Every transaction on Sui costs a fee, paid in SUI, and that fee exists to stop the network from being flooded with free transactions that would slow it down for everyone.

What happens to that fee splits two ways. Part of it is destroyed permanently the instant it's paid, removing that SUI from existence for good. The rest goes to validators, the computers that confirm transactions and keep the network running. Validators are required to lock up SUI as collateral before they can do that work, and that locked collateral is what they stand to lose if they try to cheat, which is what makes the network secure.

Holding SUI also carries a vote in the network's governance decisions.

Each of these is a real reason for SUI to exist that has nothing to do with anyone expecting its price to rise: it is consumed by use, it is the collateral securing the network, and it carries a vote.

Over the trailing year, people paid $4,083,448 in fees to use Sui. That figure is measured with complete, gapless daily data covering every day of the year.

It also describes a network well past its busiest period. In September 2024, Sui's fees reached $4,953,415 in a single month, driven by two individual days that each brought in over $1.8 million. By mid-2026, monthly fees had fallen to under $100,000, more than a fiftyfold decline from that peak. The fall is not a single bad stretch either: it runs steadily across two years, and it has not levelled off. Measured over just the most recent three months, the annualised pace is $1,216,833, roughly a third of the trailing-year total.

One honest limit on this data: the fee record only goes back to July 2024, more than a year after Sui's mainnet launched in May 2023. That is a gap in when tracking began, not evidence about what happened before it. Whatever Sui earned in its first fourteen months is not in any figure on this page, and the totals here should not be read as covering Sui's whole history.

Of the fees Sui collects, $829,651 over the trailing year, about a fifth, is destroyed: burned the instant it's paid, permanently shrinking the total supply of SUI, which benefits every holder proportionally through that reduced supply. The remaining $3,257,960, about four-fifths, goes to the validators doing the work.

Sui itself keeps exactly $0. Not a small amount, zero, and that figure holds at every time horizon measured, not just the trailing year. There is no protocol treasury taking a cut, no foundation skim, no team wallet collecting a percentage of network activity. What the network takes in goes to the people securing it and to every holder through the burn.

It is also worth stating how small Sui's cut of the economy running on it actually is. Measured against Sui's own market value, its yearly fee income comes to roughly one tenth of one percent. For comparison, an app store typically takes fifteen to thirty percent of what happens on it. Sui charges two orders of magnitude below even the low end of what other blockchain networks typically take.

One genuine inconsistency belongs here. A third-party summary of Sui's token design states plainly that there are no burns, while the same data source's own methodology for measuring Sui's fees describes those fees as "non-refundable storage fees that are burnt." One part of the record says burning doesn't happen; another part of the same record describes exactly how it happens. This page is not resolving which is right, only naming that the disagreement exists and that the burn figures above depend on it.

Sui's market value, the price of every SUI in existence multiplied together, is $3,533,675,783. Divide that by the annualised fee run-rate from the most recent three months and Sui trades at roughly 2,904 times its current yearly fee income.

For comparison, a wireless network project this framework has used as its example of an extreme, speculative valuation traded at roughly 87,000 times its own fees. Sui's multiple is about thirty times smaller than that, so it is not in that territory, but at nearly three thousand times current earnings it is still a price built on what Sui might become rather than what it currently takes in.

Two things make that comparison less straightforward than it looks. The denominator deliberately uses the recent three-month pace rather than the trailing year, which is the harsher and more current of the two; on the trailing-year figure the multiple would read closer to 865 times. And this ratio prices Sui the chain by itself, excluding all of the more than 120 separate applications running on top of it, along with whatever economic activity they generate. The market is pricing an ecosystem that this particular measurement is not allowed to count.

Beyond the network itself, a separate set of applications runs on top of Sui: exchanges, lending platforms, and other financial tools that hold user funds. The total value held inside those applications is a common measure of how much real activity a network's ecosystem is getting.

That total peaked at $2,636,094,260. Today it stands at $506,417,787, a fall of about 81% from the peak, measured across more than a thousand daily observations rather than two isolated snapshots.

This does not mean Sui itself stopped working; the network kept processing transactions and collecting fees throughout. What it means is that the layer of financial activity built on top of Sui has not held onto the scale it once had. It also matters that this decline and the fee decline described earlier are two independent measurements: one counts capital parked on the chain, the other counts transactions people actually paid for. They are not the same quantity, and they point the same direction.

Sui's maximum supply is fixed at 10,000,000,000 SUI and cannot be raised. Of that, 277,121,515 tokens, about 2.8%, have no announced destination yet. No tokens are being newly minted to fund ongoing rewards, which is a genuine positive: nothing is being created out of thin air to pay for activity.

What is still happening is the original allocation working through its schedule, and that schedule has real distance left to run. 9,597 separate token-release events are still pending. The team and early contributors' allocation is only 59% vested, meaning 41% of it, tokens already promised but not yet released, is still to arrive. Ecosystem and treasury reserves sit at 77.4% released, staking rewards at 83%. Only the private sale and public sale allocations are fully complete.

That distinguishes Sui from most projects this framework has assessed, where allocation is finished and the current split equals the final split. Sui's is still unfolding, and it is unfolding against a fee base that has fallen by more than half over two years. Tokens arriving on a fixed schedule regardless of whether network activity supports them is a real pressure, and it is disclosed rather than hidden.

The final allocation, once every release completes: 29.5% to private-sale investors, 25.7% to ecosystem and treasury reserves, 19.8% to staking rewards, 12.8% to the team and early contributors, and 12.2% sold publicly.

In May 2025, an exploit drained roughly $223 million from Cetus, a decentralized exchange built on top of Sui. The flaw was in Cetus's own smart contracts, not in Sui itself; the attacker exploited the application, and the network underneath it functioned as designed.

What happened next is what makes this incident worth understanding rather than just noting. Sui's validators voted on whether to change the network's own recorded history to reverse the theft. Validators representing more than 90% of all staked funds voted yes, with under 1% opposed, and the network executed a hard fork, a coordinated rule change, that restored roughly $162 million of the stolen funds to the people who had lost them.

This is genuinely two findings at once, and both are true. It is a demonstrated strength: the network coordinated at speed, users were made whole, and a security failure in an application built on Sui did not become a permanent loss for the people affected. It is also a demonstrated structural fact: a large enough group of validators can agree to alter what the network has already recorded, after the fact, when they decide the situation warrants it. A network that can do this to protect users is a network that has proven it can do it, full stop. Sui's own ecosystem commentary makes exactly this argument about itself.

Neither reading cancels the other, and someone holding SUI should hold both.

In May 2024, an independent analyst publicly alleged that founders and insiders controlled more than 84% of Sui's staked supply, which would mean the people who built the network also hold most of the voting power over how it runs. Sui responded directly and specifically, stating that the founders of Mysten Labs do not control the Sui Foundation's treasury, the community reserve, staking subsidies, or any tokens allocated to outside investors.

Two things are worth being precise about here. First, this dispute is from May 2024, a full year before the exploit described in the previous section. It is not a reaction to those events, and reading the two together as one story would be wrong.

Second, it remains genuinely unresolved. Both the allegation and the rebuttal are public, dated, and specific, but no independent breakdown of who actually holds Sui's staked supply was available for this assessment. Neither side has been confirmed. What can be said is that the question is real, it has not been settled, and the concentration of validator power it concerns is the same power that reversed the ledger after the Cetus exploit.