How can a small team compete with industry giants ?
What makes a company AI native ?
Garry Tan has your answer here
https://t.co/VAKwhA9PMO via @YouTube
in the last 5 years, crypto changed my life. so what i'm about to say at the end of this, i don't say lightly.
it started with a failure. 2021, i joined a team (@goksoyomer, @sahapkurtaran) to build an l1. we failed. we were amateurs, and turkey had no capital to support something like that. but honestly it was the best lesson any of us could've gotten. i learned how everything actually works under the hood, and i loved it. developing 24/7 with those guys, hands down some of the best days.
then the @Aptos airdrop happened, everyone turned to look at @SuiNetwork, and i thought, why not. i'd caught one of sui's events at devcon and it already clicked for me. joined the community, got my first suifrens nft, poked around some quests here and there.
then a small hackathon in turkey. i joined, won a reward, but it wasn't the reward that got me. it was move. that language won my heart, and i mean that even now.
after that i went deep. met @josemvcerqueira and @BL0CKRUNNER back in the day. i even met my wife (@augusthottie) through a competitive hacking platform mid-competition, which even connects to @Adam_Tehc lol, a crazy story for another day.
i started posting, and generis found me. together we shipped close to 30-40 sui contracts and probably 75% of the nft sales on sui at the time. one of them is still @0xd34th's pfp. the project closed over personal stuff, but those were very good days. i did contract work for more teams than i can count too. looking back, it's wild how much money moved through all of it.
then, back with omer and sahap, we built @PataraApp. bootstrapped it ourselves, had a real community behind us, got a grant from the @AftermathFi incubator (shout out @DerivsDegen) that carried our hiring and dev costs. we got into sui's first incubator, and a $200k investment was on the table. tokenomics help, product shaping, all of it. and then our cash ran out. we couldn't pay our people. so we made the hard call, let them go with advances out of our own pockets. and that $200k never sat right with me, because taking it meant giving away too much of the company and the token. as a team we agreed not to take it. sahap and i stepped away, and @goksoyomer still runs @PataraApp today (even spun a game, @PlayPatarian, out of it, good for him).
after that i had a lot of offers, but i didn't settle until @illuminfti reached out and brought me into dwallet labs (@ikadotxyz, @encrypt_xyz) with @ycscaly, @omersadika and @d3h3d_. crazy tech, real cryptography, a place i can still be fesal. a year in and still going, with a @solana expansion coming very soon.
so i've given this ecosystem basically everything since 2021. which is exactly why the next part is hard to write.
the tech is still good. move is still the best. that's never been the issue.
but somewhere in the back half of 2025, sui started feeling empty. 2024 and early 2025 had energy, builders building, people actually using what you shipped. now you can build something genuinely useful and there's just no one on the other side. no pull, no users, no incentive, no community rallying around the people making things. you ship something real and it lands in a room with the lights off.
i just shipped sam, infra that lets everyone earn better yield at controlled risk without having to run a lending protocol themselves. real, pluggable, useful. and the ecosystem's response tells you exactly where sui is right now.
the problem is that liquidity here isn't organic. it flows where it's told to flow. if you're not in the incentivized lane, you can build the most useful thing on the chain and it doesn't matter, the capital sitting on this network will never reach you. the tvl is real. it's just not for you. and the community that would've filled that gap got wrecked so hard there's no one left with anything to put in. the people who'd back a builder out of belief are gone or broke.
good tech was never enough on its own. an ecosystem is people showing up for each other's work, capital flowing to builders, users who actually want the thing. sui has the tech and is missing the rest. @solana has both.
so personally, i'm stepping back from building my own projects on sui. not out of spite, i love what i learned here. i just can't keep pouring real work into a place where the tech is open but the liquidity is walled off.
this is me, not my company, not my team, not anyone else's vision. just fesal being fesal.
Most founders don't fail because of the product. They fail because of everything around it: the wrong positioning, the wrong network, pitching to the wrong people at the wrong time.
This is where that changes.
A direct session with the Superteam Vietnam team to work through wherever you're stuck, whether that's finding the right angle, preparing for investor conversations, figuring out market fit, or just pressure-testing an idea before you go further.
It doesn't matter what stage you're at or whether you write code.
Slots are limited.
🔗Sign up here: https://t.co/hf1vLSIqaQ
One early stage team is building 'gstack for @solana'
a set of AI skills for founders to speedrun opportunities on Solana and increase their odds of:
- winning at Colosseum
- getting into Alliance
- landing a grant from Solana Foundation
- landing partnerships
- fundraising
They're still super early and need user feedback.
If you're looking to apply to an accelerator like Alliance and/or need help with your one-liner, blurb, grant application, market research etc. - you're a good fit.
Comment below or DM me and I'll connect you with the team 🫡
The Sui Roundtable is excited to have @SuiNetwork's
Marketing Lead @SuiGkim join us tomorrow 🎙️
Come chill with @matteodotsui@0xd34th and me for Ep. 27 at 4pm EST / 8pm UTC. We'll be talking about Sui Basecamp and the ecosystem 💧
Set a reminder here:
https://t.co/SiRMS7VpeG
Happy launch of Mermail https://t.co/3OQfsQlr8B 🧜♀️
We're bringing a small bounty for early users, builders and community members.
There will be 4 tracks, each with prizes in $.
Let's hunt down the rewards and help shape Mermail together.
Details below👇
my app Flowser is live and open for public use
https://t.co/7aLk5hNuTb
it gives you a 24/7 Agent with a Computer in 5 seconds, 0 config
like OpenClaw, Hermes, Manus - but better
boost your business with AI agents for marketing, GTM, customer support, sales, research, product, etc
anything an employee with a computer can do
Flowser can do it for them 10x better
i launched one day late behind US Independence Day
so as compensation:
anyone comment "AI" get a 20% discount code on all plans
happy agent-maxing!