Sui open interest remains near peak, traders aim to protect long positions

Sui (SUI) reached a one-month peak after doubling its price in a single trading day. The SUI asset spiked after increased social media exposure, but it was also an anomaly in SUI open interest. 

SUI is still up 65% week-on-week, trading at $0.98 after extending this week’s rally. Trading volumes retained their boost for the past week, landing above $750M in 24 hours. 

The Sui project is among the relatively high-profile Layer 1 solutions, receiving net flows of $100M from Ethereum. But this does not fully explain the recent token rally. SUI has lagged behind larger networks, with an all-time price peak just above $2. During the 2024 bull market, SUI has underperformed compared to other chains, as only a handful of networks drew in traffic.

SUI keeps getting exposure from Grayscale, which launched its SUI Trust exchange-traded product on August 1. Since then, the product also expanded its net asset value per share, rising from a low of $7.96 to $15.14. Grayscale’s Bittensor TAO product had a similar effect, helping the token recover from lows of $172 back above $280. The Grayscale products still target accredited investors rather than crypto insiders, but signal the trustworthiness and growth potential of the product.

The Grayscale SUI Trust is still the smallest of all available investment products for accredited investors. The fund still carries $681.23K assets under management.

The current SUI pump happens on top of a peak of long positions. A big part of the long are concentrated around the $0.80 level, which may be attacked in the coming days. A new SUI rally led to the creation of 861 longs against 109 shorts. 

The SUI open interest is not unprecedented, but the recent spike was sudden, arriving with additional social media mentions. The SUI market shows it is highly reactive when buyers move in, signaling that crypto investors are still watching altcoins and tokens for expansion opportunities. The SUI rally arrives after other platform tokens on the Ethereum ecosystem lagged behind the market. 

The growing longs open interest is the highest since the end of March, where SUI also achieved its highest valuation. The initial spike took SUI open interest to $120M. Overnight, new positions drove open interest to $256.39M.

SUI lines up among leading graph-based networks

One of the reasons for the relatively low popularity of SUI until recently is its different approach to building a network. SUI is a novel blockchain, not another EVM-compatible layer. It resembles the architecture of Nano (NANO) or IOTA, rather than the usual proof of work or staking blockchains. 

SUI reports more than 410K daily active accounts, to compete with the usual levels on Ethereum and Solana. Onboarding new users may be more difficult, since SUI requires the creation of a separate wallet. 

Unlike other DAG projects or innovative networks, SUI is not a “dead chain”. As of August 2024, SUI carried a relatively low value locked at $617.38M. Additionally, SUI has an ecosystem of tokens and a full DeFi collection of projects. The goal of SUI was to become a chain capable of carrying DEX trading, as well as gaming. SUI carries millions of NFT, trading between 10K and 20K items daily. Additionally, SUI carries its own ecosystem of tokens, valued at $4.5B. 

SUI may still face price pressure with attempts to liquidate the current long positions. The Sui network was launched after a series of exchange-based token placements and IDOs, in addition to Series A and Series B funding. As of August 13, only 25% of the SUI supply was unlocked and circulating. 

On September 1, an unlock of 64.19M tokens will inflate the circulating supply by 2.47%. The Sui project has allocated around 20% of its supply to early investors and VC backers. In the coming months, Sui will also accelerate the unlocks for the Series B backers. Sui has gained support from Binance Labs, as well as from leading fund Andreessen Horowitz and Jump Crypto. SUI has also been distributed to early contributors, and skeptics see the current social media popularity as a form of paid promotion through discount tokens. 

Cryptopolitan reporting by Hristina Vasileva