Can the NFT scene on the SUI network achieve sustainable development?

Original Title: "The Sui NFT Scene Already Has Early Buzz—Will It Last?"

Original Author: Andrew Hayward

Translated by: PANews

On May 3rd, the Sui Network mainnet officially launched. However, prior to this milestone event, an active NFT community had already taken root on this emerging blockchain. Many projects issued NFTs that not only generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in transaction volume, but also attracted the attention of many users.

Although Ethereum and Solana still have the most active NFT communities on their blockchains, Sui Network has also attracted many NFT traders. As a Layer 1 developed by Mysten Labs, Sui Network is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated blockchain projects recently, and some even call it the "Solana killer". However, it remains to be seen whether Sui can sustain a thriving NFT space, as networks like Aptos and NEAR have also experienced explosive popularity followed by rapid cooling.

Typical Case: "Unintended Operation" of Sui NFT Market Clutchy

On May 4th, the NFT project "Fuddies" launched on Sui Network. The project consists of 10,000 PFPs, each depicting cartoon owls in various poses and styles. It is currently the largest NFT project released on Sui Network. However, after the completion of Fuddies NFT minting, its hosting market Clutchy experienced technical issues, causing great dissatisfaction among NFT traders and Web3 builders.

Clutchy is actually a new NFT market on the Sui chain promoted by Mysten Labs. According to the plan, they will offer Fuddies NFT to users added to the pre-release permission list at a price of 95 SUI (approximately $125). The public sale will be launched in the form of a Dutch auction, starting from an initial price of 300 SUI (approximately $395) and gradually decreasing until it reaches 150 SUI (approximately $200) before it is sold out.

But the problem is that Clutchy's secondary market did not operate as expected on the Sui Network, causing many buyers who hoped to sell Fuddies NFTs quickly for profit to be disappointed. After encountering problems, Clutchy has postponed the next round of NFT minting activities originally planned for next Wednesday (May 10th), and announced the closure of Launchpad, and issued an apology letter to the Sui community, admitting that the beta release phase was very difficult and apologizing to creators and users.

However, Clutchy quickly restarted the secondary market. Although it is still unclear whether its issues have been fully resolved, the trading of Fuddies NFT has resumed and reportedly generated a trading volume of 605,000 SUI (approximately $792,500) within 24 hours.

Fuddies subsequently released data on social media indicating that the 24-hour trading volume after the resumption of trading exceeded the total trading volume on the Polygon chain during the same period.

Sui Chain's NFT project sales performance is polarized

Currently, some of the popular NFT projects on the Sui Network seem to start with "derivative imitation plates". The crypto community can actually find that Fuddies, the largest NFT project on Sui Network so far, is very similar to Moonbirds, another NFT project on Ethereum with "owl" as the theme. Another NFT project, Suishi, minted and sold out on Clutchy, is a combination of Cool Cats and "fat penguins" Pudgy Penguins (as shown in the figure below).

In fact, the sales performance of NFT projects on the Sui chain has shown a clear polarization. For example, compared with the 24 sales of Fuddies, which is close to 800,000 US dollars, Suishi has only obtained a secondary transaction volume worth about 10,900 SUI (equivalent to about 14,300 US dollars) since its self-minting.

On the other hand, Clutchy is not the only active Sui NFT market. Last fall, the NFT market Souffl3 launched on the Aptos blockchain also expanded to the Sui Network. The top NFT projects on this platform have not caused any sales sensation, such as the largest Sui NFT project on Souffl3, "Sui Trident", which accumulated a trading volume of only about $65,000 within 24 hours of its launch.

SUI On-chain NFT Scene Can Continue?

Before the release of the Sui Network mainnet, people had high expectations for its on-chain NFT ecosystem. Jacob "Dizzy Lizzy" Lawless, founder and CEO of Clutchy, was frank in stating that he "saw a lot of interest from influencers, investors, creators, and bystanders."

Actually, there has been a "gold rush" on Ethereum, Solana, and recently Bitcoin Ordinals. When the early NFTs on these blockchain platforms skyrocketed in value, creators always wanted to be the first to launch their projects on the new chain. Similarly, savvy digital collectors will also try to grab some early NFT assets, as the value of these NFTs is likely to increase significantly in the future.

For example, after its debut in October 2022, the on-chain NFT trading volume of Aptos surged, while the on-chain NFT sales of Solana decreased. Just one week after the launch of the Aptos mainnet, the Aptos Monkey NFT project went online and generated a huge transaction value of about $2.3 million in just 24 hours, but the hype quickly dissipated. Now, the same situation is happening on Sui Network, although Sui has not yet reached the same level as Aptos did at the beginning.

So, in the NFT scene, will the Sui ecosystem really follow in the footsteps of Aptos? Not necessarily.

First of all, Sui ecosystem creators are very clear about one thing: compared to other blockchains, Sui Network can achieve more advanced functions, such as real-time updated dynamic NFTs. This use case can bring many advantages to blockchain games, where weapons or armor in the game will continuously upgrade and improve over time, and NFTs can also become more useful or valuable in this "dynamic" process.

From this perspective, games may ultimately become one of the biggest driving forces behind the development of the Sui NFT scene. It is reported that a series of early games in the Sui ecosystem, such as Bushi, a hero shooter game in the style of Overwatch, a game inspired by The Walking Dead, and a Solana port of the tank game Panzerdogs, will be launched in the coming weeks. Dabblerer, a Web3 project consultant, explains that "there are many interesting experiments taking place on the Sui blockchain, which will ultimately bring a wave of NFT and DApp innovations that draw on the lessons learned from many failed cases in the previous blockchain NFT ecosystem."

Secondly, the Sui NFT scene can also expand to other potential use cases, such as the domain name project "Sui Name Service (SuiNS)" which mimics Ethereum's domain name service ENS. This project further upgrades the domain name application by associating it with NFTs and smart contracts, thereby making user interactions more trustworthy and secure.

Overall, Sui Network's technology provides an innovative platform. Its use of the Move language lowers the barriers for creators to innovate through dynamic NFTs, unlocking more types of use cases and more engaging applications and experiences. Of course, since the Sui mainnet has only been online for a short time, it remains to be seen whether many innovative projects and applications can survive in the long term. However, one thing is clear: with the entry of Sui, the benign competitiveness of the NFT market is bound to increase, which is actually more beneficial than harmful to the entire ecosystem.

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