From Pokémon rumors to doubled volume, uncovering the logic behind Sui's recent strong rise.

Original Title: "Multiple Drivers Behind the Rise of Sui: From Pokémon Collaboration Rumors to DEX Volume Surge"

Original source: PANews

Recently, the Sui governance token and its ecosystem have experienced a remarkable rise, with the SUI token itself increasing by more than 75% within a week, significantly outperforming the market during the same period. Behind this phenomenon are complex driving factors interwoven, including speculative enthusiasm triggered by market rumors, notable changes in capital flows, and continuous improvements in the ecosystem’s fundamentals. This article by PANews delves into the capital trends during this round of SUI's pump, key news catalysts, on-chain data performance, and potential risks, aiming to provide a comprehensive interpretation of the logic behind this ecological frenzy.

Hot money flows into the exchange, contract positions surge.

From the on-chain capital flow in recent months, the capital change of Sui is not significant. Over a three-month period, Sui has experienced a net outflow of 32 million USD, which is not a large amount. Furthermore, when observing the on-chain capital flow changes over the past month and the past week, Sui's capital flow has changed very little, and it hasn't even ranked in the top twenty among public chains.

However, in terms of fund flows on the exchange, the inflow of funds into the Sui ecosystem is quite noticeable. According to data from Coinglass, the spot fund inflow for SUI reached 62.86 million USD in the past seven days, ranking fourth among all cryptocurrencies, only behind USDT, ETH, and FUSD. Additionally, in the fund inflow rankings for contracts over the past seven days, several ecological tokens from the Sui network, such as WAL, MEMEFI, and CETUS, have also made it to the top ten, further reflecting the activity level of funds in the Sui ecosystem.

In the contract position data, the holding amount of SUI tokens began to rise sharply from April 21, increasing from 700 million dollars to 1.419 billion dollars in just one week. This data is already approaching the previous high point of 1.5 billion dollars.

In addition to SUI, most of the tokens in its ecosystem have also seen significant gains in a week. Among the Sui ecological tokens included in CoinGecko, 35 tokens have increased by more than 100% in the past week, accounting for 20% of the Sui ecological projects, and 37.5% of the tokens have increased by more than 50%.

From a financial perspective, this pump is a collective rise for the Sui ecosystem. Although most projects have not made any actual positive progress, the price fluctuations on the market are quite evident.

Multiple favorable factors boost market sentiment

On April 21, almost all mainstream tokens began to rebound in sync, and the initial rise of Sui also started to follow the market's rhythm, accompanied by a number of positive news releases. However, it is difficult to confirm whether these news items are the "engine" behind Sui's surge, or if they are "smoke screens" released to coincide with the price pump.

On one hand, Sui has been rumored to have multiple ecological collaborations. For example, the Pokémon collaboration rumor: this rumor began on April 23, 2025, when the Pokémon HOME app updated its privacy policy, listing "Parasol Technologies" as one of the authorized developers allowed to receive user data. Parasol Technologies is a blockchain game studio that was acquired by Sui's core development team, Mysten Labs, in March 2025. This direct connection has quickly ignited the market's imagination, with crypto opinion leaders and social media users speculating that Pokémon may plan to integrate its IP into the Sui blockchain. The market narrative focuses on potential NFT integration or blockchain-based collectibles, which might even relate to the newly launched "medal" feature of Pokémon HOME.

It is worth noting that the official blog post released by the Sui Foundation on April 23 regarding the launch of the Parasol collectible card game on Sui did not mention Pokémon. However, some users claim that an earlier version of the blog mentioned PokémonNFT, but it was subsequently edited out, further fueling market speculation.

Another example is the xMoney/xPortal partnership: On April 24, Sui announced a partnership with financial platform xMoney and crypto superapp xPortal. At the heart of the partnership is the launch of a Sui-branded virtual Mastercard in Europe, integrated within the xPortal app, which has 2.5 million users. Users can add the virtual card to ApplePay or GooglePay and pay with SUI and other cryptocurrencies at tens of thousands of merchants as easily as cash. The physical card is scheduled to launch later in 2025.

