From day one, we set out to build the Sui Stack to enable financial productsand digital asset use cases that are impossible to achieve on other networks. DeepBook is the financial infrastructure that makes this vision real. It is the neutral market layer at the center of Sui’s economy. A shared rail that every application can plug into.
Fair warning: long read. Grab a coffee!
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Zoom Out and You Can See the Curve Bending
The internet is shifting from a place where you consume information to a place where things get done.
I see it in how software is changing around us. Products are no longer static pages you browse.
They are becoming systems that trigger actions, route value, and increasingly make decisions inside constraints we set.
The human in the loop is becoming optional.
That shift changes what the internet even is.
When you move from viewing to doing, the web stops feeling like a set of destinations and starts behaving like a programmable layer.
A surface where intent can turn into an action, and that action can settle into an auditable outcome.
Now, follow that thread one step further with me.
If the internet is becoming a surface where software can take actions on our behalf, then most actions will involve some form of value exchange.
In that world, the financial layer is not something you integrate after the fact. It will be part of the core protocol.
And it demands something the web has never had at its center: a native financial infrastructure.
In other words the internet needs a native way to move value with the same default reliability that it moves information.
Sui Was Built for Exactly This Moment
From day one, we set out to create more than just another blockchain. The vision was for a technology platform in a new global economy for all types of digital assets.
A platform where unparalleled speed, massive scalability, and rich programmability come together in one place.
The goal was to enable financial products and digital asset use cases that are impossible to achieve on other networks.
If we think of the blockchain as the new economy's infrastructure, Sui is meant to be its high-bandwidth backbone. The place where any asset can live and interact seamlessly.
And by most measures, we have delivered on that promise.
We have delivered the tech. And Sui’s financial ecosystem is growing.
I remember when we used to cheer about hitting a mere $40 million in TVL on Sui DeFi. At the time, that felt huge. A real milestone.
Now we have grown far past that.
The basic DeFi machinery is all up and running. DEXes, lending markets, liquid staking, yield vaults, derivatives.
We proved we can bootstrap these things from zero.
But simply having all the pieces is not the same as having a coherent system.
The big question now is how to get from $1 billion to $10 billion. From $10 billion to $100 billion. And eventually to $1 trillion in real economic activity and beyond.
And that kind of ambition demands something no other blockchain ecosystem has put at its center.
What the Internet Economy Ultimately Needs
When we started thinking about what Sui needed to become, we kept coming back to a simple question: what makes any economy actually work?
The answer is the same whether you are looking at traditional markets or building something new.
Deep liquidity so value can move at scale without wild price swings. Credit mechanisms that let participants pull future activity into the present.
Accurate pricing so decisions can be made rationally. Risk management tools that absorb shocks. And capital efficiency so assets are not trapped sitting idle in isolated corners of the system.
These are the baseline. But the internet has none of this.
We have payment rails that move value slowly and expensively. We have pricing that fragments the moment you cross from one platform to another.
We have no native way to extend credit, manage risk, or reuse capital across applications.
Blockchains were supposed to change that. They were supposed to provide these primitives for the digital world.
They did not.
Instead, what we saw across the industry was onchain ecosystems developing in ways that made real economic infrastructure almost impossible to build.
A Decade of Building the Same Thing
Here is a question for everyone reading this:
Why did every blockchain ecosystem end up building the same five things?
DEX, lending, perps, NFT marketplace, yield aggregator, repeated across every chain, every cycle, every cohort of builders.
You would think that with all the talk of permissionless innovation, we would have seen more divergence and more experimentation.
More weird stuff that only makes sense in hindsight.
Instead we got convergence: the same templates, the same playbooks, the same ceiling. And it has been stuck there for years.
And don't get me wrong, this was not a failure of imagination.
Builders had plenty of ideas. The problem was that the ecosystem did not reward building anything else.
The Failure Was Structural, Not Accidental
A thriving economy depends on shared infrastructure that everyone benefits from, even if no single application can fully capture the upside.
Liquidity is the best example of that.
Deep liquidity is a public good. It improves pricing for every participant, lowers slippage for every workflow, makes credit safer, and makes risk easier to hedge.
Anyone can plug into protocols like Uniswap.
But the money only flows one way: back to the protocol. If you build on top and drive real activity, you don't see a dollar of that.
So what do builders do? They fork.
Then the ecosystem then defaults to fragmentation.
Each new protocol launches by bootstrapping its own pools, its own incentives, its own token emissions, its own isolated depth.
It attracts capital the way a new casino attracts gamblers, not the way a new city attracts commerce.
