Hey folks, one of the punts that I’ve taken lately is on the Sui blockchain — the premier Move layer-1 network that’s one of the two projects (the other one being Aptos) that’s broken off from the original Facebook/Meta’s Libra cryptocurrency project that was dissolved nearly two years ago. The sister blockchain project, Aptos, could be just as profitable, however I (and many others) are taking a bigger bet on Sui because despite getting a much later mainnet start, Sui has been able to attract significant more TVL with the same (if not better) tech:
I by no means am a dev, but Move is supposedly a much easier programming language to work with, and has extremely low gas fees and high throughput — that paired with relatively high daily transaction volumes, a clean UI/UX, and super fast speeds make Sui a very attractive Layer-1 to invest in.
In today’s article, I’m going to highlight some of the cheapest and most lucrative ways to farm on the Sui network, briefly talking about strategies of each protocol — most of which also have yet to release their own native token, and all of which require very little risk.
But first, how do I even get $SUI in the first place?
If you’re in the US, perhaps the easiest way to obtain $SUI is through Coinbase, otherwise it’s listed on almost every major centralized exchange, including Binance, Kucoin, OKX, and Kraken.
If you’re wary of using a CEX, then perhaps the most “official” way to bridge via DeFI is via wormhole: https://portalbridge.com/?sourceChain=sui
The official bridge however is somewhat limited because it only allows bridging from Ethereum Mainnet. Another respected bridge if you’re a $SOL maxi, is using Suilend’s bridge: https://suilend.fi/bridge
Or lastly, if you’re wanting to bridge between Ethereum’s L2s, I’d recommend using Turbos’ bridge, which has all the major ones in addition to many EVM-compatible L1s:
*Note, Native $USDC transfers from Arbtirum to Sui for some reason don’t work. Or a least they technically work, but it comes up as an unrecognized token on Sui. There may be other bridges that don’t work well, so I’d recommend doing a test transaction with a small amount first if you’re planning on moving a lot of funds.
Since $SUI is the native gas token for the $SUI network, you will need some $SUI to get started in any of these strategies, yet you’ll find that transactions are extremely cheap (a fraction of a cent) and also extremely fast (up to 6,000 transactions per second).
With onboarding out of the way, let’s get into some of these protocols and strategies shall we?
Suilend
Since I already spoke about their bridge, we might as well start off with Suilend’s protocol first. A sister project of Solend on Solana, Suilend offers pretty much the same project, yet without a native token. Now I don’t imagine that a token for Suilend will be as valuable as Solend’s $SLND (yet), but it’s still important to note that $SLND still currently has nearly a $100 million dollar FDV, and an all-time-high $300 million FDV which it reached towards the end of 2023:
Despite whether or not they end of doing a token drop or not, I still consider Suilend a fantastic place to park either your $SUI or stablecoins as you can currently supply liquidity and earn $SUI in return for more than 20% APY on each asset:
Volo
Since the Sui network is proof-of-stake, staking rewards are offered to those who stake $SUI in order to help ensure the security of the network. Similar to Cosmos blockchains, users can easily pick specific validators that they’d like to stake with in order to earn potential a1rdrops, but seeing as how the average returns for direct staking are roughly 3.5% APY, it makes more sense to me to go into one of Sui’s different liquid-staked derivates (LSDs) in order to earn massively higher rewards — the first one which I’ll talk about being Volo.
On Volo, you can liquid stake your $SUI for $vSUI, which like any LSD, will appreciate in its price compared to $SUI, with a current exchange rate of 1$SUI: 0.986 $vSUI:
You can see from the graphic above that the current APY of 3.02%, a figure that is slightly lower than some of the native alternatives, which go up to 3.38%:
Native staking to a validator can be lucrative in itself, as it may make you eligible for other tokens later on, but by nature, they can’t be used in DeFi applications. In other words, simply changing your $SUI into an LSD won’t earn you significantly higher rewards, yet using them on a DeFi application will (you’ll see this come in several other of the strategies later). A final point that I’ll make is that on Volo, assuming that the “instant unstaking” cap hasn’t been reached in the current epoch, you most likely will be able to instantaneously unstake your $SUI without any waiting period, a feature that other competitors such as Haedal doesn’t offer. Speaking of…
Haedal
A liquid staking protocol with roughly half the TVL is Haedal and their LSD $haSUI:
As you can see in the graphic above, $haSUI not only has roughly half the TVL as $vSUI but it has roughly half the APR as well too (1.78%). Additionally just as I alluded to before, unlike Volo, withdrawals on Haedal can take up to 24 hours, or however long is left in the current epoch.
You may be thinking at this point that it seems pretty clear that out of the two — $vSUI is by far the better LSD option. However, as I’ll point out with the next protocol, that’s not necessarily the case.
Navi
As I mentioned before simply holding $vSUI or $haSUI will actually earn you less returns than if you simply natively staked them with one of Sui’s validators, however with LSDs, you are able to supply them and interest through different DeFi protocols, one of the best places being on Navi — a borrowing/lending protocol that can earn you significant returns on not only your $SUI-LSDs, but on other stablecoins as well:
As you can see in the graphic above, you can currently earn more than 30% APY for supplying both $vSUI and $haSUI, yet with $haSUI you can earn significantly more — nearly 5% more if you factor in the +3% vSUI.
