Main Takeaways
- Three Sui ETFs from Grayscale, Canary Capital, and 21shares listed on U.S. exchanges, bringing Sui access to capital markets.
- Sui expanded its financial primitives with DeepBook Margin, automated liquidity vaults, and a new yield pool integration, while new passkey and mobile-first wallet options lowered barriers for newcomers.
- A community guide covered building AI-native plugins on Sui, while Mysten Labs published research on Tidehunter, a purpose-built validator storage engine.
Overview
Welcome to the Sui recap: your definitive look at the momentum, launches, and milestones shaping the ecosystem.
Throughout February, Sui’s trajectory sharpened both in the arrival of U.S.-listed ETFs and in its DeFi technical maturation.
The two tracks aren’t unrelated. Ecosystems don’t attract traditional market-structured financial products by accident. The activity across Sui’s DeFi and infrastructure layer is part of what fuels the public market momentum.
Here’s a look at what shipped in February.
A Maturing DeFi Ecosystem
The Sui Foundation launched the DeFi Moonshots Program, a selective initiative offering up to $500K in growth incentives, engineering collaboration, and audit credits to teams building category-defining financial products on Sui.
Roughly ten teams will be selected annually on a rolling basis. The program signals a shift in how the Foundation is engaging with builders: less broad-based incentive, more concentrated support for protocols with credible paths to new markets.
On the product side, eSui Dollar (suiUSDe), the first synthetic dollar integrated with DeepBook Margin, went live powered by Ethena. Shortly after, suiUSDe was added to the USDZ Pool, allowing users to deposit and earn.
Full Sail introduced automated vaults, removing the need for manual liquidity positioning and rebalancing, with a video explanation that’s worth a watch. Astros Perps reached $100M in daily volume and $3B cumulative volume. For a perpetuals exchange still in its early stages, both numbers stand up well against a difficult market backdrop.
Three ETFs in Six Days
Between February 18 and February 24, three spot and staking Sui ETFs began trading on U.S. exchanges. Grayscale’s GSUI launched on NYSE Arca, followed by Canary Capital’s SUIS and 21shares’ TSUI on Nasdaq.
Each product is structured differently, giving investors options depending on whether they’re seeking straightforward price exposure or want to capture staking yield alongside it. Together, they represent a meaningful expansion of institutional and public market access to Sui through regulated products on some of the world’s most established exchanges.
Developer Tooling & Network Infrastructure
Sui is now AI and LLM-ready, meaning AI coding tools and agents can read and reference Sui’s docs directly. For developers, this collapses the distance between intent and execution, ensuring their AI tools have the precision needed to build at the speed of the network. A community guide also walked through building a Claude code plugin using the Sui Stack, giving developers a practical starting point for extending AI workflows onchain.
On the infrastructure side, Mysten Labs published research on Tidehunter, a purpose-built storage engine designed to address the write amplification problems that general-purpose databases like RocksDB encounter under sustained blockchain load. Tidehunter is a candidate to become Sui's next validator database. It’s not yet in production, but reflects the team building ahead of where the bottlenecks will be.
Walrus continued to scale, reaching 45% of its storage capacity, with 1,883 of 4,123 total terabytes in use. The network adds capacity as new storage nodes come online, so the figure tracks how fast the network is being used, not how close it is to running out of space.
Wallets & Onboarding
Nimora launched a passkey wallet for Sui, replacing seed phrases with device-native authentication. Vera released v1.1.0, adding perps tracking, deeper Ember Earn integration, and improved wallet safety to its mobile-first financial app on Sui.
Both point in the same direction: onboarding friction continues to come down for retail users, no matter where they start from.
SUI was listed on HashKey Exchange, with deposits, withdrawals, spot trading, and OTC access available for eligible users. HashKey also launched a learning campaign with a 200,000 HKD reward pool tied to the listing.
Final Thoughts
Institutional products don’t land in a vacuum. The ETFs were significant, but they’re a reflection of something bigger. Serious capital looks for ecosystems that are actually being used, built, and moving in a direction.
February showed all of that at once.
Beneath the ETF headlines, DeFi depth was growing, infrastructure research was being published, onboarding friction was coming down, and developer tooling was getting sharper. None of that is accidental, and none of it stops here.
The momentum that attracted institutional attention in February isn’t slowing down. If anything, it’s just getting started.