On the other hand, the ETF narrative is also considered to be one of the important factors driving Sui's rise. Recently, the news of 21Shares' establishment of a "SUI ETF" statutory trust entity has been disseminated. This news is actually not a new development, according to the Delaware company registration information, as early as January 7, 2025, the number 10058451 "21SHARES SUI ETF" STATUTORY TRUST ENTITY WAS ESTABLISHED, REGISTERED AS AN ORDINARY STATUTORY TRUST. With this news coming to light recently, it seems to be supporting SUI's rally as well.

In addition, the Sui network has received quite a few positive news in the past month or two, such as the Athens Stock Exchange Group announcing on April 16 that it has completed the technical design for building an on-chain fundraising platform on Sui; Nautilus launched a verifiable off-chain privacy solution for Sui on April 15; and Canary Capital submitted a SUI ETF application, among others.

Overall, Sui has recently made progress in multiple areas such as Web3 gaming, privacy, and the development environment, which combines into a positive outlook. In this regard, it differs from Sui's previous single news that triggered a rise.

The airdrop event has driven a surge in DEX volume, facing dual pressure from token unlock and application development.

Since April, the DEX volume of the Sui network has remained at a high level, especially reaching a historical peak of 998 million USD on March 29, followed by several days of exceeding 400 million USD in daily trading volume. The leading DEX project in the ecosystem, Cetus Protocol, has driven the growth of the entire ecosystem, with its volume increasing by 84.5% in the past week, and the token CETUS has also nearly doubled in a week.

In addition, another important contributor is Kriya, which contributed a share of $780 million on the day when the trading volume of the Sui network broke records on March 29, accounting for a significant portion of that day's trading volume. This figure represents an increase of more than 100 times compared to the $7.28 million from the previous day.

In combination, the trading volume of these two DEXs surged on March 28, likely due to the airdrop of Walrus leading to a spike in volume. On March 27, the decentralized storage project Walrus, which raised $140 million, announced its airdrop, and on that day, the trading volume of the token reached $380 million. This may be the main reason for the recent rise in trading volume on the Sui network.

Moreover, the activity of developers is also one of the underlying reasons for the growth of the Sui network. On GitHub, the code submissions for the Sui network have also been quite frequent recently. Since December 2024, the code submission frequency for the Sui network has peaked, maintaining at over 500 times per week, while the previous data was around 250 times. In comparison, the code submission frequency for Solana and Aptos has been around 100.

However, during the collective celebration of the market, there are several risk points that may be worth noting. On one hand, the token unlock of SUI is a continuous selling pressure, with tens of millions of tokens being released almost every week, making it the largest supplier in the market. These unlocked tokens are always an unpredictable bomb in the rising cycle of SUI tokens.

On the other hand, the rise structure of the Sui ecosystem is currently mainly led by Dex or infrastructure projects, but the performance of MEME tokens or application/game projects has not yet stood out. At the same time, tokens with a market value above 10 million are still basically early projects. From this perspective, if we compare Sui to a city, decentralized storage, DeFi, and gaming malls have been built around projects like Walrus, Deepbook, and Parasol. However, these malls currently lack some "internet celebrity merchants" to further attract large-scale users to truly enter the market.

From this perspective, the recent surge of SUI tokens and its ecosystem is the result of the market's speculative enthusiasm, influx of funds, expectations in the futures market, and solid fundamental progress. However, while focusing on the impressive performance of Sui's price, it is also important to be cautious of the selling pressure brought by the continuous unlocking of tokens, and to pay attention to whether its application ecosystem can further thrive and produce truly attractive blockbuster applications for users. This will be key in determining whether Sui can convert its current popularity into long-term value.

Original link

：