Sui Price Down Following Network’s First Major Outage

Sui, a layer-1 blockchain built by Mysten Labs, experienced its first major outage Thursday, as the network failed to process transactions for around two hours.

The outage was caused by a “bug in transaction scheduling logic that caused validators to crash,” Sui’s official account explained on Twitter (aka X). A patch for the issue has since been rolled out, Sui added, which was quickly adopted by the network’s community of validators.

Since the network went live in May 2023, Sui had experienced consistent uptime up until the bug knocked its validators offline. The last incident impacting Sui took place in June, when its testnet experienced a temporary outage.

Created by the team behind Meta’s now-defunct Diem project, Sui leverages a modified version of its Move programming language. Essentially, the open-source programming language is centered around “objects” that exist as user-level assets.

When it comes to the value of assets locked in smart contracts on Sui’s network, also known as total value locked (TVL), the project is ranked eighth among all chains, according to DefiLlama. Totaling $1.6 billion, the figure has climbed 55% over the past month alongside a jump in Sui’s price.

Sui’s token fell as low as $3.36 amid the outage, but it has since risen back up to $3.56 as of this writing, showing a nearly 5% decrease in price over the past day. The price had climbed back as high as $3.68 after the downtime, but has since dipped again.

Like many digital assets, the price of SUI has rallied since Election Day, jumping approximately 80% since Donald Trump’s White House victory this month.

Billed as a “Solana killer” for its focus on fast transaction speeds, Sui’s outage Thursday paralleled problems experienced by Solana on occasion. In 2022, for example, Solana experienced five major outages, with the latest outage taking place in February of this year.

Armani Ferrante, the CEO of Backpack, a Solana-based wallet for NFTs, described Sui’s outage as par for the course on Twitter. He said that the projects that experience occasional outages are typically the ones that are pushing the limits of what’s possible on-chain.

“Downtime is just a fact of life,” he wrote. “If you don’t go down, you’re not pushing the limits.”

Sui did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Decrypt.

Edited by Andrew Hayward