Sui Foundation Announces Ecosystem Fund Worth Over $50M

By Nivesh Rustgi

The Sui Foundation, responsible for managing and developing the Sui blockchain, has announced a $51.3 million ecosystem fund to support its DeFi ecosystem and on-chain central limit order book-based platform, DeepBook.

According to an announcement shared with Decrypt, the foundation will claim 117 million SUI tokens worth $51.3 million from “external market makers” and direct them toward supporting Sui’s ecosystem.

The additional funds will be used to grow the Sui ecosystem by “offering grants to developers” of DeFi applications and support its on-chain CLOB platform, DeepBook, for routing and matching trades on-chain.

DeepBook seeks to emulate the same high-frequency trading capabilities as Nasdaq and centralized exchanges by leveraging Sui network's swift transaction speed.

A spokesperson for the Sui Foundation told Decrypt that Sui provides advantages such as “unparalleled low latency and high throughput” through “Sui’s object-centric approach, horizontal scalability, and capacity for efficient on-chain storage.”

The press release claimed the network clocked a “record 65.8 million transactions in a single day—surpassing the performance of every other blockchain in history.”

Greg Siourounis, Managing Director of the Sui Foundation added in the press release that the allocation will provide a “new tailwind” for “developers, and ecosystem participants.”

Moving liquidity from centralized exchanges

At the time of Sui’s mainnet launch in May, the foundation allocated around 396 million toward market makers, representing 75% of its initial circulating supply.

The Foundation now appears to be reclaiming those tokens. A spokesperson for the Foundation declined to comment on the deal with the market makers.

They did, however, tell Decrypt that “SUI has always been and continues to be a highly liquid token on CEXes.”

Besides its focus on DeepBook, the foundation will also look to support other native DeFi applications in automated market makers (AMM) based decentralized exchanges, liquid staking, and lending protocols on the network.

Currently, Sui holds the 35th position among top blockchains in terms of total deposits in DeFi protocols, with assets worth $38.2 million, according to DeFiLlama data.

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