How to Be a Successful Builder on Sui

Main Takeaways

• Success on Sui is measured by real economic activity: revenue, retention, and durable demand, not headline metrics.
• The strongest teams build intentionally with the Sui Stack—a unified infrastructure stack for verifiable, composable apps—unlocking products that are unfeasible to build elsewhere.
• Credibility comes from visible progress and value flow, so ship something people use and design for compounding economic activity from day one.
• Programs like Hydropower and DeFi Moonshots are there to amplify that traction at different stages.

Overview

As the Sui ecosystem matures, the standard for meaningful success evolves with it. Every builder should ask early on what success means in practice.

Success on Sui isn’t about being early. And it’s not about launching a token quickly or announcing partnerships before you have a product. It’s about building something that generates real economic activity. 

Revenue, retention, and true demand. Those are the signals that matter.

Raising capital is often the most visible sign of momentum, but it’s not the goal. It’s a reflection of traction. The builders who succeed are the ones who create sustainable demand first and let capital follow naturally.

What follows is a clear way to align product decisions with real traction and long-term value flow on Sui.

Define Success the Right Way

Whatever you’re building, it helps to be explicit about what “success” looks like in measurable terms. The clearest signal is economic activity: revenue, fees, sustained usage, and durable demand for what you’ve built. 

The teams that stand out are the ones with a clear product, a clear value proposition, and evidence that people actually use what they’ve built. In practice, that means fast MVP cycles, public testnet traction, and a product narrative that’s easy to explain in one or two sentences.

Build Intentionally

The strongest products on Sui aren’t generic apps deployed on a new chain. They leverage the Sui Stack, a set of native infrastructure and primitives that reduce friction for users and make deeper composability practical, to ship genuinely differentiated products.

At the protocol layer, Sui’s object-centric model and parallel execution make high-throughput, low-latency state changes practical. Move enforces asset safety at the language level, shaping how value is handled from the start.

Above the protocol layer, the Sui Stack includes shared liquidity through DeepBook, data access and indexing via Nautilus, decentralized storage with Walrus, programmable encryption through Seal, and onboarding primitives like zkLogin. This isn’t a list of features. It’s a design surface.

Building intentionally means understanding which layers of the stack your product can leverage and designing around them from day one.

The question isn’t “Why Sui?” It’s “What does Sui unlock that wasn’t practical before?” That’s where differentiated products begin.

Turn Vision Into Credibility

Ambitious ideas often require strong research and thoughtful design before launch. That’s especially true for products defining new financial primitives or infrastructure. But credibility comes from progress, not perfection.

At some point, every serious project needs to show movement: a prototype, measurable activity, a product people can interact with.

Even early traction (public testnet usage, real volumes, committed beta users) signals that the thesis can translate into reality.

Vision earns attention and credibility earns trust. The builders who stand out don’t just describe what they intend to build. They demonstrate that it works.

Design for Value Flow from Day One

Many teams build features and only later map how value moves through the system. The most sustainable businesses design value flow first. Starting with questions like:

• What actions generate revenue?
• What brings users back?
• How does activity deepen over time rather than reset?

If you’re building financial products, think about liquidity depth and sustainable fee generation early.

If you’re building consumer products, think about retention beyond novelty.

Surface metrics can be distracting. What matters is whether economic activity compounds. That doesn’t happen by accident, it’s designed.

Builder Programs

Sui offers two programs designed to support builders at different stages. Both are structured to amplify traction, not create it from scratch.

Hydropower Fellowship

Hydropower is an equity-free fellowship for teams in the MVP, launching, or recently launched stages. It provides mentorship, ecosystem access, and investor-facing support to help teams reach meaningful traction. 

The program is designed as flexible, on-demand support rather than a rigid accelerator curriculum, with regular masterclasses and workshops available to all fellows.

Hydropower is best suited for teams that have early product signal and want structured support to reach their next milestone.

DeFi Moonshots

Moonshots is a separate, highly selective program focused specifically on DeFi teams building category-defining financial products. It's not a cohort or accelerator. 

Selected teams can receive up to $500k in growth incentives, direct collaboration with DeFi engineering specialists, audit credits, and coordinated launch support. 

Moonshots is looking for teams pursuing novel financial primitives, capital efficiency breakthroughs, or products that can attract entirely new capital and user segments to onchain finance.

Success Compounds

The Sui Stack lowers the barrier to building serious products. 

Shared liquidity, scalable execution, composable objects, programmable storage, and flexible onboarding give you structural advantages.

But technology alone doesn’t create success. Clear success metrics, intentional product design, and observable traction do. 

When economic activity starts to compound, everything else follows: integrations, distribution, capital, credibility.

Sui gives you leverage. What you build with it is what matters.