Four Power Tokens Fueling Sui’s 2025 Flywheel
DeepBook (DEEP) · Walrus (WAL) · SuiNS (NS) · Ika (IKA)
1. Why Sui Is Suddenly on Everyone’s Radar
Last cycle’s mantra was “pick the fastest chain.” In 2025 the conversation has quietly shifted to “pick the chain with the deepest toolbox.”
Sui already proved it can haul freight—-65 million transactions in a single 24-hour burst without a fee spike, plus a sustained 5,414 TPS debut-year average. But raw speed is only half the story. Sui’s object-oriented Move VM lets each smart-contract call run in parallel, meaning infrastructure-heavy apps (order books, storage layers, MPC bridges) are native features, not bolted-on compromises.
Below are four tokens that turn Sui’s theoretical horsepower into practical, revenue-generating rails.
2. DeepBook & DEEP — The Order-Book You Can Fork
One-liner: “CEX execution, DEX ethos.”
What it is. DeepBook is an on-chain central-limit-order-book (CLOB) that settles trades in ~390 ms—fast enough for market-makers to abandon Web2 APIs and live entirely on chain.
Why the token matters.
Fee fuel & rebates. Heavy takers pay fees in DEEP and unlock tiered discounts; makers who stake DEEP in a pool earn a share of those fees.
Pool-level governance. Staked DEEP holders vote on tick sizes, fee curves, even the risk rules for each trading pair, making every pool a miniature DAO.
Macro angle. Because DeepBook is open-source and subsidized by the Sui Foundation, new perps or spot DEXs can plug directly into its liquidity instead of fragmenting it. Every additional interface is a demand sink for DEEP—creating the same “exchange-token flywheel” that made BNB famous, but run by code instead of a corporation.
3. Walrus & WAL — Decentralized Storage With a Cost-Fixing Twist
One-liner: “Filecoin’s little cousin got a growth-hormone injection.”
What it is. Walrus shipped to mainnet 27 March 2025 with an unusually large war-chest: $140 M in prior funding and a ten-figure FDV listing.
Token design highlights.
Fiat-pegged pricing. Users pre-pay storage in WAL, but contracts stream payment to nodes at a USD-pegged rate—avoiding “storage inflation” when the token moon-shoots.
Delegated proof-of-storage. Anyone can delegate WAL to a node and share its revenue; misbehaving nodes are slashed and part of the penalty is burnt, injecting deflation.
10 % airdrop + subsidy vault. Early Sui addresses received WAL, and a separate 10 % pot subsidizes storage costs during the network’s first year.
Why it matters. NFTs, gaming studios and AI-model marketplaces can now host petabyte-scale assets directly inside the Sui economy instead of relying on IPFS pins or AWS buckets. That keeps fees, liquidity and user stickiness inside the Sui loop—and WAL remains the scarce gate-key.
4. SuiNS (NS) — Human-Readable Wallets, Community-Writable Rules
One-liner: “.sui names are the new blue check.”
What it is. A fully on-chain naming service—think “alice.sui” → Sui address—governed from Day 0 by its NS token (no multisig backdoors).
Why the token matters.
Protocol upgrades. Only NS voters can alter the registry contract or tweak pricing.
Treasury control. 22 % of total supply sits in a community war-chest; 5 % is earmarked to reward active voters, turning participation into yield.
Strategic role. Seamless UX converts the next million users faster than throughput numbers ever will. The more wallets, games and dApps resolve .sui names, the more irreplaceable NS governance power becomes.
5. Ika (IKA) — MPC Rails for “Programmable Bitcoin”
One-liner: “Bridge hacks are so 2022.”
Ika is a 10,000-signatures-per-second multi-party-computation (MPC) network that stakes its reputation—and its IKA token—on sub-second, non-custodial bridges from BTC, ETH, SOL, TON and beyond.
Token utilities.
Gas for signatures. Every cross-chain withdrawal, deposit or contract call pays IKA to MPC nodes.
Security bond. Nodes stake IKA and risk slashing for faulty signatures, aligning security with economics.
Bigger picture. If even 1 % of Bitcoin’s $1 trillion market cap migrates to Sui DeFi via Ika, that alone exceeds the entire current TVL of many rival L1s—turning Sui into a global liquidity sink.
6. The Flywheel in One Sentence
Cheap parallel execution (Sui) → Fast on-chain trading (DeepBook) → Sticky liquidity funds data-heavy dApps (Walrus) → Friendly UX lowers onboarding friction (SuiNS) → Secure bridges import off-chain capital (Ika) → repeat. Each token captures value at a different cog in the loop, giving investors multiple “picks-and-shovels” plays on the same growth engine.
7. What to Watch Next
DeepBook V3 fee wars. How aggressively will pools cut maker/taker fees to steal CEX volume?
Walrus storage adoption. Are game studios or AI collectives actually migrating terabytes of data on-chain?
NS governance turnout. Does the 5 % vote-reward carrot keep voter participation above 30 %?
IKA security audits + first bridge TVL. A flawless first year could make “Ika-secured” a DeFi buzzword.
Closing Thought
A year ago, Sui was “the fast Move chain.” Today it’s quietly amassing the rails you’d expect from a much older network—and doing it with community-owned tokens instead of rent-seeking middlemen. If you’re scouting for the next ecosystem that can rival Ethereum’s depth or Solana’s speed without the single-vendor risk, keep a close eye on DEEP, WAL, NS and IKA. As each of them ticks its own KPI boxes, the Sui flywheel spins faster—and you don’t want to be the last one to notice.
Thank you for the article, what do think the timeline is Theta passing it's OTH I am thinking 2026-2027