What is the SUI NFT Scene and Will it Kill Solana?

Smart money is flooding into the Sui NFT market. The new Layer 1 blockchain launched its mainnet last week and already has a vibrant NFT scene. What do we know about NFTs on Sui?

What do we know about Sui NFTs?

Speculators have labeled Sui as a potential “Solana killer”. It has fast transactions and low fees similar to Solana, but it remains to be seen if this will be enough to establish SUI as a top blockchain for NFTs. After all, Aptos and Near both started strong but quickly lost relevancy after their initial hype wore off.

Sui NFT mania kicked off with the much-anticipated release of Fuddies. Fuddies, a 10,000-piece owl PFP project, had a strong ramp-up to its mint with massive influencer marketing, an allowlist campaign, and the support of Mysten Labs, the owner of Sui’s biggest NFT marketplace Clutchy. The collection started with an allowlist mint for 95 SUI (about $125) before running a Dutch-auction style mint. The dutch-auction began at 300 SUI and gradually came down before minting out around 150 SUI.

Unfortunately, the Clutchy marketplace disappointed in its first appearance on a big stage. The website went down and frustrated traders who looked to flip the mint for a quick profit. Eventually, however, Clutchy came back online and Fuddies reported about 605,000 SUI of volume, worth approximately $792,500.

The Fuddies Twitter account went on the offensive after the dust settled. It tweeted, “Fuddies just passed the entirety of @0xPolygonLabs in 24-hour sales volume and @SuiNetwork didn’t even have to pay us to launch on their chain.” This post earned a ton of engagement and captures the project and Sui’s underdog mentality.

Fuddies is not the only successful project on Sui, however. Suishi, A sushi-theme PFP project, also managed to mint out its entire collection.  Since minting out, it has a lifetime volume of 21,000 SUI already. Clearly, there is a demand among NFT collectors to get early projects from new blockchains in case they ever have historical significance in the future.

What makes Sui different?

Sui is a proof-of-stake blockchain that runs on a modified version of the Move programming language. It has a cap of 10 billion SUI tokens that will be used for gas fees, staking, and governance. Half of the tokens are allocated to the Community Reserve, a fund for future development managed by the Sui Foundation.

The majority of the remaining tokens went to people who contributed to the project. An additional 14% of the supply went to investors. Community members then had the option to purchase the SUI token when the mainnet launched last Wednesday.

Clutchy founder and CEO Jacob “Dizzy Lizzy” Lawless commented that his marketplace has “tons of interest from influencers, investors, creators and onlookers.” Part of this interest comes from Sui’s ability to handle more advanced capabilities than other blockchains. Sui has sufficient scalability to allow dynamic NFTs to update in real time. For example, in-game items such as weapons or armor can improve during gameplay.

This application might be a huge difference maker for Sui. It has already helped catch the attention of several big gaming upcoming gaming titles. Bushi, an Overwatch-style FPS, chose to launch on Sui. Similarly, The Walking Dead universe will release a game on Sui in the future future. Another hotly-anticipated Web3 game, Panzerdogs, found Sui compelling enough to pivot away from Solana in favor of it.

When asked about Sui, pseudonymous Web3 advisor Dabblerer stated, “I feel like there’s still a lot of interesting experimentation going on, culminating in another wave of NFT and dapp innovation. The launches are inspired by lessons learned by early movers with some different takes.”

Major exchanges has already taken taken notice. Since launching last week, Sui has already been listed on Binance, OKX, Kucoin, and Bybit. Clearly, these Web3 companies are expecting Sui to see plenty of volume and are preparing themselves to meet that demand.

Time will tell is Sui does manage to someday rival Ethereum and Solana for NFT supremacy. It has had some early success, however, and does seem poised to make it interesting moving into the next market cycle.

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