Sui History: From Meta's Shuttered Diem to an Independent Blockchain
Diem's Legacy: From a Shuttered Meta Project to a Public Blockchain
Sui's story doesn't start with a blank slate — it starts with the wreckage of one of crypto's most ambitious, and ultimately failed, projects: Diem (originally called Libra), Facebook's (Meta's) own cryptocurrency, shut down in 2022 under pressure from U.S. regulators. Part of the Diem engineering team, including Evan Cheng, Sam Blackshear, and George Danezis, took some of that work — notably the Move programming language originally built for Diem — to found Mysten Labs and build an independent public blockchain.
May 2023: Mainnet Launch
Sui's mainnet went live on May 3, 2023. The token began trading around $1.30 at listing, significantly above its earlier private sale price ($0.03) and public sale price ($0.10).
Technology: Parallel Transaction Processing
Sui's key architectural difference from most Layer 1 blockchains is that it processes independent transactions in parallel rather than strictly one after another, which in theory allows for significantly higher network throughput.
2024–2025: Growth Amid Renewed Attention to New L1s
After falling below $0.40 in late 2023, SUI rallied through the 2024–2025 bull cycle to an all-time high of roughly $5.35 in January 2025.