Sui’s Expansion Roadmap Continues to Improve with Pilotfish’s Progress in Sharding
Sui’s expansion roadmap is continuously improving with the advancement of Pilotfish’s sharding execution, aiming for true horizontal scalability and flexible validator configurations. This article is derived from a piece by Delphi Digital, organized, compiled, and authored by Glendon of Techub News.
(Background: Why did Sui surge 70% in a week? Multiple drivers from Pokémon collaboration rumors to soaring DEX trading volume)
Since Delphi Digital’s last in-depth exploration of Sui’s architecture, ecosystem, and tokenomics, the network has completed a series of key upgrades in its infrastructure and application stack. In this follow-up report, we will analyze the key advancements in its ecosystem, including the construction of Bitcoin financial (BTCfi) infrastructure, the growth trajectory of the lending protocol Suilend, and the expansion of Aftermath Finance’s territory.
In terms of infrastructure, the launch of Mysticeti v2 introduced a “Fast Path” for low-competition transactions, significantly reducing latency and rebalancing validator workloads. At the same time, Move VM 2.0 achieved significant execution improvements through higher composability, region-based memory management, a modular architecture, and enhancements designed to support more complex and dynamic on-chain logic.
Meanwhile, Sui’s expansion suite roadmap has also been continuously improved with the advancement of Pilotfish’s sharding execution, aiming to achieve true horizontal scalability and flexible validator configurations. These enhancements of Sui are further reinforced by implementing localized object-based fee markets and MEV-aware optimizations, including prioritized transaction submissions and consensus block flows.
Ecological Updates
The DEX trading volume on Sui has retreated from its previous quarter’s peak, but it can be observed that there has been an uptick in trading volume since the WAL token of the decentralized storage protocol Walrus went live on March 27.
BTCfi on Sui
BTCfi has recently emerged as a niche market on Sui, bringing lending, staking, and yield fundamentals to Bitcoin, traditionally viewed as passive collateral. According to DeFiLlama, the total value locked (TVL) in the BTCfi space has grown from less than $100 million to over $4.5 billion, covering various assets, including restaking, anchoring, and decentralized BTC.
By the end of 2024, Sui announced a partnership with Babylon Labs and Lombard Protocol to introduce native BTC staking through LBTC. LBTC is a liquidity staking token directly minted on Sui and Cubist platforms, aimed at helping users manage deposits, minting, cross-chain, and staking. A few weeks later, in December 2024, Sailayer partnered with LBTC and WBTC to launch restaking opportunities for BTC. Prior to this, the Lorenzo protocol launched stBTC on Sui, a liquidity staking token powered by Babylon, designed to aggregate BTC yields and integrate with DeFi protocols like Cetus and Navi. In early February 2025, Sui Bridge added support for wrapped BTC assets like WBTC and LBTC, and since then, over 587 BTC have flowed into Sui’s DeFi platform.
So far, over $111 million in wrapped BTC has been deposited into Sui native protocols such as Suilend, Navi, and Cetus.
DeFi Protocols on Sui
Suilend
Suilend is the lending protocol for the Sui ecosystem, achieving an annual revenue of $15 million by February 2024 in less than a year of operation, with 70% flowing into the SEND treasury. The treasury initially received 1.2 million SUI from the “mdrop.”
Suilend has also launched an automated market maker (AMM) called Steamm, which features integrated money market components designed to maximize capital efficiency by depositing idle liquidity into the lending market. The protocol has a composable architecture supporting various quoting systems, including constant product quoting, stablecoin-specific quoting, and dynamic fee quoting based on market volatility. By allowing idle funds to earn returns in the lending market while still being available for trading, Steamm enhances capital efficiency and provides additional yields to liquidity providers through its bToken mechanism.
Aftermath
MetaStables is incubated by Aftermath on Sui as a vault system that allows users to deposit cross-chain or native assets to mint stablecoins such as mUSD (pegged to USD) and mETH (pegged to ETH), with plans to launch mBTC and other meta tokens in the future. It employs oracle-based exchange rates (e.g., Pyth) to facilitate no-slippage trades among vault assets, avoiding the inefficiencies brought by AMM slippage, and supports lending deposited assets to enhance yields. The concept of MetaStables is to tackle liquidity fragmentation issues by promoting meta tokens and enabling users to earn mPOINTS.
In addition to MetaStables, Aftermath has also launched Perp DEX on the testnet, a fully on-chain perpetual contract order book based on Sui.
Walrus Launch
The decentralized storage protocol Walrus launched its mainnet on March 27, 2025, completing a $140 million funding round led by Standardcrypto.
Walrus is a decentralized storage network built on Sui designed to store a variety of data, from NFT assets, AI model weights to blockchain files and website content. It can also serve as a data availability layer for rollups, similar to Celestia or EigenDA. While Walrus utilizes Sui for metadata and governance, it offloads storage tasks to a separate set of nodes, thereby avoiding the overhead of Sui validators.
The core of Walrus is Red Stuff, a two-dimensional encoding protocol that enables efficient single-file encoding with robust data recovery capabilities. The system is protected by a stake-based WAL token incentive model, where nodes are rewarded for uptime and correct data handling, and penalized for faults or malicious behavior. The breakdown of WAL tokenomics is as follows:
- Community Reserve: 43%
- Core Contributors: 30%
- Walrus User Airdrop: 10%
- Subsidies: 10%
- Investors: 7%
Technical Updates
Sui Core Development Projects