Why We Chose Sui Over Solana for Our DePIN 🚨
Looking at crypto news headlines, it would seem initially 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 on which to build our project, something didn’t quite add up. So, after getting our analytical hats on and running the requisite due diligence checks, we decided to go with Sui over Solana.
The first thing that gave us pause was the prevalence of outages on Solana. In 2022 – an annus horribilis for the crypto industry as a whole – Solana seemed to be going down every other month. But even after the Firedancer validator client went live (which was meant to put a stop to any further outages), the network still went 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 this, Solana seemed to be struggling to handle its own increase in popularity. Several times this year, the network has become congested due to memecoin mania, as well as Bitcoin-like Ore mining, which quickly grew in popularity. In the last few months, X has been exploding with users complaining about transactions failing, as traders of memecoins like BONK and WIF flooded the network. This sort of frenzy is a good test of a network’s ability to handle real trading volume – and I can’t tell you with absolute confidence that a different blockchain wouldn’t struggle – but for us, this was another red flag.
When it comes to DePIN, and especially projects like ours, which handles huge amounts of data in real time, the two main things we require from a blockchain are reliability and scalability. When Solana first emerged as an “Ethereum-killer,” this was the most exciting thing about it – its promise to reliably process upwards of 50,000 transactions per second.
