Looking at crypto news headlines, it would seem initially 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 on which to build our project, something didn’t quite add up. So, after getting our analytical hats on and running the requisite due diligence checks, we decided to go with Sui over Solana.
This op-ed is part of CoinDesk's new DePIN Vertical , covering the emerging industry of decentralized physical infrastructure.
The first thing that gave us pause was the prevalence of outages on Solana. In 2022 – an annus horribilis for the crypto industry as a whole – Solana seemed to be going down every other month. But even after the Firedancer testnet validator client went live (which was meant to put a stop to any 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 this, Solana seemed to be struggling to handle its own increase in popularity. Several times this year, the network has become congested due to memecoin mania, as well as Bitcoin-like Ore mining, which quickly grew in popularity. In the last few months, X has been exploding with users complaining about transactions failing, as traders of memecoins like BONK and WIF flooded the network. This sort of frenzy is a good test of a network’s ability to handle real trading volume – and I can’t tell you with absolute confidence that a different blockchain wouldn’t struggle – but for us, this was another red flag.
When it comes to DePIN, and especially projects like ours, which handles huge 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 about it – its promise to reliably process upwards of 50,000 transactions per second. In reality, though, it is of course far less than that under real-life conditions. For what we do at Chirp, that simply isn’t 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 this meant venturing into somewhat unchartered waters. After all, among the bigger and more established Layer1s, Solana really would be the top pick for speed, as well as low transaction costs (which was another one of our key criteria). This search led us to Sui – a blockchain that went public on May 3, 2023.
We believe Sui truly improves on the design of the blockchains from the last bull market, in our view getting closer than any other Layer1 to solving the infamous Blockchain Trilemma. It is cost-efficient, decentralized and secure. It boasts 100 validators, distributed across the globe, and its throughput has ranged from 10,871tps to a whopping 297,000tps. I’m an engineer, so I know not to expect the best performance all the time – in fact, I’m far more inclined to anticipate the worst result in real-life scenarios. But even 10,000tps is still pretty exceptional.
On top of this, Sui’s Mysticeti upgrade – which recently went live on testnet – is set to make the network even faster, bringing consensus latency down 80% to 390 milliseconds (ms). For those without the technical background to give this number context, suffice to say, it’s really fast. In fact, I believe this will make Sui the fastest blockchain in the DeFi space. I’ll give credit where credit is due, though: Solana already boasts a consensus latency of around 400ms, so the difference between the two will be tiny.
What Sui does still hold over Solana, though – apart from transaction processing speed – are the lower costs and its ultra-secure programming language, Move. Cost-wise, the average gas fee on Sui for the last 30 days is just 0.003932633 SUI (with SUI price currently sitting at around $0.86), while average fees on Solana have been as high as $0.03 at various points during recent months. Still a fraction of the fees on Ethereum, of course, but these things do add up.
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Of course, we’re not quite comparing apples with apples here. Though the number of active wallets on Sui and Solana is actually comparable (despite Solana being a more established blockchain), Sui hasn’t experienced anything similar to Solana’s memecoin trading frenzy. But we can only draw conclusions from the facts we have before us, and so far, Sui’s lower gas fees have really helped us keep a lid on costs.
And last, but not least, Sui was a good fit 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 allowing for naming and, therefore, easy tracking of on-chain IoT devices – goes a long way toward creating a more transparent and efficient system of interconnected devices. This allows us to achieve our vision of building a network that is device-agnostic to connect as many devices to the blockchain as possible.
In a nutshell, those are the key reasons 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 been implementing upgrades like Firedancer testnet that are designed to make it more reliable. It is also an established Layer1 that has already weathered one bear market (and, in fact, rose from the ashes after the collapse of FTX). So it’s a solid choice for future DePIN projects.
However, in an ecosystem that innovates as quickly as blockchain does, there will always be innovative developments that improve on existing offerings and surpass them. We believe Sui is exactly that – a sort of Solana 2.0, if you will. And if an early-stage DePIN project comes to me in search of advice, I won’t hesitate to recommend Sui as the top choice for a robust and 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.
UPDATE (7/23/2024): This op-ed was changed to reflect that Firedancer is still in testnet and not yet fully deployed.