Although token allocations and a TGE has already occurred for Navi’s native token $NAVX, the community is still waiting up on a community a1rdrop which according to the team’s public token allocation, could make up a significant amount:
Bucket
I could probably write an entire article on Bucket Protocol by itself, but in a nutshell, Bucket is a stablecoin protocol which allows users to put up different assets as collateral in order to mint Bucket’s decentralized and overcollateralized stablecoin $BUCK. The top 3 collateral positions of note include $afSUI (the LSD from Aftermath), $haSUI and $vSUI:
You’ll notice in the graphic above that the APRs listed for these 3 assets are pretty high, but they are variable as they’ll only only increase as your collateral ratio decreases. In other words, if you decide to take greater risk and mint more $BUCK compared to your collateralized asset, you’ll get a higher APR than if you would otherwise. Currently at time of writing, a “safe collateralization” ratio on your $vSUI and $haSUI of roughly 175% will earn you 27.78% APR and 33.85% APR respectively:
A second step to earn even greater rewards is to take your newly minted $BUCK and stake it it for $sBUCK, which currently is earning roughly 72% APR:
To note, Bucket Protocol does not (yet) have its own native token, but its highly speculated that they will soon, and in addition to using the protocol itself, Discord members have recommended completing their Zealy tasks.
Kriya
Another platform that also doesn’t have its own native token yet is Kriya Finance, which is slated to launch as one of the top perpetual decentralized exchanges on the Sui blockchain.
Although Kriya has already seen the end of its $KRIYA season 2 campaign, we’re still extremely early with several features still being released which includes their PerpDEX. The most lucrative/low-risk way I’ve found to engage with Kriya is by entering one of its LP Pools, preferably one that has minimal impermanent loss:
As you can see in the graphic above, the $vSUI-$SUI LP for instance can earn you a maximum of 56.828% APY assuming that you choose to lock your LP token for the maximum 28 days.
Another recommendation if you’re adding liquidity into Kriya is to spread your assets out across 4 different LPs. Given their current Suinami 2.0 promotion, if you lock up four different LPs you can get up to 4 times higher reward APY:
Aftermath
Another lucrative native-tokenless platform with high LPs and little impermanent loss is Aftermath finance which also has its own LSD version of $SUI, $afSUI. Out of all the major liquid-staked derivatives, $afSUI is probably the least integrated across other major protocols, however its own native $afSUI-$SUI LP has perhaps some of the highest APRs, earning more than 60% APR if you decide to lock your LP token for at least 14 days:
An additional note on Aftermath is that they do have a collection of egg NFTs that currently have a floor price of 167.4 $SUI:
Personally, almost $200 dollars worth of $SUI is a bit pricey for me, but there’s been quite a bit of speculation of what they might “hatch” out later:
Bluefin (and Elixir)
Because of its association with Elixir, providing liquidity for Bluefin may be perhaps the most lucrative strategies on this list, as I personally think that the Elixir alrdrops might be one of the biggest that we see left in 2024 (most likely an article on this later).
Elixir is an decentralized orderbook liquidity protocol which provides liquidity to several different trading DEXes across multiple different blockchains. Highly VC-backed, Elixir currently provides liquidity to some of the most popular exchanges, including dYdX, Hyperliquid, Vertex, and Bluefin, which is on the Sui blockchain.
Although they all have associated risks with impermanent loss, with Elixir you can provide liquidity for Bluefin through a variety of LPs, all of which will earn you a combination of Blue points as well as $SUI:
(Personally I only have assets staked via their Vertex $USDC-$USDT LP on Arbitrum due to its minimal impermanent loss, but this may change in the near future as I’m trying to get more surface exposure to a future potential $ELX and $BLUE a1drop)
If you’re planning on entering this strategy in particular, consider supporting this blog and use my Elixir referral, and make sure you stake at least $100 dollars worth of $ELXETH (their LSD version of $ETH) in order to get at least a 50% boost on your number of earned potions.
Turbos and Cetus
Two protocols that already have their own native tokens, Turbos Finance ($TURBOS) and Cetus ($CETUS), are still highly worth mentioning due to their very attractive APRs. Cetus, Sui’s flagship DEX also with a token launchpad, has LP pairs for all the major LSDs I mentioned early at +40% APRs:
Additionally Turbos, another exchange with concentrated liquidity pools, also has 40% APRs on all the major LSD-pairs, but also has a cool “Turbos Grand Prix” feature which allows you to earn additional weekly rewards for staking at least 5k $TURBOS.
Conclusion
Besides being able to earn significantly high APRs through most of these protocols, the advantages of playing around on the Sui ecosystem has several major advantages:
- All of the protocols have many LPs have little to no impermanent loss.
- Many give you exposure to potential airdrops.
- Many of these protocols don’t have their own native token, rewards are mostly paid out in more $SUI, which if you’re bullish on $SUI in general, you’ll be able to keep stacking more tokens in the process.
- Extremely low gas fees
- Great UI/UX
With all the things I’ve read about Sui and their programming language Move, I’m willing to take a bet that Sui is going to come out to be a big winner this bull cycle, and given there’s so many opportunities to even just stack stablecoins on many of their protocols, I consider it a pretty low-risk way to do so.
Are you bullish on the Sui ecosystem as well? Are there any protocols that I missed that should be included in this list? If so, I’d love to hear about it in the comment section below.
And as always, thanks for taking the time to read this and be sure to follow me on twitter (https://twitter.com/CryptosWith) to get all my latest updates. Also, looking for a gift for your Crypto-loving/hating friend? Give them a REKT journal to cheer them up!
Disclaimer: And as a final reminder, this is not financial advice and this is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please as always, do your own research and find what investments are best for you. Cheers everyone! allocation, but I’m also earning some pretty significant yields on my assets at the same time.
