Blockchain
Why we chose Sui instead of Solana for our DePIN
Looking at cryptocurrency news headlines, it would initially seem that Solana has firmly established itself as the home of DePIN. From Hivemapper to Helium, some of the most well-known DePIN projects are built on this blockchain. But when we explored Solana as a blockchain to build our own project on, something didn’t add up. So, after putting on our analytical hats and doing the required due diligence, we decided to go with Sui over Solana.
This opinion piece is part of CoinDesk’s new article Vertical DePINcovering the emerging sector of decentralized physical infrastructure.
The first thing that made us reflect was the prevalence of outages on Solana. In 2022, a horrible year For the cryptocurrency industry as a whole, Solana seemed to go down every two months. But even after the Firedancer validation client went live (which should have put a stop to further outages), the network still went down for nearly five hours in February 2024. It may have been a fluke, but those odds didn’t fill us with confidence.
On top of that, Solana seemed to be having trouble managing its own surge in popularity. Several times this year, the network has become congested due to the memecoin craze, as well as Bitcoin-like Ore mining, which has rapidly grown in popularity. In recent months, X has exploded with users complaining about failed transactions, as memecoin traders like BONK and WIF have flooded the network. This kind of frenzy is a good test of a network’s ability to handle real trading volume, and I can’t say with absolute certainty that a different blockchain wouldn’t struggle, but for us, this was another wake-up call.
When it comes to DePIN, and especially projects like ours that handle massive amounts of data in real time, the two main things we require from a blockchain are reliability and scalability. When Solana first emerged as an “Ethereum killer,” this was the most exciting thing: its promise to reliably process over 50,000 transactions per second. In reality, however, it is obviously much less in real-world conditions. For what we do at Chirp, this is simply not enough.
So, for these main reasons, when we began our search for the “holy grail” of DePIN blockchains, we decided to look beyond the obvious choice of Solana. We knew that this meant venturing into uncharted waters. After all, among the largest and most established Layer1s, Solana would indeed be the best choice for speed, as well as low transaction costs (which was another of our key criteria). This search led us to Sui, a blockchain that went public on May 3, 2023.
We believe Sui truly improves upon the design of the latest bull market blockchains, coming closer than any other Layer1 to solving the infamous Blockchain Trilemma in our opinion. It is cost-effective, decentralized, and secure. It boasts 100 validators, distributed across the globe, and its throughput has ranged from 10,871 tps to a whopping 297,000 tps. I am an engineer, so I know better than to always expect the best performance, in fact, I am much more likely to anticipate the worst outcome in real-life scenarios. But even 10,000 tps is still pretty exceptional.
On top of that, Sui’s Mysticeti upgrade, which recently went live on testnet, is set to make the network even faster, reducing consensus latency by 80% to 390 milliseconds (ms). For those who don’t have the technical knowledge to put that number into context, suffice it to say that it’s really fast. In fact, I believe this will make Sui the fastest blockchain in the DeFi space. However, I’ll give credit where credit is due: Solana already boasts a consensus latency of around 400 ms, so the difference between the two will be minimal.
What Sui still has going for it over Solana, though, aside from transaction processing speed, are lower fees and its ultra-secure programming language, Move. In terms of fees, the average gas fee on Sui over the past 30 days is just 0.003932633 SUI (with the SUI price currently sitting at around $0.86), while average fees on Solana have been as high as $0.03 at various points over the past few months. Still a fraction of Ethereum fees, of course, but these things add up.
Of course, we’re not exactly comparing apples to apples. While the number of active wallets on Sui and Solana is indeed comparable (despite Solana being a more established blockchain), Sui hasn’t experienced anything like the memecoin trading frenzy that Solana has. But we can only draw conclusions from the facts before us, and so far, Sui’s lower gas fees have really helped keep costs in check.
And last but not least, Sui was a good choice because of the wide range of tools it offers to support our growing Internet of Things (IoT) network. For example, the Sui Name Service (SNS), a naming system that assigns unique identifiers to blockchain addresses, enabling naming and thus easy tracking of IoT devices on-chain, greatly contributes to creating a more transparent and efficient system of interconnected devices. This allows us to realize our vision of building a device-agnostic network to connect as many devices as possible to the blockchain.
In a nutshell, these are the main reasons why we chose Sui over Solana. That’s not to say that Solana doesn’t offer many of the attributes required for a strong and resilient DePIN network. It’s still among the fastest blockchains in the industry and has implemented upgrades like Firedancer that are designed to make it more reliable. It’s also an established Layer1 that has already weathered a bear market (and, in fact, risen from the ashes after the FTX crash). So it’s a solid choice for future DePIN projects.
However, in an ecosystem as rapidly innovating as blockchain, there will always be innovative developments that improve upon and surpass existing offerings. We believe that Sui is exactly that: a kind of Solana 2.0, if you will. And if an early-stage DePIN project approached me for advice, I would not hesitate to recommend Sui as the best choice for a robust, scalable network.
Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.