The BTCfi & Payments Fellowship on Sui is a joint initiative by Press Start Capital, the Sui Foundation and Walrus Foundation that seeks to support startups focused on Bitcoin within the Sui ecosystem. The program offers an initial investment of $25,000 and an intensive four-week mentorship block designed to turn inactive BTC holdings into productive financial applications.
The project selects early-stage founders and grants them $25,000 as a first capital injection, accompanied by weekly mentorship and specialized workshops on customer development, go-to-market strategies, tokenomics and fundraising. Mentors and investor pitches are a structural part of the plan, with the stated goal of facilitating subsequent funding rounds and strategic partnerships, reinforcing a pathway from prototype to market.
The focus is on agile teams building base protocols, secure wallets, cross-border payment rails and Bitcoin-specific solutions for DeFi. The program emphasizes community building among cohorts and operational support from the teams at Walrus, Sui and Press Start, creating a supportive environment for iteration and market validation.
Previous participants have accessed well-known accelerators and achieved funding rounds or acquisitions, which organizers point to as evidence of effectiveness in identifying talent and accelerating trajectories toward product-market fit and capital formation.
Sui as a technical layer for BTCfi
The initiative is part of Sui’s broader strategy to turn its Layer 1 into a BTCfi hub. Sui bets on high technical performance: 297,000 transactions per second (TPS) and a finality close to 400 milliseconds, figures that promoters present as necessary for payments and liquidity use cases at scale.
Move is Sui’s native programming language and is designed for secure asset management and parallel execution; its goal is to facilitate the implementation of complex contracts and protocols efficiently, enabling composable and performant financial primitives.
Sui is working on concrete integrations to attract Bitcoin liquidity, including wrapped variants such as tBTC, which organizers estimate could bring up to $500 million in liquidity. TVL (Total Value Locked) is the metric that measures the total value deposited in protocols; according to communications, almost 30% of Sui’s TVL would already be composed of BTC assets, which proponents interpret as a sign of traction.
Partnerships with protocols like Babylon Labs and Bitlayer enable concrete proposals —for example, yield-generation products on BTC without custody transfer— and create use cases for multiple staking and bridges with Bitcoin layer-2s. Platform projects mentioned by organizers include NAVI, Suilend and SpringSui, which contribute to the expansion of lending, liquid staking and DeFi activity.