The capital arrives because the yield is loud, not because the underlying economy is dense. And when the yield fades, it rotates to the next venue.
This is the quiet tragedy of most onchain ecosystems.
They produced many successful verticals, but they did not produce an economy with system-level incentives.
And the ecosystem as a whole stayed frozen. A collection of products that happened to share a ledger but had no economic reason to actually work together.
The strange part is that everyone knew this was happening. The word on everyone's lips was supposed to fix it.
Composability.
Composability Was Talked About but Never Achieved
Composability was the founding myth of DeFi.
The pitch is this: Put all smart contracts on one shared ledger, standardize assets, and suddenly applications can plug into each other like Lego blocks.
Money becomes software. Finance becomes modular. Innovation compounds instead of restarting from scratch every time.
In a narrow technical sense, that story was true.
Standards made assets portable. Atomic transactions made multi-step actions possible in one execution. Contracts could call other contracts.
You could borrow here, swap there, stake somewhere else, and wrap the whole thing in a single on-chain flow.
That is real composability. But it is also the easier kind.
Because calling another contract is not the hard part of building an economy.
When you snap two Lego bricks together, neither one loses anything. But when two protocols "compose," one of them is usually extracting value from the other.
Aggregators extract from DEXes. Liquidators extract from lending markets. Yield optimizers extract from liquidity pools.
So protocols learned to defend themselves.
They built moats. They designed tokenomics to make their capital sticky and punish exits.
Composability even in the rudimentary form you have on Ethereum or Solana became a threat to be managed, not an opportunity to embrace.
The contracts could call each other. But the economic incentives pointed in the opposite direction.
Every protocol wanted to be the endpoint, not the building block.
So what we ended up with was not a composable economy. It was a collection of competing toll booths that happened to share a settlement layer.
We saw this clearly. And we understood what was missing: the economic architecture that would make sharing rational.
The Real Missing Layer Was Economic, Not Only Technical
For most of crypto's history, we simply did not have blockchains capable of running a real economy.
Sui changes that equation. The technical substrate for a real onchain economy now exists.
But even with the right technical foundation, you still need the right economic architecture on top of it.
And that is where the real gap has always been.
Technical composability at scale means contract A can call contract B, and a thousand others, all within a single atomic transaction.
Economic composability means the liquidity in protocol A is available to protocol B.
It means pricing discovered in one venue propagates instantly to every other venue. It means risk taken in one corner of the system can be measured and hedged in another.
That is a fundamentally different problem.
To solve it, you need shared primitives that sit beneath individual applications.
Shared liquidity any protocol can tap. Shared pricing surfaces any application can reference. Shared risk parameters any credit market can rely on.
Without this layer, composability stays cosmetic. You can chain contract calls all day, but the economic activity underneath remains siloed.
This is the piece nobody built.
Not because they did not understand it, but because shared infrastructure is a coordination problem. No single protocol can capture the upside, so no single protocol is incentivized to build it.
It has to be built as a public good at the ecosystem level.
And once you accept that, the question becomes practical. What does this shared economic layer actually look like? What is the primitive you build it around?
If we want one shared economic surface, one place where price discovery can be credible and capital can actually scale, what market primitive do you build it on?
The Primitive That Unlocks Everything Else
If you want to understand how serious financial infrastructure works, do not study DeFi. Study the systems that actually move the world's capital.
Every major exchange, every institutional trading venue, every market that handles real scale converges on the same primitive: the order book.
It is because order books do something no other market structure can do as well. They let buyers and sellers express exactly what they want, at exactly the price they want, and match when the terms align.
An order book is not just a place where trades happen. It is a machine for discovering truth.
The spread between the best bid and best ask tells you how confident the market is. The depth at each price level tells you how much size can move without impact. The shape of the book tells you where liquidity actually lives.
This information is not a byproduct. It is the product.
Every other financial primitive, from lending to derivatives to risk management, depends on this signal.
AMMs were a clever workaround for a world where order books could not exist. It worked well enough to bootstrap markets from nothing. That was a genuine innovation.
But AMMs have fundamental limits that no amount of curve optimization can fix.
If you want shared liquidity, credible pricing, and capital efficiency that scales, order books are the only serious answer.
But if order books are so foundational, why did most chains never build fully on-chain order book exchanges that actually scale?
Why did the industry default to formulas and pools in the first place?
The real reason this industry never built fully onchain order book infrastructure is not that nobody understood this. It is that nobody could.
What Made Fully Onchain Order Books Impossible Until Now
An order book is not a smart contract. It is a high-frequency state machine.
