the supply numbers, but they never come attached to the headline. And checking them coin by coin takes hours. So, our team does that work for you. That's the work that we do inside our private intelligence network.

Our research team puts the price next to the usage and the new supply for the coins our members hold. And you see that research before any of it reaches this channel. Sui pays a staking yield, which means you earn extra coins just for holding it to help secure the network. And plenty of other coins do the same. Members learn how to earn that extra on the crypto they already hold without taking on risks they can't see.

Every week there's a live trading and technical analysis coaching, which means learning how to read price charts and understand indicators. So, when a coin runs 70% in a few weeks, you know where you take profit based on the actual chart instead of deciding on the way down. There's also full custody training, which means keeping your coins in your own wallet instead of on an exchange. So, whatever you're staking stays with you and each one of our members does go through a bit of a process to apply, but that's because we're taking on very serious crypto investors and clients, which is an awesome thing for the people inside of our private intelligence network, who you will then have access to and can compare notes and learn from. That said, you can learn more by clicking on that very first link down in the description or the pinned comment below.

And if you're on a mobile device, be sure to click more and then you'll find the link. Now, a few months from now, the fees, the stable coins, and the ETF numbers will have answered the question this video started with. You can find out then along with everyone else, or you can know what you're looking at while it's still happening. And Sui probably isn't the only coin you hold where the chart moved faster than the usage. If you'd like a second pair of eyes on the rest of your portfolio, then be sure to click on that link, watch the short brief, and then book a call that is totally free and will help you to get a heck of a lot more clarity on where you stand, what your goals are, and what the next best step is for you and your crypto portfolio so you can secure your future.

As always, you know what to do. Stay bullish. That is it for the video, folks. Subscribe. Until next time, goodbye.

[music] [music] [music]