Multiple pushers behind Sui's rise: from rumors of Pokémon cooperation to soaring DEX trading volume

Author: Frank, PANews

Recently, Sui governance tokens and their ecosystem have experienced a striking soar, with SUI tokens itself rising by more than 75% in a week, far exceeding the market performance during the same period. Behind this phenomenon is the interweaving of complex drivers, including speculative enthusiasm caused by market rumors, significant changes in capital flows, and the continuous improvement of ecosystem fundamentals. This article PANews analyzes the capital trends, key news catalysts, on-chain data performance and potential risks of SUI's rise in this round of growth, and strives to fully interpret the logic behind this ecological carnival.

Hot money in exchanges flows in, contract positions surge

Judging from the on-chain capital flows in recent months, Sui's capital changes are not obvious. In the three-month cycle, Sui's capital showed a net outflow of US$32 million, which is not high. After further observing the changes in on-chain capital flows in the past month and week, Sui's capital flows have changed very little, and it has not even ranked in the top 20 in the public chain.

However, in terms of exchange capital flow, the influx of funds from Sui Ecology is more obvious. According to Coinglass data, SUI's spot capital inflow reached US$62.86 million in the past seven days, ranking fourth among all currencies, second only to USDT, ETH and FUSD. In the list of contract capital inflows in the past seven days, several network ecological tokens such as WAL, MEMEFI, and CETUS have also ranked among the top ten, which further reflects the capital activity of the Sui ecosystem.

In terms of contract holding data, SUI token holdings soared since April 21, and increased from US$700 million to US$1.419 billion in just one week, which has approached its previous high of US$1.5 billion.

In addition to SUI, most tokens in its ecosystem have also experienced a sharp rise in one week. Among the Sui ecological tokens included in CoinGecko, 35 tokens have increased by more than 100% in the past week, accounting for 20% of Sui ecological projects, and 37.5% of tokens have increased by more than 50%, which can be said to be a full bloom.

From the perspective of capital, this increase is a comprehensive collective increase to the Sui ecosystem. Although most projects have no actual positive progress, the abnormal price movements on the market are very obvious.

Multiple positive effects boost market sentiment

On April 21, almost all mainstream tokens began to rebound simultaneously, and Sui's initial rebound and rise also began to start with the pace of the market, and then a lot of positive news came out. But it is difficult to confirm whether these news is the "engine" that has risen sharply or the "smoke bomb" released to cooperate with the price increase.

On the one hand, multiple ecological cooperation news has been reported. For example, Pokémon cooperation rumors: The rumors began on April 23, 2025, when the Pokémon HOME app updated its privacy policy, listing "Parasol Technologies" as one of the authorized developers who allow the reception of user data. Parasol Technologies is a blockchain game studio that was acquired by Sui’s core development team Mysten Labs in March 2025. This direct link quickly ignited the market’s imagination, with crypto opinion leaders and social media users speculating that Pokémon might plan to integrate its IP on the Sui blockchain. The market narrative focuses on potential NFT integrations or blockchain-based collectibles, and may even be related to PokémonHOME's new "Medal" feature.

It is worth noting that Pokémon was not mentioned in the official blog post published by the Sui Foundation on April 23 on Parasol's launch of the exchange card game on Sui. However, some users claimed that earlier versions of the blog mentioned Pokémon NFT, but were subsequently deleted by editors, further intensifying speculation in the market.

For example, xMoney/xPortal cooperation: On April 24, Sui announced a cooperation with financial platform xMoney and crypto super application xPortal. The core of this collaboration is the launch of a Sui-branded virtual Mastercard in Europe, which is integrated into the xPortal application with 2.5 million users. Users can add this virtual card to ApplePay or GooglePay, and use SUI and other cryptocurrencies to make payments at tens of thousands of merchants, as convenient as using cash. The physical card is scheduled to be launched later in 2025.

On the other hand, ETF narratives are also considered one of the important factors driving Sui's rise. Recently, news of 21 Shares' establishment of a statutory trust entity called "SUI ETF" has been spread. This news is actually not a new trend. According to the Delaware company registration information, the statutory trust entity of the "21SHARES SUI ETF" with number 10058451 has been established on January 7, 2025. The registration type is a common statutory trust. As this news has been exposed recently, it seems to support the rise of SUI.

In addition, Sui Network has received a lot of positive news in the past one or two months. For example, the Athens Stock Exchange Group announced on April 16 that it had completed the technical design to build an on-chain fundraising platform on Sui; Nautilus launched a verifiable off-chain privacy solution to Sui on April 15; Canary Capital submitted a SUI ETF application, etc.

Overall, Sui's recent progress in Web3 games, privacy, development environment and other fields has brought together a positive side. At this point, it is different from the single news that triggered an outbreak before Sui.

Airdrop incidents have driven DEX trading volume to skyrocket, facing

dual pressures of token unlocking and application construction

Since April, Sui Network's DEX trading volume has always maintained a high level, especially on March 29, hitting a historical peak of $998 million, followed by a daily trading volume of $400 million in several days. Cetus Protocol, the leading DEX project in the ecosystem, has driven the growth of the entire ecosystem, with its trading volume increasing by 84.5% in the past week, and the token CETUS has also nearly doubled in one week.

In addition, another important contributor is Kriya. On the day Sui’s online transaction volume broke the record on March 29, Kriya contributed a US$780 million share, accounting for an important share of the day’s transaction volume. This data is more than 100 times higher than the previous day's US$7.28 million.

In combination, the trading volume of these two DEXs soared on March 28, mainly due to the surge in trading volume caused by Walrus' airdrop. On March 27, Walrus, a decentralized storage project that raised $140 million, released an airdrop, and the transaction volume of the token reached $380 million on the same day. This may be the main reason for Sui Network's recent increase in transaction volume.

In addition, the activity of developers is also one of the underlying reasons for Sui network growth. On Github, Sui Network's code submission has also been frequent recently. Since December 2024, the Sui Network's code submission frequency has reached its peak, basically maintaining more than 500 times a week, while the previous data has basically maintained at around 250 times. For comparison, the code submission frequency of Solana and Aptos is basically maintained at around 100.

However, there are several risk points that may be worth noting during the collective market carnival. On the one hand, SUI's token unlocking is a continuous selling pressure, basically releasing tens of millions of tokens every week, making it the largest supplier on the market. These unlocked tokens are always an irregular time bomb in the SUI token up cycle.

On the other hand, the upward structure of the Sui ecosystem is currently mainly led by Dex or infrastructure projects, but the performance of MEME tokens or applications/games has not yet been outstanding. At the same time, tokens with a market value of more than 10 million are basically still early projects. From this perspective, if Sui is compared to a city, a shopping mall with themes such as decentralized storage, DeFi, and games are built around projects such as Walrus, Deepbook, and Parasol. However, there are still some "Internet celebrity merchants" in these malls to further attract large-scale users to truly enter the market.

From this point of view, the recent surge in SUI tokens and their ecosystem is the result of the combined effect of market speculation enthusiasm, capital influx and contract market expectations, as well as solid fundamental progress. However, while paying attention to Sui's outstanding performance, we must also be wary of the selling pressure brought by the continuous unlocking of tokens, and pay attention to whether its application ecosystem can further prosper and create hot applications that truly attract users. This will be the key to determining whether Sui can convert current popularity into long-term value.