After a busy 12 months that included launching the mainnet and announcing new partnerships with TikTok’s parent company ByteDance and Google, and Mysten Labs, the creator of Layer 1. Sui Sui
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Protocol is confident that blockchain technology will reach the proverbial turning point.
“A killer app for web3 is coming. The ChatGPT moment is just around the corner.” Evan Cheng, CEO and co-founder of Mysten Labs, added in an interview with The Block that the current uptick coincides with web2 technology giants expressing more interest in blockchain than ever before. “We’re seeing a lot of interest from more established companies. We’re seeing companies coming in that haven’t done anything in this space before.”
Mysten Labs’ recently announced “ecosystem partnership” includes groundbreaking agreements with Alibaba Cloud and Google Cloud focused on enhancing security and scalability. BytePlus, the technology arm of TikTok parent company ByteDance, also recently partnered with Cheng’s company to develop a variety of initiatives, including Web3 games, SocialFi, recommendation solutions and augmented reality products, Mysten Labs said in a blog post.
When asked why large, centralized technology companies like Google and Bytedance are interested in DeFi applications, Cheng said these companies must be committed to continuous innovation. “They’re not just doing this for publicity. They are actively looking into web3 and working with us,” he said. “Perhaps (decentralization) is not an immediate threat to the business model, but in this way great companies last longer than those that rest on their laurels.”
Exactly one year after Sui, which he helped build the blockchain, launched on mainnet, Cheng is clearly one of blockchain’s biggest proponents and best known for believing that the protocol is superior to others. According to Mysten Labs, Sui is far from the leader in terms of total locked value, but it has made some progress, at one point over the past 12 months breaking into the TVL top 10 just a few months after its mainnet launch.
It has since fallen to 13th on the list, behind protocols such as Ethereum, Solana, and Avalanche, according to DeFiLlama.
Total value anchored ranking between blockchains. Image: DeFiLlama
Fierce competition between blockchains
According to Steven Zheng, The Block Research Director, Sui may eventually prove to be one of the most used and best-performing blockchains, but it faces stiff competition on all fronts.
“Compared to its cousin blockchain, apartment 
appropriate
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, Sui was able to gain much more economic activity through TVL and on-chain transaction volume,” Zheng said. “But in terms of visibility, I think Aptos is gaining a lot of marketing and visibility awareness.”
The reason Sui and Aptos are often compared is because both use the Move programming language and are blockchains created by former Meta employees. All five of Mysten Labs’ founders were previously involved in Meta’s cryptocurrency initiatives, while Aptos Labs was co-founded by former Meta engineer Avery Ching.
The competition between layer 1 blockchains like Sui is likely to heat up for some time as the protocol becomes essential in the web3 era. So far, Cheng said she feels good about Sui’s growth over the past year.
“We are pretty healthy now. If you look at DeFi in particular, it has consistently been in the top 10 in terms of trading volume,” he said. “And that’s real because there are a lot of other metrics that can be faked, but real volume is real.”
After mainnet launch, the SUI token lost more than half its value in about a month before recovering significantly, more than doubling its price to around $2 earlier this year. As of today, the token price is trading at just over $1, according to the Block Price Page.
Sui price movement since mainnet launch. Image: Block pricing page.
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