From Infrastructure to Impact: Where Sui Goes Next

Main Takeaways

• A recap of how Sui has evolved and where it’s headed, drawing on perspectives from key figures at Mysten Labs, the original contributors to the network.
• Across ecosystem growth, cryptography, DeFi, and systems design, the focus has shifted from hardening infrastructure to delivering production-ready experiences.
• Sui is entering a phase where performance, privacy, and composability support users, applications, and economic activity at scale.

Overview

It’s tempting to measure progress by headlines or market cycles. But on Sui, the real momentum in 2025 came from something more durable: the steady rollout of product and tooling upgrades that changed what builders could actually ship.

Those improvements, from performance and finality to developer experience and system primitives, didn’t just make the network better on paper. They expanded the design space. They unlocked new classes of applications. And they made it possible for teams to focus less on workarounds and more on building products people actually want to use.

That theme came through clearly in a year-end conversation on X with leaders from across the ecosystem. Early in the discussion, Evan Cheng, CEO of Mysten Labs — the original contributor to Sui — framed the broader shift: 

“The way to get people excited is to build products that actually impact their lives.”

The conversation also featured other key figures from Mysten Labs, including Adeniyi Abiodun, Kostas Chalkias, and Aslan Tashtanov, each bringing their own unique perspective. The goal was to step back and answer a simple question: what did 2025 actually unlock, and what feels different about 2026?

What follows isn’t just a recap, but a set of signals. Four perspectives — across ecosystem adoption, systems design, cryptography, and DeFi — that together explain why 2026 is fundamentally different, and what that difference makes possible.

From Potential To Proof

From an ecosystem standpoint, 2025 was about proof. Not theoretical scalability or future potential, but real usage, with builders shipping and users showing up. 

Adeniyi Abiodun, Co-Founder of Mysten Labs and Chief Product Officer, reflected on how that shift showed up across the ecosystem.

Over the year, Sui saw sustained growth across developers, applications, and onchain activity. Improvements in finality and cost weren’t incremental; they fundamentally changed what could be built. 

Consumer-facing apps onboarded users without forcing them to think about private keys or wallets from day one. Games, social apps, and payments began to feel less like “crypto products” and more like software that just worked.

As Adeniyi pointed out: “It’s easy for progress to get lost in announcements of announcements. But what really mattered was seeing builders ship real products and users actually show up.” 

What stood out was the pattern of successes. Infrastructure matured, developer experience improved, and adoption followed.

Why Systems Matter

The distinction that emerged repeatedly was not about individual products, but about cohesive systems. As Evan Cheng put it, “While everyone else is building a ledger, we’re building a stack, a control layer that lets automation actually work.”

The internet is changing. The number of “users” online is exploding, not because of population growth, but because machines, agents, and autonomous software are joining humans as participants. But today’s internet wasn’t designed for that world. 

The work of the past two years has been about preparing for that shift. Not by chasing narratives or shipping isolated features, but by assembling a full stack that can support automation, verification, and coordination at scale.

2026 is where that preparation starts to show up as products. Not one flagship app, but a new class of applications that can only exist because the underlying pieces are finally in place. The goal isn’t to convince people that blockchain matters. It’s to build things so useful that the question stops being asked.

As Evan put it near the close of the conversation: “The only way to get people excited is to build products that actually impact their lives. That’s what 2026 is about.”

Cryptography For The Real World

From the cryptography side, 2025 marked the moment when Web3 stopped being inward-looking. Kostas Chalkias, Chief Cryptographer and Co-Founder of Mysten Labs, spoke about how advances in AI, robotics, and physical systems are reshaping what cryptographic infrastructure needs to support.

These systems are rapidly becoming participants on the internet. That raises a new class of questions: how do machines authenticate, transact, coordinate, and prove what they did? What’s striking is how naturally object-based systems map to these problems.

“Object-oriented systems are exactly how people already work in robotics today,” Kostas explained. “When they see that, the blockchain stops feeling abstract, it starts feeling natural.” 

Robots, drones, and devices already operate as objects with state, permissions, and histories. Bringing them onchain isn’t about financialization first; it’s about coordination, accountability, and trust.

Privacy as a Prerequisite

Alongside these advances, the groundwork for something long overdue also came into place: practical privacy.

Not privacy as an afterthought or niche feature, but privacy as a prerequisite for real-world use. For institutions, enterprises, and regulated applications, privacy is what makes it possible to operate day to day: protecting sensitive data, managing access, and meeting compliance requirements without sacrificing usability.

Without these primitives, institutions can’t safely build, transact, or automate onchain. With them, privacy becomes an enabler, allowing real users and organizations to operate on Sui with confidence.

From a cryptography standpoint, that end state is clear: a world where blockchain infrastructure becomes invisible, embedded into products people use without ever needing to think about the underlying stack

As Kostas put it, “The real win is when someone uses an app and doesn’t even know blockchain is behind it, but it wouldn’t be possible without it.”

DeFi Grows Up

In DeFi, 2025 was a year of maturation.

Liquidity became more composable. Capital efficiency improved dramatically. Infrastructure like DeepBook proved that fully onchain markets can support real volume and real use cases, not just experiments.

In 2026, the focus moves from primitives to experiences. As Aslan Tashtanov, Software Engineer at Mysten Labs, shared, “For me, 2026 is the year of experiences. Not just DeFi apps that already exist, but things you can’t do anywhere else.”

Trading, margin, derivatives, and yield strategies are now expected. The opportunity is in making these capabilities accessible to everyday users, without forcing them to become experts.

The same composability that powers advanced strategies can also power better consumer products. Spending directly from onchain savings. Routing liquidity across protocols automatically. Turning complex financial flows into simple experiences.

For DeFi to matter at scale, it has to feel better than traditional finance, not just more open. That’s the direction Sui’s DeFi stack is now moving in.

The Path Forward

Taken together, these perspectives tell a clear story.

Across the ecosystem, the message is the same: performance, privacy, and composability are no longer theoretical advantages. They are now stable enough to support real applications, users, and economic activity at scale.

That shift changes the question entirely. The focus is no longer on whether the infrastructure works, but on what it enables. Systems that can act autonomously without sacrificing accountability or trust.

If there’s one thing to take away, it’s this: Sui is moving from proving the foundations to delivering products people actually use.

If you’d like to hear the full conversation for yourself, you can listen to the complete year-end discussion on X here.