Author: David C, Bankless; Compiler: Deng Tong, Golden Finance

Sui is one of the most talked about L1s this cycle, with its roadmap plans generating excitement and winning That's a lot of attention, helping it stay ahead of the curve during times of price volatility.

Even compared to other Move-based chains, Sui is having a stellar season as it builds a solid foundation for its ecosystem that looks set for future growth in 2025 Get ready for a slew of major releases coming this quarter.

Let’s examine these upcoming catalysts for Sui, designed to enhance its DeFi suite, drive liquidity, grow its user base, and unlock support for new applications.

Although Sui’s DeFi is about to undergo a series of upgrades, such as the launch of Aftermath’s perpetual contract market and the continuation of network agency promotion, top Suilend’s upcoming automatic market maker (AMM) Steamm It may inject vitality into Sui DeFi this quarter, attracting liquidity seeking efficient returns.

Traditionally, in AMMs, liquidity is provided across a range of prices for a trading pair. For example, if you provide liquidity to the USDC/SUI pool, your funds will be spread across all possible prices at which trades may occur. However, trading only occurs at specific price points, so a lot of liquidity is "idle" outside of active trading ranges. By introducing a “bank” feature, Steamm introduces these idle funds into Suilend’s lending pool, allowing liquidity providers to earn interest on capital that is not actively used for market making. This dual-purpose approach improves capital efficiency as providers can collect proceeds from transaction fees and borrowing. In addition to increasing earnings for liquidity providers, Steamm will issue profitable LP tokens that can be leveraged by other DeFi protocols on Sui to develop other strategies to effectively recycle liquidity throughout the network.

A series of releases will bring a lot of liquidity to Sui in the coming quarter, such as the release of the BTCfi protocol Babylon Labs (and the protocol), and the mainnet deployment of the multi-computing network Ika.

This cycle is another attempt to unlock the trillions of dollars in Bitcoin, as whichever chain accounts for just a portion of it will receive a massive infusion of capital. Given the security advantages of Move, these chains provide an attractive environment for bridging liquidity, and Babylon and Lombard (a liquid Bitcoin staking protocol built on Babylon) announced a plan to bring BTC to Sui strategic initiatives. As Babylon’s largest protocol, Lombard launched LBTC-wrapped Bitcoin tokens, accounting for approximately $2.2 billion of Babylon’s approximately $5.3 billion in TVL. LBTC will allow Bitcoin holders to stake and earn returns while maintaining ownership of their BTC. Given Sui’s current TVL of approximately $1.8 billion, even a modest reallocation from Lombard or other Babylon-based protocols such as SatLayer, which also intends to launch on Sui, could significantly increase Sui’s overall liquidity. Additionally, since Babylon is still working on the “demand side” mechanics of its protocol, currently, BTC holders who stake through it or any application based on it will only receive “points” towards future airdrops.

The second avenue for increasing liquidity on Sui is Ika, a new network that takes multi-party computation (MPC) to another level. Unlike traditional bridges, which often rely on centralized trust points, Ika uses a "2PC-MPC" model that spreads control over hundreds or even thousands of nodes, making it nearly impossible for any single entity to tamper with funds. By broadcasting messages rather than relying on one-to-one communication, Ika keeps transaction times low and can scale to thousands of signatures per second while remaining decentralized. This means assets like BTC, ETH or SOL can enter Sui with fewer security concerns and less congestion, allowing developers to take advantage of more cross-chain lending, staking or trading options. The result is a more liquid, connected DeFi ecosystem, and Ika can connect Sui to the wider cryptocurrency world without sacrificing speed or security.

While increasing liquidity is crucial, attracting new users is equally important, which is where the recently announced integration between Phantom and Backpack wallets comes into play. place.

Phantom, known for its simple interface and broad support (Solana, Ethereum, and Bitcoin), has 7 million monthly active users, nearly as many as Sui’s total active accounts over the past 30 days. By adding Sui to Phantom, it not only gives these users a direct entry point into the chain, but it also gives the network a seal of approval based on Phantom's reputation. Meanwhile, the Backpack wallet serves over 150/regions while also hosting an exchange that handles $60 billion in trading volume and will support Sui functionality.

In addition, both wallets offer mobile support, in line with the growing trend of crypto users who prefer to conduct transactions via smartphones. With the rollout of these integrations, enablingThe barriers to using Sui will be lowered, increasing its distribution and making it possible to gain more users.

Walrus is developed by Sui founder Mysten Labs and is expected to be launched this quarter. It will be a decentralized storage protocol that has nothing to do with the blockchain. , by storing large-scale rich media data in a distributed manner, the functionality of Sui can be expanded beyond the financial field.

Walrus works through a process called Red Stuff erasure coding, which splits and spreads data across multiple nodes, reducing reliance on traditional centralized hosting. So instead of having each Sui node hold a massive file, Walrus will offload these blobs onto its own network, keeping Sui's core ledger lean. By coordinating incentives and node management with the Sui blockchain, Walrus can run efficiently without duplicating consensus or overloading storage.

This design opens up a wide range of possibilities. It will increase the capabilities of blockchain-based AI applications that, through Walrus, can easily use decentralized data to train models for any use case. For media, Walrus provides a solution for storing content in a resilient, durable environment, which remains a problem for digital content. Additionally, with Walrus Sites, developers can build fully decentralized front-end websites that load their code and assets directly from Walrus, reducing reliance on traditional hosting. Even broader use cases, such as storing transaction history for high-speed chains or as a data availability layer for aggregation, are possible on Walrus.

By handling the storage layer in a way that is both cost-effective and highly scalable, Walrus paves the way for diverse applications beyond the typical DeFi and NFT focus, further expanding within Sui’s growing ecosystem Achievable goals.

Although Sui's current focus is Steamm's capital-efficient AMM, Babylon/Lombard's BTCfi liquidity, Ika's cross-chain MPC and Phantom/ Catalysts like Backpack wallet integration, but the growth of the network doesn’t end there.

Deeper upgrades such as Mysticeti v2 and SIP-45 are also coming. Mysticeti v2 improves Sui’s parallel transaction model, potentially unlocking faster confirmation speeds for DeFi, gaming, and other resource-intensive applications. At the same time, SIP-45 solves the problem of transaction fees during peak demand periods and proposes higher gas price limits., and allows users to pay extra for fast processing. This ensures that critical operations do not stall when network activity surges.

Taken together, these developments are indicative of Sui's broader ambitions. From increasing DeFi liquidity and user adoption to enabling large-scale data storage and advanced AI, Sui is laying the foundation for beyond basic finance. As these protocols and upgrades come online, they will solidify Sui’s position as a versatile platform powered by the Move language—one that can host not only current use cases for encryption, but also the next generation of high-throughput, decentralized services.