Think about what an active order book actually does. Thousands of orders placed. Thousands canceled. Prices shifting tick by tick. Every millisecond, the state is different.
Every action depends on the exact state at the exact moment it executes. This is fundamentally hostile to how most blockchains work.
An order book is the worst case scenario for most general purpose blockchains.
Every trade, every placement, every cancellation hits the same data structure.
In a system where all transactions compete for one global lock, that structure becomes the bottleneck for the entire chain.
Now Add Latency To This
On most chains, you are waiting seconds for a block. Sometimes longer. By the time your order lands, the market has moved. The price you wanted is gone. So you cancel and resubmit.
This creates more load on the system which then creates more contention and more latency.
On most general purpose blockchains that workflow is economically impossible. Every update costs money. Every cancellation costs money.
The math just does not work.
Plus, things like toxic flow, sequencing limitations, and fee-based priority games create structural problems that most onchain order books cannot solve.
That is what Sui was built to change.
Why a Fully On-Chain Order Book Becomes Technically Possible on Sui
Both the EVM and SVM are fundamentally incompatible with fully on-chain order books.
Both models treat state in ways that create unavoidable bottlenecks when high-frequency, high-contention workloads hit the system.
Neither was designed for a state machine that updates thousands of times per second on a single shared structure.
Sui starts from a different premise entirely.
State is not a shared ledger. It is a collection of discrete objects, each with its own identity, its own ownership, its own versioned history.
The runtime knows exactly which objects a transaction will touch before it executes. That information is intrinsic to the transaction structure, not a hint the system has to verify at runtime.
For an order book, this changes everything.
Every market becomes its own object. The SUI/USDC book and the ETH/USDC book do not share state. They do not contend. A flood of activity on one market does not slow down activity on another.
Within a single market, orders still need to be sequenced. Price-time priority matters. But that sequencing happens per-market, not globally.
There is no single bottleneck that every transaction on the entire chain must pass through.
Now layer on MysticetiV2.
With MysticetiV2 No single party controls the sequence. The commit rule ensures deterministic ordering that all validators compute locally and independently.
For a fully onchain order book, this is non-negotiable.
And Then There Are Programmable Transaction Blocks
A PTB lets you compose arbitrary operations into a single atomic execution.
Cancel fifteen orders and place fifteen new ones? One transaction. Match against eight counterparties and clean up the resulting state? Still one transaction.
We have seen this in production. Fifteen cancellations plus fifteen placements for 0.0033 SUI total. Roughly $0.0003 per order operation.
On the EVM, that same workflow would be thirty separate transactions, each paying gas, each waiting for confirmation, each vulnerable to state changes between submissions.
On the SVM, you would hit compute unit limits and transaction size caps long before you finished batching.
Sui makes trading workflows that were previously impossible not just possible but cheap.
But throughput and latency are only part of the equation. There is another cost that kills order books on most chains, one that has nothing to do with execution speed.
Sui Turns Even State Churn Into an Advantage
On most blockchains, storage is a one-way street.
You pay to write state. You pay again to modify it. And when that state is no longer needed? You still paid. The cost is sunk. The chain does not care that your canceled order is now garbage taking up space.
For a fully onchain order book, this is fatal. Sui inverts this model completely.
Storage on Sui is rented, not purchased. When you create an object, you deposit a storage fee. When that object is deleted, you get it back.
Now combine that with the fact that orders and markets are objects, and that PTBs let you batch many actions into a single atomic execution.
A market maker can cancel a set of stale orders and repost new ones in one transaction, touching only the relevant objects, paying only for the work that remains in state, and getting back value when state is cleaned up.
For an order book, this changes the entire cost structure. Which makes it an economic precondition for real markets onchain.
Without it, you cannot have tight spreads. Without tight spreads, you cannot have credible price discovery. Without credible price discovery, you cannot build the rest of the financial stack.
Sui makes professional liquidity provision viable on a general purpose blockchain for the first time.
And that unlocks something far more ambitious than just another trading venue.
DeepBook: A Neutral Market Layer That Any Application On Sui Can Plug Into
DeepBook is designed as a neutral market layer that any application can plug into.. And DeepBook is designed to make that utility composable by default.
Every application on Sui can read from the same depth, execute against the same markets, reference the same price discovery mechanism.
A lending protocol does not need to bootstrap its own oracle or trust a third-party feed. It can read directly from DeepBook's live order book.
A derivatives platform does not need to fragment liquidity into its own pools. It can settle against the same spot markets that every other application uses.
A wallet can offer swaps without integrating five different DEXes.
