The Sui blockchain will soon host its first native stablecoins, following a three-way partnership between publicly-traded digital asset treasury firm SUI Group (SUIG), synthetic dollar protocol Ethena (ENA) and the Sui Foundation.
The new tokens, USDi and suiUSDe, are expected to launch later this year, according to a press release. USDi will be backed 1:1 by BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund BUIDL issued with tokenization specialist Securitize. Meanwhile, suiUSDe will mirror Ethena’s $14 billion USDe offering, a synthetic dollar backed by a mix of digital assets and short derivatives.
“We believe this initiative will add another powerful mechanism to drive liquidity, utility, and long-term value across the Sui blockchain, while positioning SUIG as one of the first publicly traded gateways to the global stablecoin economy,” Marius Barnett, chairman of SUIG, said in a statement.
The move is the latest example of crypto ecosystems making steps to issue proprietary stablecoins partnering with service providers instead of solely relying on the existing offerings such as Circle’s USDC (USDC) and Tether’s USDT (USDT).
For example, Hyperliquid (HYPE), a layer-1 network known for its popular on-chain perpetual swaps exchange, held an auction for the rights of issuing the native USDH stablecoin to curb its reliance on USDC, with Native Markets in partnership with Stripe winning the competition. MegaETH, an Ethereum scaling network designed for fast transactions, also announced to launch a native stablecoin, partnering with Ethena.
In August, the Sui network processed $229 billion in stablecoin transfer volume, outpacing its previous records, according to a Sui Foundation blog post. That kind of throughput is part of what drew Ethena to the chain. “Sui’s performance and composability made it a clear choice,” said Guy Young, CEO of Ethena Labs.