During the last bull run there was a lot of speculation about if any of the new Layer1 solutions could finally dethrone Ethereum as the de facto leader. Cardano, Polkadot and Solana were backed by big groups and funds and had amazing run but once the bull market started to lose steam it became clear that no competitor was ready at the moment to replace Ethereum from its top spot.
Now that the markets seem to have found their bottom and are gearing up to commence the next bull run the main focus and hype seems to be centered around the Layer zkEVM projects like zkSync, Taiko, StarkNet, Polygon zkEVM, Scroll and many more. These are all very interesting and promising projects and I will probably make dedicated posts to cover them in more details. In a nutshell all these zkEVM or zero knowledge Ethereum virtual machines are Layer2 projects built on top of Ethereum which are designed to bundle up transactions to make the operations more gas efficient.
In parallel there is another Layer1 project that is building consistently and I think might come into the lime light of crypto world very soon. It is SUI blockchain which is developing it’s own PoS (proof of stake) network. Whether it can give a stiff competition to Ethereum or not I think it is too early to say but I strongly feel this is a project which has huge potential and we should keep it in our watchlist. Through this post I will share what are the main highlights of this project and also share what activities I am currently doing on SUI network to ensure that I get a decent allocation of their airdrop once they launch their native SUI token on mainnet.
What makes SUI Unique?
SUI is backed by Mysten Labs and their focus is to provide a high throughput network with special emphasis on NFT markets. SUI differs from Etereum and majority of Layer1 blockchains built on Solidity as it’s smart contracts are developed on Move, which is designed to improve upon the shortcomings of Solidity.
While Ethereum can handle about 30 transactions per second, SUI is being configured to handle more than 100,000 transactions per second. This speed they aim to achieve by allowing parallel execution of transactions to overcome the limitation of Ethereum of sequential execution of blocks.
A major improvement that SUI proposes over other blockchains is gas fee stability. We have all encountered crazy gas wars where gas fees shoots up exponentially when many users are trying to execute transactions at the same time. SUI will overcome this issue by introducing epochs of 24 hours where gas fee will remain stable throughout an epoch.
How to be Eligible for SUI Airdrop?
SUI has already announced that once they launch their mainnet they will start releasing their native SUI tokens to the users. The supply will be capped at 10 billion token.
They have not mentioned what part of the tokens will be used for airdrop to early users but considering recent launches it is highly likely that they will reward through airdrop to their early adopters. Considering they will have a staking system in place I think it will be a really good long term bet to get hold of some SUI tokens once it is launched.
Currently the project is running on testnet and I will strongly recommend to regularly perform transactions on the testnet to gain eligibility to a higher allocation of SUI airdrop. There are several applications running on the SUI testnet and you should try them out.
Following are the main activities on SUI blockchain that I am performing every weekend:
1. Staking SUI tokens- You can claim free SUI test tokens from the faucet and then stake them directly on the staking interface on web version of SUI wallet.
2. Mint SUI Capys- You can use the SUI test tokens to mint SUI Capys which are capybara themed NFTs. There is already a functionality of breeding so try to mint a couple of them and also try the breeding function. As the network is currently on testnet it might be down for maintenance at times and you will have to check once it becomes available.
3. Register SUI domain- Just like you use ENS to register domains on Ethereum you can use SUI NS (SUI Name Service) to register SUI based domains through your SUI test tokens.
Currently these are the main applications running on SUI network but I will recommend you to join their discord group as well so you are informed of any major updates.
I have also created a short video of how to perform these transactions that you can refer in case you have any doubts.
Keep in mind that this is an expected airdrop but there is no 100% guarantee so I will advise you not to spend too much time on it and just do a few transactions a week as that will be sufficient for the airdrop if it happens.