This is what makes DeepBook different from every other order book project in crypto.
And once you have shared liquidity infrastructure that any application can compose with, competition shifts. Protocols stop fighting over the same capital.
They start building differentiated products on top of a common foundation.
Introducing Margin Trading On DeepBook
We just introduced margin trading on DeepBook. And what makes margin trading on DeepBook different is how it was built.
The standard approach to margin trading creates silos. You deposit collateral into a platform. That collateral gets locked in a contract.
It cannot be used anywhere else. The leverage exists in its own walled garden, disconnected from the rest of the ecosystem.
This is how you end up with fragmentation all over again.
Spot liquidity in one place. Margin liquidity in another. Derivatives somewhere else. Each product competing for the same capital. Each one building moats instead of rails.
DeepBook takes the opposite approach.
Margin on DeepBook is not a separate system. It is an extension of the same spot markets that every other application already uses.
When traders take leveraged positions, they are trading against the same order books, the same depth, the same pricing. The margin layer sits on top of the spot layer.
And because you are trading against the full depth of Sui's liquidity rather than a single counterparty vault, there is no auto de-leveraging.
In traditional perp protocols, when one side of the market gets too crowded, profitable positions can be forcibly closed to balance the books.
That does not happen on DeepBook.
This also changes the math on execution quality. Orders fill more efficiently because the counterparty pool is vastly larger and more diverse.
It also changes the risk profile for traders in a fundamental way.
Margin Trading That Strengthens the Entire Ecosystem
Because margin lives inside the shared liquidity layer, it becomes composable by default.
A lending protocol could supply capital to margin pools. A yield vault could tap into the flows generated by leveraged trading.
A trader's margin position could eventually be tokenized, used as collateral elsewhere, or integrated into strategies that span multiple protocols.
The liquidity that powers spot trading also powers margin trading. And the yield generated by margin activity flows back to the protocols and users who contribute to that liquidity.
This is the design principle we keep coming back to. Every new capability should strengthen the ecosystem, not splinter it.
Margin trading should make the liquidity layer more useful, not less composable.
Then We’re Bringing Every Asset Worth Trading to Sui
With the right infrastructure and incentives now in place, the next step is straightforward: bring every asset worth trading to Sui.
For context, getting assets onto Sui has been a friction point for a while. And by the time a token is bridged and liquid on Sui, the moment has often passed.
The hottest assets launch elsewhere, gain traction elsewhere, and Sui users watch from the sidelines.
We are solving this with a dedicated bridge and asset pipeline straight into DeepBook.
When a token gains traction anywhere in crypto, it should be tradable here immediately, with full margin capabilities from the start..
Think about what that unlocks.
The next breakout token launches. Within hours, it is live on Sui with real depth, real price discovery, and the ability to trade it with leverage. You no longer have to miss out on momentum happening elsewhere.
And very soon we are going beyond crypto. Gold is the next big asset that we are bringing to Sui.
This is what DeFi should be doing. Taking assets people already understand and trust, and making them do things they could never do before.
After gold, we will eventually expand to things like commodities, derivatives, index products. If people value it, they should be able to trade it or earn on it here.
More assets flowing through DeepBook means more activity. More activity means more fees, more flow, more economic energy circulating through the system.
And as the range of assets expands, so does the opportunity for yield to flow back into the system.
And Finally, “Yield” Will Start to Work for the Ecosystem
DeepBook is designed around a simple principle: every actor who expands the surface area of Sui's economic activity should earn from that expansion.
This includes aggregators who route volume, apps that drive deposits, market makers who provide depth and long-term holders with conviction.
Start with stablecoins.
We are launching SuiUSDe (using Ethena synthetic dollar protocol) as a Sui-native asset, and it will power DeepBook's margin pools.
When users borrow sUSDe to place leveraged orders, that borrowing activity generates yield on top of what Ethena already produces.
Passive yield from offchain strategies combined with active yield from onchain trading. Two revenue streams in one product.
The result is DBUSD.
A yield-bearing token that compounds both sources automatically. It accrues value just sitting in your wallet.
Lending protocols can accept it as collateral. Yield vaults can loop it for amplified returns. One asset that works across the entire DeFi stack from day one.
And the value stays inside Sui.
Traditional stablecoins funnel yield to issuers who send it off-chain. DBUSD keeps that cash flow circulating through the ecosystem that generated it.
Then there is DEEP itself.
A portion of margin revenue will buy back DEEP from the open market and add it to an insurance fund that protects the protocol from bad debt. Burns plus buybacks, powered by real activity.
