How Sui Tech Made Claynosaurz's Popkins NFT Launch a Resounding Success

Brands like Claynosaurz leverage Sui to push the boundaries of onchain innovation, showing how Web3 can evolve interactive entertainment and deliver unique, new experiences. Claynosaurz's recent launch of its Popkins NFT collection and the accompanying massive raffle campaign on Sui was not just a success in community engagement, but also a powerful demonstration of Sui's unique technological capabilities. 

Claynosaurz’s Popkins launch featured a public mint, with mystery packs available for 200 USDC each. The company created 25,000 mystery packs, with 2,000 of them containing a Popkin NFT. Buyers of mystery packs who did not receive a Popkin were refunded in USDC and provided additional rewards, including a chance to win a Claynosaurz NFT. 

The Popkins campaign was a resounding success, marked by impressive numbers: 

• 97,347 NFT tickets minted
• 17,760 unique holders
• 17,644,000 USDC in paid ticket sales 

Critically, 13,932,000 USDC were refunded to non-winners in less than an hour, and the entire multi-phase process, involving minting nearly 100,000 NFTs (25,000 with Kiosks), complex raffle calculations, and massive refunds, incurred a total gas cost of merely 770 SUI. 

Powering the infrastructure: Seamless user experience and asset management

Enoki for sponsored transactions: To ensure a frictionless user experience, Claynosaurz integrated Enoki, a Mysten Labs service. Enoki enabled sponsored transactions, allowing users to participate without needing SUI for gas fees. 

Walrus and Tusky for rich NFT asset hosting: The Popkins collection, with its nine character types and nearly one million trait combinations, demanded a high-performance storage solution for its extensive 3D animated assets. Claynosaurz utilized Walrus, Sui's native high-performance blob storage service, to host all NFT images and animations. Assets were efficiently uploaded to Walrus via Tusky. This ensured that the cinematic-quality visuals were efficiently stored and rapidly delivered to users across various platforms.

Core Sui primitives in action: Building complex systems onchain

Claynosaurz masterfully leveraged Sui's object model to create a sophisticated and resilient onchain ecosystem:

Enabling secure concurrency with shared objects

Sui distinguishes between owned and shared objects. Shared objects can be accessed and modified by multiple users, making them ideal for use cases like registries and state tracking.

Claynosaurz utilized shared objects for:

• Concurrent interaction: Players could buy tickets and check their status, while admins used the same registries in smart contract logic—all through shared objects like MainTicketRegistry and DrawRegistry, supporting thousands of users concurrently.
• Efficient fund aggregation: Shared objects holding USDC balances—such as LotteryUSDCPool and BoosterPackUSDCPool—handled both payment collection from participants and refunds to losing players, without bottlenecks.
• Admin-gated mutability: While users could interact with registries, only admins could perform sensitive operations, such as updating allowlists or withdrawing funds, enforced through Move level access control.

Sui’s shared object congestion control ensures that even under heavy load, transactions involving shared objects are prioritized fairly (based on gas) and processed efficiently. This allows apps like Claynosaurz to scale smoothly while maintaining security and responsiveness across admin and user operations.

Scaling onchain state with dynamic collections and shared registries

Sui’s dynamic collections built on dynamic fields and dynamic object fields allow the creation of flexible, onchain registries that can grow without predefined limits.

In particular, structs utilizing Table<K, V>, as used in the Claynosaurz integration, provide a typed key-value store that maps entries to child objects internally. This design avoids storage caps and allows developers to efficiently track and access large datasets (such as player records, tickets, or ownership entries) with consistent performance.

These registries were implemented as shared objects, which act as extensible, concurrent-access data stores. While they are interactable by anyone, only admins can modify them, enforced through explicit access control logic in Move.

Key shared registries used in the Claynosaurz integration included:

• MainTicketRegistry: Held all 97,347 ticket entries with structured metadata like owner address, payment type, and pre-winner flags.
• DrawRegistry: Tracked the evolving draw state, including batch snapshots, winner selection progress, and randomness references.
• WhitelistMintRegistry: Listed authorized admin addresses allowed to mint special NFTs.
• PlayerRegistry: Maintained a list of verified players, enabling game rules such as restricting NFT transfers to registered users only.
• PizzaTicketsOwnersRegistry: Indexed Pizza NFT owners eligible for bonus booster pack airdrops.

Controlled trading with Sui Kiosks and transfer policies

Sui Kiosks are a native primitive that enables decentralized, policy-enforced asset trading. Each Kiosk is a shared object owned by a specific user via a KioskOwnerCap, allowing them to securely store and list assets for sale.

