Analysis
SUI Went Parabolic: What's Happening?
Market sentiment is positive again. Green candles everywhere. But one chain is standing out from the others.
Last week, $SUI pumped a whopping 75%. On April 21st, it was trading at ~$2.17. And by April 28th, SUI was at $3.81.
So what's going on? And more importantly, is there more juice left?
#1. The whole market is up. All the majors have pumped recently.
- $BTC is at ~95k
- $ETH is at ~$1.8k
- SOL is at ~$150
I covered the broader bullish vibe last week. But here's the short version: Trump is de-escalating the trade war, some macro indicators are leaning positive, and Bitcoin's getting love from both ETF flows and new TradFi entrants like Twenty One, a firm focused on BTC accumulation.
All of that positivity? It's bound to lift other boats—SUI included.
#2. Pokémon partnership rumors.
Now this one's spicy. There's chatter about a possible partnership between SUI and the Pokémon franchise.
It all started when Pokémon HOME updated its privacy policy to include Parasol Technologies, LLC. It's a gaming infrastructure startup that just so happens to have been acquired by the SUI team, Mysten Labs.
(There are caveats tho. The update is only on the app, not the website. It's absent from Chinese & Japanese versions as well.)
Sui had recently promoted Parasol for its work in using NFTs in the trading card games. Naturally, the hopium crowd is buzzing about a potential onchain Pokémon card game on SUI Network. If that happens, it'll be a big pumpamental factor for SUI.
#3. Onchain metrics are looking strong. If we aggregate data weekly, compared to the week before, indicators are up and to the right.
- Stablecoin transfer volume increased from 32.7B to 70.9B (~117% increase).
- 16.4% increase in daily transactions (from 36.2M to 43.3M).
- Daily active addresses increased from 1.5M to 1.6M.
- Fees (166.6k to 359.6k) & revenue (60.3k to 122.5k) also increased.
That's a clean "up and to the right" chart if we've ever seen one.
Rising on-chain activity is usually a solid signal that an ecosystem is heating up. And right now? SUI is looking hot.
#4. Greyscale SUI fund buying speculation.
Grayscale Investments is the world's largest provider of digital asset products by assets under management ($23B). They had launched a SUI fund back in August 2024.
And last week, on April 23rd, they opened the fund to eligible accredited investors. This is potential buying pressure.
Considering the positive context, degens might be trying to front-run potential inflows. If big TradFi cash is about to flow in, people want to be in early. Who can blame them?
#5. The ecosystem pump. The increase in SUI prices has caused the tokens across the SUI ecosystem to pump. On the weekly chart,
- WAL, a storage network on SUI, is up 46%
- DEEP, a liquidity protocol on SUI, is up 133%
- CETUS, a DEX on SUI Network, is up 97%
- And many more. (I'm not sharing low MC coins to avoid shilling low MC coins)
These pumps in the SUI ecosystem create a wealth effect for SUI users. This might be the economic stimulus that boosts the onchain activity.
It's not all rainbows and rocket ships.
SUI has cooled off a bit from its recent peak. And with a major unlock event coming on May 1st—we're talking 74M $SUI, worth around $262M, or 2.28% of the circulating supply—there could be short-term selling pressure.
So, SUI might not keep ripping… but the ecosystem is heating up. And if the Pikacho shows up, things can go crazy.
Sponsored Deep Dive
csUSDL Gearbox Strategy: Leveraged Stablecoin Yield Made Easy
Stablecoin farming is one of the best strategies for the current market.
I've already introduced several great strategies to you. My favorite strategy is using csUSDL stablecoin.
What's csUSDL? It's a safe, high-yield stablecoin. (Technically, it's a "liquid lending token".)
It's from Coinshift, an asset management, payments, and accounting platform. Tiger Global and Sequoia led their Series A, and it already has $1B+ in AUM.
csUSDL is backed by USDL, a yield-bearing stablecoin from Paxos that's regulated by FSRA in Abu Dhabi Global Markets. To mint it, you need to get USDL first. Then, USDL should be deposited into the Coinshift Vault to receive csUSDL.
The vault curator, Steakhouse Financial, will strategically allocate wUSDL to blue-chip collateral assets such as cbBTC and wstETH. This additional yield is given to csUSDL holders.
