The Sui Dollar (USDsui), the stable coin of the Sui blockchain, went live on Wednesday with a promise that revenue from the assets backing the token will be funneled back into the ecosystem from which it originated.
Returns on bonds and liquid assets backing the USDsui will be used to buy back and remove tokens from circulation or implemented into decentralized finance protocols (DeFi) and into automated market making to stimulate swaps, said Adeniyi Abiodun, a co-founder at Mysten Labs, the original contributors to Sui.
Stablecoin growth has been rapid, and the $310 billion market cap industry led by Tether and Circle Internet (CRCL) is entering the global payments arena. Both companies keep all the dividends generated by the masses of US Treasuries backing their dollar-pegged tokens, USDT and USDC, respectively.
“I think we’re starting to see a shift in the business model of stablecoin issuers, whereby the proceeds are largely kept to external agencies that don’t really pour value back into the ecosystem,” said Adeniyi Abiodun, co-founder at Mysten Labs, the original contributors to Sui. “This yield can effectively be fed back from the foundation directly to the Sui ecosystem.”
Plans for the coin, which is issued by Bridge, the stablecoin company acquired last year by payments giant Stripe, were not announced until late 2025. Sui was built by a group of former Meta engineers who worked on the social media company’s abandoned Libra/Diem digital dollar project.
“Right now these funds are not hitting the ecosystem; they are really flowing out,” Abiodun said. “We’re all about closing that loop. So it’s real leverage from real-world funding going back into DeFi that creates a flywheel.”
Starting a stablecoin is not that heavy when your network has carried over $1 trillion in stablecoins: such as USDT, USDC and other stablecoins, Abiodun said.
“The Sui Foundation actually has USDC and other stablecoins today, and then a lot of that can be transferred directly to the Sui Dollar. Mysten Labs can do the same. On top of that, we actually have a lot of investors and hedge funds that are interested in minting the Sui USD. So bootstrapping this is actually very easy,” he said.
Abiodun’s former Facebook colleagues and Libra coin partners are the Mysten Labs co-founders: George Danezis (Chief Scientist), Sam Blackshear (CTO), Evan Cheng (CEO), Kostas Kryptos Chalkias (Chief Cryptographer).
