Sui Crosses $1 Trillion in Stablecoin Volume and Plans Private Payments
Mysten Labs says its Sui blockchain has processed more than $1 trillion in stablecoin transfers since August 2025 and is building toward zero-fee, privacy-enabled payments as a core network feature. Under Sui's sponsored-transaction model, transaction costs are not eliminated at the protocol level; instead, they are absorbed by developers or operators on behalf of users, making payments effectively free for end users when those parties choose to cover them.
Adeniyi Abiodun, co-founder and chief product officer of Mysten Labs, the company behind the Sui blockchain, confirmed the cumulative volume figure and announced that private transactions are coming to Sui in 2026. The privacy feature is being designed as a protocol-level default rather than an opt-in option. Mysten Labs has framed these two developments as central to its stated strategy of building Sui into a global payments infrastructure layer, intended to compete with traditional financial rails and other Layer 1 blockchains. (A Layer 1 is a base-level blockchain network that processes and settles transactions directly, without relying on a secondary network.)
Volume Numbers, With Context
The $1 trillion figure covers roughly nine months of activity from August 2025 onward. Within that window, Sui processed $400 billion in stablecoin transfers in August and September 2025 alone, and was handling more than $200 billion per month by November 2025. Stablecoins are digital tokens pegged to real-world currencies, most often the US dollar, and are widely used for cross-border payments, trade settlement, and remittances. Sui's stablecoin circulating supply currently exceeds $885 million, according to DefiLlama, a blockchain data aggregator.
Not all network metrics point in the same direction. Sui's total value locked (TVL), a measure of capital deposited into decentralised financial applications on the network, peaked at roughly $2 billion in 2025 and has since dropped to approximately $564 million to $600 million as of May 2026. That gap between high transfer volume and lower locked capital may suggest Sui's stablecoin activity is concentrated in payment flows rather than speculative or yield-seeking positions, though this is an editorial inference rather than a sourced finding. High transfer volume alongside lower TVL can also reflect short-tenor stablecoin cycling or other trading patterns, and no independent analyst has attributed the divergence specifically to organic payment use.
Privacy as Infrastructure, Not a Feature
Abiodun framed transaction privacy as a prerequisite for mainstream adoption rather than a product differentiator. "It's impossible to get mass global consumer adoption for anything payments related without privacy," he told Bitcoinist. He described the planned implementation as a protocol primitive, meaning a standardised building block that all developers on the network can access, rather than a bespoke solution requiring custom cryptographic work. "Private payments directly on Sui, so users don't even have to opt in to ensure that their transactions they do on-chain are inherently private," he said.
Mysten Labs has also indicated that the privacy layer is being designed with KYC and AML compatibility in mind, which matters to developers building regulated financial products. Abiodun has cited "adhering to what the regulatory constraints may be" as a design goal, though Mysten Labs has not confirmed specific KYC or AML tooling as a shipped feature; the capability is best understood as forward-looking design intent. This orientation is not incidental. Several of Mysten Labs' co-founders previously worked on Meta's Diem project, a stablecoin effort shut down under regulatory pressure. That background gives the team direct institutional experience navigating compliance demands, providing context for why the company treats privacy and regulatory tooling as complementary goals rather than contradictory ones.
Emerging Market Relevance
Recent partnerships point to growing reach in the regions where cheap, private payment rails matter most. In April 2026, RedotPay, a crypto payments platform with seven million users across more than 100 countries and an annualised payment volume exceeding $10 billion, integrated native SUI and USDC-Sui on the network. The move extends Sui-based stablecoin access to more than 130 million merchants globally.
The practical stakes are high in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Sub-Saharan Africa received more than $205 billion in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025, a 52 percent year-over-year increase, with stablecoins dominant in remittance and import-export corridors. Nigeria alone processed an estimated $26 billion in stablecoin volume in 2024. These are market-level figures drawn from regional blockchain data and are not specific to Sui; no Sui-specific user statistics for Nigeria or India are publicly available. Average remittance costs to Sub-Saharan Africa still exceed six to eight percent through traditional channels, according to World Bank data. A stablecoin rail with developer-sponsored transactions could significantly undercut that cost for end users in corridors where operators elect to absorb fees, though this depends on the commercial decisions of those operators rather than on a protocol-level guarantee of zero fees. In South Asia, India receives more than $120 billion in annual remittances and ranks among the fastest-growing markets for stablecoin adoption globally. Default transaction privacy also carries additional weight in markets where publicising a remittance receipt can expose recipients to social or security risks.
Sui also launched USDsui in November 2025, a native reward-bearing, U.S.-compliant stablecoin issued through Bridge, a payments infrastructure company owned by Stripe. Bridge co-founder and CEO Zach Abrams described the role of Bridge's Open Issuance product in enabling the launch: "Open Issuance eliminates the usual complexity and extended timelines associated with stablecoin deployment. It's designed exactly to enable platforms like Sui to launch their own stablecoins quickly." Institutional products from VanEck, Franklin Templeton, Grayscale, 21Shares, and Canary Capital also launched in 2025, broadening regulated exposure to the network across ETF and related fund structures.
What Comes Next
The private transaction feature carries no confirmed deployment date beyond a broad 2026 target. Mysten Labs has not specified a quarter, and the capability remains a commitment rather than a live product. Whether Sui can sustain its stablecoin volume trajectory while delivering on the privacy roadmap will be the clearest test of how credible its pitch as a global payments layer becomes over the next 12 months.