When everyone who grows the system earns from the system, the incentives compound inward instead of leaking out.
And once the economic backend starts paying builders for building on it, something else changes. The cost of experimenting collapses.
You no longer have to recreate market infrastructure just to test a new idea.
Now Builders Can Focus on What Actually Matters
DeepBook changes the unit of creation on Sui.
You are no longer “building a protocol” as the starting point. You are building a product on top of a shared market surface.
And that single shift unlocks a completely different pace of innovation.
You can design an experience without first designing a market. You can ship an interface that routes orders into platform that provides real market depth and real price discovery.
The most explosive part is that you can do this without deploying new smart contracts.
If DeepBook already provides the core financial logic, a builder can launch a product that routes flow, earns fees, and monetizes immediately by plugging into what already exists.
That collapses time-to-experiment. It also collapses risk.
Early innovation no longer requires protocol-level risk. It requires taste, distribution, and a point of view about what users actually want.
And that widens the builder funnel dramatically.
Suddenly the people who can push the ecosystem forward are not just protocol engineers. It is also the teams who understand UX.
Designers who can make complex actions feel obvious. Growth teams who know how to acquire users. Domain specialists who understand a specific workflow better than anyone in crypto.
When this clicks, you get a new kind of compounding.
Ultimately, the set of people who can build expands beyond a narrow group of Solidity specialists to anyone with a real idea and the ability to express it in code.
DeFi Moonshots Program Supercharges A System Like This
Everything we have talked about so far is infrastructure. But infrastructure does not build products, people do.
Sui's real strength has always been the builders who show up and create things that did not exist before.
That’s why we’re launching the DeFi Moonshots Program.
This is a public initiative to fund and support teams building high-impact projects on Sui, especially those integrating with DeepBook or extending what the liquidity layer can do.
Any team can apply. If you have an idea that could onboard a massive number of users, open a new market, or push the boundaries of what DeFi can be, we want to hear it.
And this is not small money.
We are not talking about hackathon prizes or token grants that barely cover your cloud costs. We are talking about meaningful capital. Enough to hire, enough to ship, enough to find out whether your product has real traction.
The goal is to de-risk the builders who are willing to aim high.
The program is designed to reward the teams that take real swings, not the ones copying what already exists somewhere else.
What we need are the ideas that only make sense on Sui.
The products that use this infrastructure in ways nobody else can replicate. That is what the Moonshots Program is for. To find those ideas and give them the runway to succeed.
The Flywheel Finally Has All Its Parts
What we now have is a blockchain built from first principles to handle the exact workloads that real financial infrastructure demands.
A fully onchain order book that makes professional liquidity provision viable for the first time. Margin trading that strengthens economic activity instead of fragmenting it.
A pipeline that brings every asset worth trading to Sui. Yield mechanics that reward everyone who grows the system. And a builder program that de-risks the teams willing to aim high.
Each piece was designed to reinforce the others. And each new builder expands the surface area for the next wave.
Now multiply that by fifty teams building fifty different products on the same foundation.
Each one is generating activity that compounds into the shared layer. Each one is making the infrastructure more valuable for everyone else. Each one is adding more surface area for what can be built.
In the old model, every protocol had to choose between contributing to the commons and capturing value for itself. The math always pointed toward extraction.
In this model, contribution and capture align.
You earn more by building on the shared layer than by rebuilding the layer yourself. You grow faster by plugging into existing depth than by bootstrapping your own.
The result is an ecosystem where competitive energy flows into differentiation instead of duplication.
Nobody needs to worry about bootstrapping the basic infrastructure to build DeFi products. The problem is solved.
What remains is the infinite space of products that can exist on top of it.
Why This Extends Beyond DeFi Entirely
Once you have infrastructure with this kind of economic alignment, you are not just enabling new trading products. You are giving the entire ecosystem a native way to express value.
This is why DeepBook being a neutral “internet native” market layer matters beyond trading.
The goal is not for every app to become a trading app. The goal is for every app to use economic primitives without becoming a financial app.
They should be able to route value the way they route data. Reliably, cheaply, and with composability as the default.
And the compounding gets stronger when non-financial apps start plugging in.
Their flows deepen the same liquidity. Their usage strengthens the same pricing. Their demand creates the same yield that reinforces the same builder incentives.
The economy stops being a niche corner of the chain. It becomes the ambient layer everything else sits on.
That is the real endgame here.
We are building a better default for how the internet handles value.
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Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. I'm sharing a vision for how this technology works and where it's headed. None of this should be taken as a recommendation to buy, sell, or trade any asset. Always do your own research and make your own decisions.
