Sui closed 2025 with measurable institutional traction and growing payments and Bitcoin-DeFi activity, highlighted by a peak DeFi TVL of $2.17 billion in July 2025 and network throughput of 297.000 TPS with 400ms finality.
Sui’s institutional gateway strengthened through a series of contractual and product milestones, starting with a Google Cloud partnership that produced the Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2), enabling AI agents to initiate on-chain payments and improving programmability for enterprise use.
Sygnum Bank integrated it into its regulated offering, adding custody, spot and derivatives trading and planned staking and Lombard loans; this provided a regulated on-ramp for professional investors. Nasdaq filings likewise reflected institutional interest: a 21Shares SUI ETF application and the December 2025 listing of a 2x leveraged SUI ETF (TXXS) moved Sui closer to traditional capital markets.
The company expanded payments rails and stable-value options: USDsui, a native stablecoin issued by Bridge (a Stripe company), plus merchant-focused projects such as xMoney, improved on-chain payment finality and merchant remittances. USDsui supported lower-friction settlement and DeFi primitives on Sui, strengthening use cases beyond speculation.
Payments and Bitcoin DeFi (BTCfi) on Sui
BTCfi—Bitcoin-focused DeFi that brings Bitcoin liquidity on-chain—became a material component of Sui’s ecosystem; BTCfi is the set of protocols that enable Bitcoin value to be used in DeFi. By Q4 2025 BTCfi accounted for roughly 10% of Sui’s $2.33 billion TVL, and tBTC introductions brought about $500 million of Bitcoin liquidity.
Total value locked (TVL) measures assets committed to a protocol and reached $2.17 billion; this scale showed concrete user and institutional activity. Projects including NAVI, Lorenzo Protocol (stBTC pool holding over 500 BTC), Babylon Labs, DSRV, OKX’s xBTC and Bitlayer’s YBTC, plus a BTCfi & Payments Fellowship supported by the Sui Foundation and partners, collectively accelerated Bitcoin yield products and liquidity activation. These developments converted dormant Bitcoin capital into productive on-chain uses.
Sui’s technical profile—297.000 TPS and 400ms finality—supported use cases that demand high throughput, such as gaming and high-frequency payments; the network also expanded developer outreach via SuiHub Lagos and Athens and Basecamp events in Dubai and Istanbul, which broadened the contributor base. Institutional RWA offerings arrived as well, with R25’s rcUSD and rcUSDp introducing regulated real-world assets onto Sui.
SUI touched an all-time high of $5.35, but tokenomics events produced volatility—44 million SUI (≈1.3% of circulating supply) unlocked and generated short-term selling pressure. These supply dynamics remain a near-term risk for price stability.
