SuiEcho: Bootstrapping Sui Communities

We’ve spent the last months building the Sui Smart Contracts Platform in order to deliver infrastructure that will help onboard billions of users to web3. Now that we’ve announced Sui publicly, we can also discuss what’s kept us motivated during those late nights: you!

We believe that Sui is a step-function improvement in blockchain tech and that our tech is only impactful if people use it. This is why we’ve made onboarding users, building communities, and developing the tooling to help unleash Sui’s power one of our top priorities.

SuiEcho is a first step towards creating solid communities in Sui. In a nutshell, SuiEcho allows existing NFT owners to port them into Sui. For example, an Ethereum NFT owner can use SuiEcho to provide proof-of-ownership to the Sui network and mint a corresponding Sui-based NFT. Subsequently, the Sui-based NFT becomes an independent asset, no longer tied to the original one but imbued with the cutting-edge functionality of the Sui blockchain.

We believe in true decentralization. Open networks should usher in an era of genuine openness — where people own and control their assets and can move them across networks. Users who spent time and money investing in, say, the CryptoPunk or Bored Ape Yacht Club community should be able to reap the benefits everywhere. We do not think the gates of web2 social networks should separate friends and family. Similarly, chains should not lock in and segment communities. By addressing this challenge, SuiEcho will let communities soar to new heights.

We also believe that true decentralization implies enjoying your assets in different places simultaneously. Always. This means locking your assets in one chain to use them elsewhere just won’t cut it. With SuiEcho, NFT owners are free to use both the original and Sui-based NFTs to their full capacity and independently. Hence, instead of segmenting communities across chains, SuiEcho ensures that communities thrive in multiple ecosystems.

We also believe that true ownership implies giving users complete control over the underlying assets. This view means NFT holders should have the ability to customize, mutate, and compose their assets. By letting NFT collections evolve in entirely new and unexpected ways, SuiEcho will crystalize the vision of on-chain assets with utility and not just speculative value.

SuiEcho is a general-purpose tool for creating Sui communities. One of the applications we’re most excited about is gaming, where we expect SuiEcho to deliver on the following fronts:

• New Economies. Sui’s unparalleled on-chain storage and performance will finally let games create, mutate, and transfer content to deliver thriving on-chain economies. These advances will create richer dynamic and composable NFTs and entirely new ways of interacting on the blockchain. Game economies, in particular, will feature tighter feedback loops between gameplay, utility, and asset ownership. SuiEcho will seed the communities needed to ignite these flywheels.
• Creating Value Where Value is Due. To date, game developers confront the following dichotomy: Build good functionality far from where value is stored or build poor functionality but connect directly to the ownership layer. While high-value NFTs can be bridged elsewhere, the value ultimately accrues back to the original chain. These obstacles make it hard for newer and better networks to reap the value they create. SuiEcho, in contrast, will let communities evolve independently and ensure a game’s long-run value remains on its network.
• Tailored Solutions. SuiEcho will provide gaming platforms with the flexibility to create customized models for cross-app economies and liquidity. By Echoing different variants of the same base NFT, games can differentiate themselves and generate specific mechanisms for capturing value. For example, two Sui games may choose to seed their communities with the same original Ethereum NFT series but through two separate sets of Sui-based NFTs. These two communities might thus evolve sharply differently depending on how each game transforms the on-chain assets. This flexibility accrues to the NFT owners too. One user may retain ownership of the Ethereum NFT and the complete set of Sui-based NFTs. But another player may only be excited about a subset and choose to sell the remaining ones.

Sui was built from the bottom-up to deliver extraordinary performance. We will strive to provide the tooling to make your life as a developer, creator, or end-user as simple as possible. SuiEcho is part of a broader effort to provide a friendly and easy-to-use Sui Developer Kit (see here). We’d love to hear from you, contact us at suidevcommunity@mystenlabs.com.

Across the broader landscape, there is an ongoing debate on whether the future will be one-chain-to-rule-them-all, multi-chain, cross-chain, or something else. Instead of advocating for any one solution, our approach is less dogmatic. Regardless of what the future looks like, we believe communities will build on Sui because it serves their needs. Fast. Cheap. Secure. Easy. That is our goal.