Key Takeaways:
Mysten Labs co-founder Evan Cheng says every digital payment on the internet will run through Sui within four years — and the network's 2026 volume data is starting to back the claim.
Sui processed more than $65 billion in gasless stablecoin transfers in the roughly two months since June 10, when Mysten Labs removed protocol-level gas fees for stablecoin movements, according to network data. The milestone gives Cheng's sweeping prediction a data trail that most foundation-level forecasts lack.
"Within four years, the volume of digital payments moving across Sui will rival the volume moving across the traditional internet's card networks and bank rails combined," Evan Cheng, co-founder and chief executive of Mysten Labs, said.
The gasless mechanism layers onto a network that has already carried $2.27 trillion in cumulative stablecoin volume since early 2024. It removes what fellow co-founder Adeniyi Abiodun described as the core friction of blockchain payments — the need for merchants and apps to hold a second reserve asset just to cover network fees. Cheng has framed Sui's endgame not as a venue for speculative trading but as settlement plumbing for stablecoins, remittances and, eventually, agentic commerce between AI systems.
Mysten Labs, the Sui development studio Cheng leads, was founded in 2021 by engineers who previously built Meta's abandoned Diem blockchain and its Move programming language. That payments-infrastructure pedigree is central to how Cheng pitches the network's roadmap, telling reporters earlier this year that current web3 infrastructure remains stuck in what he called the dial-up era.
Sui has also been pushing into bitcoin's territory through the Hashi testnet, which went live July 22. It lets bitcoin collateralize decentralized finance loans on Sui without wrapping it into a synthetic token, a bridge Mysten Labs and the Sui Foundation built with more than two dozen participating institutions. The pitch is that Sui can pull a slice of activity from bitcoin's $1.4 trillion market without asking holders to give up custody assumptions. On top of that, Sui is making stablecoin transactions private by default, a feature institutional users have flagged as a prerequisite for moving real payment volume onto public blockchains rather than private ledgers.
Sui's own token has been under pressure from recurring unlock schedules that add new supply on a rolling basis, and its roughly $2.8 billion market capitalization remains a small fraction of the payment volume Cheng describes. SUI traded near $0.69 on Aug. 3 after again finding support around $0.65, with the $0.74-$0.76 zone the strongest nearby resistance, according to visible-range volume analysis.
The Sui Foundation's stablecoin-funded buyback program has acquired about 317,500 SUI — roughly 0.008 percent of the network's 4.07 billion circulating supply — with daily purchases averaging around $6,000. Stablecoin balances on the network have reached approximately $443.1 million across 3.6 million holding addresses. The program's scale remains too small to materially move the token, serving more as a long-term capital allocation strategy than short-term price support.
Whether Sui becomes the rail for every digital payment or captures a smaller, still-meaningful slice of stablecoin and cross-border settlement will be tested over the next year of gasless-volume data and Hashi bridge adoption. That window is the clearest gauge of whether Cheng's four-year clock is realistic or marketing from a founder with immense skin in the game.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
