Interview: Christian Thompson, Managing Director, Sui Foundation

“Sui is ideal for enterprises, governments, and industries”

This is inside the elegant surroundings of Hôtel Château Voltaire in Paris that we had the pleasure of hosting Christian Thompson, Managing Director of the Sui Foundation. Despite a busy European schedule — which included the opening of Sui’s new headquarters in Greece — Christian arrived jetlagged yet unfailingly warm, ready to dive into a conversation about one of crypto’s most compelling stories of 2025.

Sui has quickly established itself as one of the standout success stories of the year. Against a backdrop of maturing digital asset markets and increasing institutional attention, the blockchain’s rapid growth in decentralized finance, real-world asset tokenization, and new Web3 infrastructure has made it a protocol to watch. As of the time of writing, Sui’s native token capitalisation is over $12 billion and its network hosts over $2 billion, a metric that has kept increasing since the inception of the blockchain.  More than just technical innovation, Sui represents a vision for scalable, low-cost, developer-friendly blockchain architecture designed to bring Web3 into the mainstream.

In this interview, Christian shares his personal journey from Meta to Mysten Labs and now the Sui Foundation, reflects on Sui’s mission to support builders and institutions, and discusses why the project is positioned to be a central player in the convergence of finance, technology, and ownership.

CoinShares: Why was Sui launched in the first place?

Christian: Sui was really birthed out of our work at Meta. Meta had a strong desire to be in Web3, but we had a problem: we served three and a half billion people a day and had to evaluate whether any Web3 languages could support that scale. The conclusion was no. So we built a new language called Move. Meta later deprecated its work, but we took Move, built upon it, and created Sui. Sui is purpose-built to support real scale.

What is the mission of the Sui foundation you’re leading now?

Christian: Our mission is to support the ecosystem. It’s about builders: people creating companies in DeFi, gaming, and beyond. We have entrepreneurs, institutions, even names like Pokémon and others building on Sui. It’s a diverse set of participants.The foundation gives grants to builders, hosts community events, provides infrastructure help, and offers engineering support. Those are the kinds of initiatives we focus on.

Sui has grown a lot the past few months. What kind of metrics are you looking at to measure adoption?

Christian: We look at TVL, growth in stablecoins, and DEX volume—we’ve seen about $11 billion in the past 30 days [the interview was made in June]. But at the end of the day, it’s about usability: how many wallets, how many daily active users. Those numbers matter most.

In this space, we see a lot of tribalism. Do you feel like you’re competing with other blockchains?

Christian: I’m not a big fan of tribalism. Our space is so young. Competition is important, but collaboration is more critical right now. In four or five years, when the industry is much larger, we can compete but today, we should focus on growing the whole pie.

How do you explain Sui’s current growth? Is it the tooling? The applications?

Christian: Sui is purpose-built for speed, low cost, and scalability. That makes it ideal for enterprises, governments, and industries like DeFi, Bitcoin DeFi, and gaming.

We’re not just a Layer 1: we’re building a full developer stack. We launched Walrus (programmable decentralized storage), Seal (permission-based encrypted data access), and Nautilus (off-chain computation). This stack makes Sui very attractive for developers.

Yet some critics point to Sui’s decentralization or tokenomics. How do you respond?

Christian: Criticism is valuable. But the foundation is a non-profit built to support the ecosystem. The more resources we have, the more we can push adoption. That’s our mission.

You mentioned “BitcoinFi.” What does that mean?

Christian: It’s the idea that Bitcoin can be used for more than just a store of value—things like yield, lending, and broader financial services. It’s becoming safer. We’re still early, but we’re heading toward a place where it will be secure, fast, and give users real choices.

We’ve seen institutional interest in Sui, especially ETF filings. How do you explain that?

Christian: Many of us come from Meta, Google, and similar backgrounds. Institutions are our home in a sense. Institutions see where the world is going. For Web3 to scale, we need billions of users. Sui and our developer stack are built for that scale, which is why institutions are picking Sui.

What would it take to make Web3 mainstream?

Christian: Several things: policy and regulatory clarity across governments, more developers building, and retail users demanding ownership features, especially in gaming.It’s already happening, but it takes time.

How do you foresee Sui’s future?

Christian: I think Sui has an amazing future. We’re at the forefront of a technological revolution. We’re seeing AI, robotics, quantum, blockchain, AR/VR, all beginning to converge. Sui is built as a coordination layer for these technologies, providing fast, cheap, reliable infrastructure. We’re still only 1% into the journey, but it’s an exciting narrative to be part of.

Solidity or move?

Christian: Move.

DeFi or TradFi?

Christian: DeFi.

ETF or self-custody?

Christian: Self-custody.