Claynosaurz integrated Kiosks with Sui’s TransferPolicy system to enable controlled trading functionalities, including:

• Royalties, which were enforced at the protocol level for all secondary sales. This ensured creators received their share regardless of the marketplace used.
• Custom trade rules per asset type: A TransferPolicy was created for each NFT type (e.g., BoosterPack, Popkins), defining royalty logic and enabling listing through Kiosks. These policies governed trade behavior globally, applying to any sale across the Sui network.

Controlled transfers and onchain randomness

• Claynosaurz implemented rules to restrict transfers of certain NFTs such as game characters and cosmetics so they could only be moved through in-game mechanics. This was enforced using Sui’s capabilities like a utilizing a shared registry, ensuring these items remained bound to gameplay context.
• For assets not intended for trading (e.g., event attendance badges or booster packs distributed to non-winners), Claynosaurz minted soulbound NFTs non-transferable tokens directly issued to users.

Sui’s native randomness module (sui::random::Random) was used to power its winner selection logic. This secure, unbiasable randomness—generated by Sui validators—was used onchain to select winners from the eligible ticket pool, ensuring a transparent and tamper proof draw without reliance on offchain or oracle based systems.

Programmable Transaction Blocks (PTBs) for complex, atomic operations: Sui’s PTBs allow developers to chain up to 1024 operations into a single, atomic transaction. This was instrumental for efficiency and user experience in several areas of the Claynosaurz campaign:

• Efficient batch operations: The raffle involved numerous batch processes. The smart contract logic for minting rewards to winners, processing loser rewards and refunds, as well as the offchain scripts managing these operations, highlight the batching of mints, burns, and refunds. The rapid refund of 13.9 million USDC in under an hour is a testament to this.
• Multi-phase draw management: Due to inherent blockchain transaction execution limits, complex operations like the main drawings were split into multiple phases, each triggered by admins. For instance, the initial phase involved batch-scanning all tickets to identify pre-winners, followed by another phase for randomly selecting additional winners from the remaining pool. PTBs would have allowed the admin to trigger these phased operations efficiently, with state consistently maintained in shared objects like DrawRegistry.

NFT display standards for universal metadata compatibility: To ensure consistent display of NFT metadata across wallets, explorers, and marketplaces, Claynosaurz implemented Sui's Display Standard. Each NFT type had a corresponding display structure defined onchain, detailing how its name, description, image, links, and attributes should be presented.

Sophisticated onchain mechanics tailored for the campaign

Beyond the core primitives, Claynosaurz engineered specific onchain mechanics. The following components have been built but will be implemented in a future phase of the project.

Popkins NFT minting and management

Admin-controlled minting (allowlists): The creation of new Popkins NFTs was a privileged operation. The smart contract design ensured that only admin addresses maintained in a dedicated onchain allowlist registry could initiate the minting process.

Backend-authorized minting by players (signed permits for BoosterPacks): For BoosterPacks, the Claynosaurz backend signed data (containing details like owner, nonce, price, NFT metadata), and the user submitted this signature with their transaction to claim a BoosterPack. An onchain mechanism then verified this signature against the admin's public key (stored in the central Registry object) using Sui's native cryptographic verification capabilities. This process, secured with nonces to prevent replays (with nonces tracked in the Registry's list of claimed nonces), provided a seamless UX and secure, delegated minting.

Burning NFTs for storage refund: Both BoosterPack and Popkins NFTs were designed to be burnable. Their respective onchain burn mechanisms not only delete the NFT object but also ensure the original storage fees are rebated, a unique economic feature of Sui.

Why Sui? The perfect canvas for onchain innovation

Claynosaurz's choice of Sui was deliberate. They sought a platform that was not just infrastructure but a creative canvas. Sui's architecture, with its object-centric model, scalability, low transaction fees, rich developer tooling (like Walrus and PTBs), and features like native randomness and sponsored transactions, provided the ideal environment for their ambitious project. The ability to handle massive scale, complex logic, and large transaction volumes with remarkable efficiency and low cost, as demonstrated by the Popkins campaign, underscores Sui's readiness for next-generation Web3 applications.

The Claynosaurz team is already looking ahead, with plans for a free-to-play game with Gameloft, an animated series, and physical toys linked to onchain assets, all building towards their vision of becoming the Pixar of Web3. Their successful integration and innovative use of Sui's technology pave the way for other creators and developers to build equally groundbreaking experiences onchain.