Or you can take the easy way out. Just swap any asset into csUSDL on aggregators like CoW Swap.
Just holding csUSDL will give you better returns than many stablecoin farms. Conservatively, you'll make at least 12.5%. Let's look at the yield sources:
- USDL Base APY (+3.5%): This represents the yield passively generated by USDL from Paxos International Reserves like US T-Bills.
- Lending APY (+0.5%): Yield generated from lending wUSDL within Morpho.
- Morpho Rewards (+1%): Additional returns from participating in Morpho's lending market. Its value will fluctuate based on market conditions.
- SHIFT Rewards (+7.5% at $150M FDV): They're token rewards provided by Coinshift for USD deposits. It'll be airdropped during $SHIFT TGE. It's currently scheduled for mid-June 2025.
But if you're a crypto-native, you wouldn't be satisfied with this yield alone. You'd want to earn leveraged yield by using the looping strategy.
In fact, a couple of weeks before, I had shared a guide for exactly that.
But to be honest, it does require some advanced DeFi skills. You have to manually monitor the position, click through multiple apps, and more. If you aren't deep into DeFi, you might not want to do that.
What if you can leverage farm without its complexities?
Enter Gearbox. It's a modular credit layer. It allows you to take leverage across whitelisted DeFi apps, like Curve, Yearn, Lido, Uniswap, Morpho, and more, from a single intuitive interface.
In a way, Gearbox is abstracting away all the complex steps using multiple apps involved in the leverage strategies into an easy-to-use website.
There are a lot of leverage strategies you can implement using Gearbox. Margin trading, Staked ETH loops, directional trading, and more.
More importantly, you can leverage yield farms as well. Here's how you can easily leverage farm csUSDL rewards:
- Step 1: Head over to the csUSDL Strategy on Gearbox.
- Step 2: Select the Borrowed Asset from the dropdown, ideally the one with the lowest borrow rate. Supported stablecoins include DOLA, USDT, USDC, DAI, and GHO.
- Step 3: Input your Deposit Amount. For ex, deposit 5000 USDC at a 5x leverage.
- Step 4: Click Next, Approve USDC, and open the leverage position.
Hooray!!! You are now leverage farming csUSDL yield.
The additional yield from leverage farming comes from the difference between the borrowing rate you pay and the yield you get from the underlying asset. As of writing, you'll get 8.23% APY from borrowing DOLA stablecoin at 6x leverage. You can view this beside 'Overall APY' on the Gearbox interface.
But Coinshift is sweetening the deal for Gearbox users.
If users open a leveraged csUSDL position and hold it for 90 days, you can earn an additional guaranteed 5% SHIFT APR per loop on the borrowed amount.
- By default, users will earn 0.0137 SHIFT per $ per day (~5 SHIFT per year). At an FDV of $100M (planned public sale FDV), this equates to a fixed 5% APR on borrowed and looped capital.
- If the 30-day average FDV drop below $100M after the TGE, Coinshift will airdrop additional $SHIFT tokens to give you the guaranteed 5% APR.
- If the Fully Diluted Value exceeds $100M after the TGE, users can keep the additional yield.
So, in addition to the Overall APY from the strategy, you can earn a guaranteed 5% SHIFT from this position. If the FDV exceeds $100M, you'll earn more than that. (This is an extension of our existing Public Airdrop Program — 7.5% SHIFT APR at $150M FDV — for the Gearbox users.)
20% of your reward will be unlocked after the commitment period. The rest of the 80% will have a monthly linear vesting over 6 6-month post-commitment period.
Your position on Gearbox is monitored through a live health factor. It measures the stability of your borrow positions on Gearbox. If your HF falls below 1, you might get liquidated.
Normally, an HF above 1.1 is considered safe. But since we use stablecoins as both the deposit and the borrowing asset, you can take a bit more risk. Health Factor about 1.02 can be considered safe.
You can make all the relevant calculations from this spreadsheet.
This strategy is very safe. Gearbox is a battle-tested protocol, so there's minimal smart contract risk. The only thing to watch out for is your borrow position getting liquidated. But that's very minimal for our csUSDL strategy.
