Solana
Why we chose Sui over Solana for our DePIN
Looking at the crypto news headlines, it would seem at first glance 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 to build our project on, something didn’t feel right. So, after putting on our analyst hats and doing the due diligence, we decided to go with Sui over Solana.
This editorial is part of CoinDesk’s new newsletter DePIN Verticalcovering the emerging industry of decentralized physical infrastructure.
The first thing that got us thinking was the prevalence of outages on Solana. In 2022, a Annus horribilis To the crypto industry as a whole, Solana seemed to be down every other month. But even after the Firedancer validator client went live (which was supposed to stop any further outages), the network was 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 that, Solana seemed to be struggling to handle its own surge in popularity. Several times this year, the network has been congested due to memecoin mania, as well as Ore mining, like Bitcoin, which has quickly gained popularity. In recent months, X has exploded with users complaining about failed transactions, while memecoin traders like BONK and WIF have flooded the network. This kind of frenzy is a good test of a network’s ability to handle real-world trading volume—and I can’t tell you with absolute certainty that another blockchain wouldn’t struggle—but for us, it was another red flag.
When it comes to DePIN, and especially projects like ours that deal with massive amounts of data in real time, the two main qualities we demand from a blockchain are reliability and scalability. When Solana first emerged as an “Ethereum killer,” this was the most exciting thing: its promise to reliably process over 50,000 transactions per second. In reality, it’s much less than that in real-world conditions. For what we do at Chirp, this is simply not enough.
It was for these main reasons that we decided to look for the “holy grail” of DePIN blockchains, beyond the obvious choice of Solana. We knew that this meant venturing into somewhat uncharted waters. After all, among the largest and most established Layer1s, Solana would truly be the top choice in terms of speed, as well as low transaction costs (which was another 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 blockchain design of the last bull market, coming closer than any other layer 1 to solving the infamous blockchain trilemma in our opinion. It’s cost-effective, decentralized, and secure. It has 100 validators, spread across the globe, and its throughput ranges from 10,871 tps to 297,000 tps. I’m an engineer, so I know not to expect the best performance all the time—in fact, I’m much more likely to anticipate the worst outcome in real-world scenarios. But even 10,000 tps is still pretty exceptional.
On top of that, Sui’s Mysticeti upgrade — which recently went live on the testnet — is expected to make the network even faster, reducing consensus latency by 80% to 390 milliseconds (ms). For those who aren’t technically savvy enough to give context to that number, suffice it to say that it’s really fast. In fact, I think it’ll make Sui the fastest blockchain in the DeFi space. I’ll give credit where credit is due, though: Solana already has a consensus latency of around 400ms, so the difference between the two will be minimal.
However, aside from transaction processing speed, Sui still has an advantage over Solana: lower costs and its ultra-secure programming language, Move. In terms of cost, the average gas fee on Sui over the last 30 days is just 0.003932633 SUI (with SUI currently sitting at around $0.86), while the average fee on Solana has hit $0.03 at various points over the past few months. That’s still a fraction of Ethereum’s fees, of course, but these things add up.
Of course, we’re not comparing apples to apples here. While the number of active wallets on Sui and Solana is actually comparable (despite Solana being a more established blockchain), Sui hasn’t seen anything like Solana’s memecoin trading frenzy. But we can only draw conclusions from the facts we have, and so far, Sui’s lower gas fees have really helped us keep costs in check.
Last but not least, Sui was a good choice 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 to easily name and therefore track IoT devices on-chain – goes a long way toward creating a more transparent and efficient system of interconnected devices. This allows us to realize our vision of building a device-agnostic network to connect as many devices as possible to the blockchain.
In a nutshell, these are the main reasons why 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 implemented upgrades like Firedancer that are designed to make it more reliable. It’s also an established Layer 1 that has weathered a bear market before (and, in fact, rose from the ashes after the FTX collapse), so it’s a solid choice for future DePIN projects.
However, in an ecosystem that innovates as rapidly as blockchain, there will always be innovative developments that improve and surpass existing offerings. 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 for advice, I will not hesitate to recommend Sui as the best choice for a robust and scalable network.
Note: The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.