SUI was one of the most hyped projects in late 2022 and early this year. However, the team adopted a different approach to launch the mainnet and reward the early adopters. The method the team chose was establishing partnerships with centralized exchanges to distribute 1 SUI per $0.1 in raffles. Kucoin, OKX, and Bybit had this mechanism and Binance initiated a Launchpool for that.
Though so far it sounds like a reasonable idea, it was not. A big number of early adopters were not rewarded for their efforts just because of central exchange's account-linking operations to check wallets etc. Also, this attitude of team was reacted with a new ideology: NO AIRDROP; NO COMMUNITY. Frankly speaking, the case of SUI opened a new era for Layer 1 projects. Any project that does not directly reward their community with an airdrop will never have a real community to add value on the chain.
What do you think happened after this No Airdrop No Community protest?
There were only 407 daily active wallets. Imagine, this chain is a VC-friendly one with $300m money raised.
SUI team realized their mistake though it was a bit late. They activated their second plan: ACES Program
BullShark NFTs by Mysten Labs
The team is still applying different methods in crypto. They are exactly unorthodox in terms of their strategies to grow a Layer 1. Actually, I'm a big fan of Aptos and SUI which are two strong blockchains developed by the former Diem project developers. Also, they are using MOVE language, which might be a handicap for dApp devs, though.
380K wallets were given these NFTs for free. The team emphasized that the NFTs are going to be used for future rewards and tickets for specific events. In the case of selling them, the accounts will not be eligible for these upcoming events.
The team, indirectly, rewarded the community with a few SUI tokens for now and promised more. (Because they killed the community early in the project!)
So, these people are most probably the ones who do not see any future in the SUI project because they are selling their NFTs that will have future utilities. I can't say this is a good or bad idea but I am into SUI.
Do not Kill the Community
As you see, killing the community would be the worst mistake a project can ever make. SUI was the hottest, honestly the hottest project. Still, you can see around 900k people in Discords of SUI project. However, almost none of the early adopters are interested in the chain as a whole.
On the 3rd of every month (for 9 more months), there is an unlock event for those who were able to get SUI from Kucoin, Bybit, and OKX. None of these people are keeping their SUI just because they see no future in the project or they are disappointed with the team's behavior.
This is one of the saddest TradingView charts that I feel heartbroken. The end of the story should never be like that in their token distribution to energize, create, reward the community.
Let me tell you something funny, their criteria to distribute tokens for the community was being in Discord earlier than the 2nd of February, no matter how hard you hustled for 3 - 5 months! This is ridiculous and the community wanted to punish the attitudes of the devs.
However, I still want to be optimistic about the future of SUI. The team has observed and realized the severity of the situation and they are doing something to reward the community.
Please look at the Community Access Program that has 588m tokens allocated. The team wants to use these funds to reward the community members via BullShark NFTs, early access things, etc. Most probably they will be distributing money almost for free (Although it was supposed to be the first thing when they launched the mainnet).
Better late than never.