- #1. No price volatility. Both the collateral asset (csUSDL) and the borrowed asset (USDC) are stablecoins. So you don't have to worry about collateral assets suddenly falling in value and liquidating you.
- #2. Highest liquidation threshold. Liquidation loan-to-value (LLTV) is the LTV value at which you will be liquidated. The LLTV of csUSDL is 96.5%, the highest on any collateral asset on Morpho.
This high LLTV is due to its highly secure treasury assets reserve of USDL and blue-chip collateral. Our strategy is limiting our LTV to 90% due to the Morpho front-end borrowing limit.
- #3. Oracle security features. Lending protocol/vaults use oracles to know the asset prices. If they can be manipulated, your collateral can be liquidated.
But the vault we use has low Oracle risk. The csUSDL/USDC market uses a NAV oracle. This means price determination is entirely onchain and mathematical. This setup eliminates any oracle manipulation risks and depeg risks.
- #4. Other mechanisms. There can be other theoretical exploit risks like inflation attacks or abusive borrow rate spikes. But there are mechanisms to protect users even in those cases as well.
Even in extreme scenarios, such as mass lender withdrawals, borrow rates can only rise in a controlled manner, and Steakhouse can inject liquidity to stabilize the market.
With csUSDL strategy, you can get ~40% APR. There's probably no other strategy in DeFi that offers such high APRs for low risks.
But Gearbox cannot support unlimited leverage of csUSDL. There's a limit to how much they can support. So if you want the best risk-adjusted yield farm in DeFi, start farming csUSDL on Gearbox today.
🚀 DeFi Catalysts
Ethereum's Pectra upgrade is scheduled on May 7. In terms of the number of EIPs, it is going to be the biggest Ethereum upgrade.
Starknet announced plans to bring Bitcoin staking to Starknet in Q3 2025. It promises stronger security for Starknet and sustainable rewards for Bitcoiners.
Jupiter Exchange introduced Ultra v2. It introduces many innovations like MEV Protect and Gasless Support for a great trading experience.
Infinex is getting a big update this week. It adds support for most of the tokens, a new token explorer, Interactive asset charts, and more.
OpenAI is rumored to announce a social platform tomorrow. Apparently, it'll use Worldcoin's WLD token as its currency.
Drift Protocol launched Amplify. It allows you to loop your position with automated leverage, increasing exposure to yield-bearing assets.
Balancer introduced the MEV-Cap Hook on Balancer V3. It captures MEV and redirects it back to Liquidity Providers.
DeFi Saver introduced their new Discover Page. It helps you to easily find and compare the best opportunities across 10+ supported protocols.
Morpho Labs open-sourced one of their liquidation bots. It's entirely based on RPC calls and ready to be deployed on any EVM-compatible chain.
🚀 New Launches
Junction offers a fast, unified, simple, and scalable platform for cross-chain swaps with a unified UI across over 30 chains. It launched its beta phase.
Fragmetric is a Liquid (Re)staking project on Solana. It introduced fragBTC, a yield-bearing BTC on Solana.
Talos Network has launched Talos Devnet and the Nexus whitepaper. Nexus is their framework for building fully onchain Talus AI agents.
REI Network launched phase two of the closed beta phase of REI Core. It'll now be accessible to a wider community.
📰 Industry News
Mastercard announced its end-to-end capability to support stablecoins. Consumers can spend them, and merchants can receive them.
Federal Reserve announced the withdrawal of the requirement to report crypto activities. This will allow banks to participate in crypto more effectively.
DeFi Development Corporation has filed a $1 billion shelf offering with the US SEC. They're aiming to be the "MicroStrategy of Solana".
🐦⬛ X Hits
- EtherFi thesis: road to $1B in revenue.
- Ray Dalio's take on the impact of Tariffs.
- Updates from the Ethereum Foundation.
- Introduction to Plasma, the stablecoin chain.
- Masterlist for details on projects on HyperEVM.
😂 Meme
Until next time,
Edgy
Today's email was written by Edgy and Yayya.
DISCLAIMER: I'm NOT a financial advisor. This content is for education and information purposes only. Crypto and DeFi are risky and speculative. Please do your research before investing.
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