"Has SUI really shown a quarter of the potential of Solana?"
My thoughts as someone who built early on both Solana and Sui (@save_finance early 2021, @suilendprotocol early 2024):
1. Developer Experience: Solana is famous for a DevEx that feels like "chewing glass." There's no question that building on Sui is better.
Solana is low level, there are endless build issues, and debugging is hard. You need to learn Rust, Anchor, and Solana all at the same time. Simply setting up the environment is challenging, as things don't work out of the box.
Sui Move is intuitive and abstracts low level chores like deserializing bytes. Higher transaction size limits reduce constraints often encountered on Solana. Tooling is well maintained and "just work."
2. User Experience: Sui is incredibly performant with fast and cheap transactions. Transactions often work more smoothly and consistently than Solana. Sui is at least on par if not better.
Sui is an R&D powerhouse with groundbreaking innovations like Mysticeti and Pilotfish. Transaction throughput is only going to get better from here.
3. Ecosystem: While not as numerous as Solana, Sui has great deal of quality builders. But more importantly, Sui builders are incredibly passionate. This is the most powerful signal of an ecosystem. Devs are bound to flock to Sui due to the upside potential and DevEx, then get Sui-pilled after building.
On market actionβthe Ethereum foundation is notorious for huge selling. Solana had multiple unlock FUD, especially with FTX. If anything, the fact that SUI pumped despite such big sales is incredibly bullish, since it shows how much demand there is.