Nasdaq Wants to Wrap This $11.5B Altcoin in an ETF

Forget Ethereum, there’s a new altcoin coming for the $10 trillion ETF industry. 

Nasdaq and the European crypto issuer 21Shares filed for an exchange-traded fund in May that would hold $SUI, a relatively new coin from a blockchain technology called Sui. While XRP and Solana filings are already in the works, the secret behind the Sui network is its focus on instant settlements that allow unrelated transactions to close simultaneously. The Palo Alto, California-based startup behind the technology is backed by Andreessen Horowitz and FTX Ventures, among others, with a valuation of about $2 billion. $SUI’s market cap stands at around $11.5 billion, far lower than more prominent coins like Ethereum at $307 billion.

“SUI presents a differentiated bet on speed, developer adoption, and novel architecture,” said Mike Cahill, CEO of the crypto developer Douro Labs. “Not to mention, the fact that an ETF provides the cleanest way to express that view under compliance constraints.”

Gas Up the Car

$SUI is already traded in a regulated exchange-traded product in Europe. The 21Shares ASUI fund has approximately $165 million in assets and that’s after just about 10 months of trading. “There’s real balance-sheet demand once custody and compliance boxes are ticked,” said Felix Xu, CEO at the blockchain company ARPA Network. 21 Shares said in a filing that the $SUI token has four main use cases:

• It functions as a liquid asset for apps or programs that run on the Sui network. 
• Alternatively, the coins can be used to pay gas fees, transaction fees that charge users to process moves on the blockchain.
• Like other altcoins, $SIU can be staked to earn rewards, and it can also serve as a governance token. 

“Pension funds, insurance firms, RIAs … these guys aren’t buying tokens on-chain,” Xu told Advisor Upside. “They want ticker symbols on Nasdaq.”

Parallel Execution: Sui network’s instant settling means it can process transactions much faster than competing blockchains in some situations, which Xu said is perfect for gaming and high-frequency DeFi. Daily active addresses are already in the millions, he said, and stable-coin liquidity is closing in on a billion dollars.

If that went over your head, we had Xu simplify it: “In other words, this isn’t a ghost chain.”