7 Random Thoughts on Sui/Cetus + A Bit of Opinion on Token Prices

1. The Sui team’s ability to manage their own token is top-notch in the industry. This isn’t just about the recent price increase; since the TGE, they have been spending wisely—spending but not excessively. The ecosystem won’t starve but also won’t be overfed. Binance doesn’t gain too much advantage, and they have negotiated good terms for infrastructure like native stablecoins and bridges. This is an obvious advantage, better than Ethereum/Solana.

2. This is a hard injury to the ecosystem. Some ecosystem projects will adopt more conservative strategies, and those migrating/expanding from outside will start to delay. There’s even the fear that issues might affect the brand of other chains, leading to migration/expansion plans being stillborn. Such events will impact the number and intensity of potential catalysts (in the past, you could imagine something like MakerDAO moving to Solana happening with Sui; can you imagine that now?)

3. It’s a hard injury, but not a fatal one. I’ve been to Sui Basecamp, and while the atmosphere is planned and economic, there’s no visible corruption. This atmosphere is rare. It’s unlikely that a mass retreat of native projects will occur; even if various resources take a year or two to materialize, people won’t disperse quickly, especially since other Move-based public chains are dying out with no escape routes.

4. For $SUI, the ecosystem is a side dish; the $SUI token is the main course. The negative impact on the main course's chip aspect is controllable this time, as it has capped the upper limit (it’s difficult for any main course on a limited menu to be fine dining). This doesn’t mean it’s going to fail completely. Just like during BSC’s quietest times with various hacks and exits, the main course (especially Binance Exchange and Launchpad) didn’t have issues, which won’t affect Binance's fundamentals too much, and they won’t break down.

5. The culture of mutual aid in the ecosystem should be established like a crowdfunding model, where each ecosystem participant donates ten or eight dollars to those Cetus victims. In Solana’s case, examples are $BONK and Mad Lads, relying on asset airdrops, community donations, and traffic support to build culture. Thankfully, this time no other projects have openly engaged in kicking others while they are down; this is the accumulation of regular building by ecosystem project parties.

6. Emotional blackmailing speculators who buy the dip on collapsing tokens is unacceptable behavior. You can’t expect users to think from the project’s perspective, and I see a tone that treats those who bought ecosystem tokens at low prices as accomplices to hackers. Even if it facilitates transactions, the damage to the overall ecosystem culture will be greater than rescuing these projects. What’s more important is to facilitate connections rather than transactions. Aligning the interests of speculators and project parties, rather than emotionally blackmailing them for “discount price” OTC tokens. This requires transparency and commitment from the project parties towards large speculators, promising to continue the project rather than deceiving them and leaving with the tokens they speculated on. The burden of proof and persuasion lies with the project party, not with the community leaders or lucky speculators, and speculative behavior should definitely not be seen as collusion (don’t label me, I didn’t participate in speculative crashes of ecosystem tokens).

7. I understand the behavior of coordinating various validators and project parties to freeze assets. Sui is not Ethereum; Sui’s genetic heritage comes from Meta’s Libra, which doesn’t require a high degree of decentralization. Moreover, this coordination is different from rollback or data manipulation in databases. It’s not sufficiently decentralized but fits its own positioning. After all, they haven’t claimed a convincing narrative of an absolutely decentralized world computer, but that doesn’t mean it can become a server chain. They must be more decentralized than servers and than BNB Chain, and they need to convince external communities (not only the Sui community/Move community). These matters require following some decentralization procedures and PR efforts, and afterward, sincerely finding some technical bloggers to help smooth things over. The founder should come out and say something like “this is a one-time exception,” and PR damage can be controlled.

Lastly, I can’t help but express my opinion on token prices. I don’t believe there will be a significant sell-off, but if you try to push it up now, the number of followers will also be limited. There’s a strong mental anchor already planted in the potential buyers' and TVL’s minds around the $4 mark. It’s tough to remove it without time, and there’s no way to divert attention with narratives or good news. Without buyers, even a small amount of selling pressure due to other expenses will lead to a downward trend.