NAVIs Rise in Sui Ecosystem: Building on Lending + LST Success, Ready to Scale as Native USDC Launch

Written by TechFlow

Objectively speaking, we're experiencing a less-than-optimistic market cycle. Whether it's the lack of new buyers or the MEME resistance movement, the apparent market excitement often carries an undertone of self-mockery from the community. However, with interest rate cuts materializing, the market has finally reunited with long-awaited optimistic sentiment.

At the beginning of the highly anticipated Q4, Sui has captured the community's attention with its leading price performance.

According to DeFi Llama data, Sui's TVL has exceeded $1 billion, with a growth of over 250% in the past two months. The token price has broken through $1.72, showing a 30-day increase of over 109%.

Beyond the numbers, Sui has also announced significant ecosystem developments, including the Grayscale SUI Trust Fund and the upcoming launch of native USDC. These developments have not only heightened expectations for Sui's ecosystem future but also ignited community enthusiasm for positioning within the Sui ecosystem.

After all, the Solana ecosystem produced applications with significant wealth effects like Raydium in the previous bull market. In the rapidly growing Sui ecosystem, who can seize this opportunity and reignite enthusiasm across both Sui and the broader crypto industry? With TVL exceeding $400 million and maintaining its position as the DeFi leader in the Sui ecosystem, the lending protocol NAVI has become many investors' top choice for capturing Sui's wealth potential.

This article attempts to provide readers with reference points for better participation in the Sui ecosystem by analyzing project ecosystem positioning, on-chain data comparisons, and recent positive developments.

Sui TVL Breaks $1 Billion, NAVI's Significant Contribution

Over the past few months, if you've been paying any attention to the market, you couldn't have missed Sui's impressive on-chain performance.

According to DeFi Llama data, two months ago on August 5, 2024, Sui's TVL was hovering around $500 million. Currently, Sui's TVL has surged to $1.3 billion, ranking among the top ten public chains (currently eighth), with over 250% growth in two months.

In fact, since the beginning of 2024, Sui has shown sustained and vigorous growth momentum, with TVL rising from nearly zero to a peak of $1.3 billion. This explosive growth is unparalleled among public chains in the current cycle.

We know that on-chain data prosperity mainly relies on ecosystem activity, with DeFi being a major contributor. Therefore, when analyzing the driving forces behind Sui's ecosystem growth, DeFi is undoubtedly a key area worth investigating.

In the DeFi sector, DEX, lending, and stablecoins have long been viewed as the three pillars driving development, essential for promoting healthy ecosystem growth. Particularly in lending, as a crucial application scenario for decentralized finance, decentralized lending TVL has already surpassed DEX, becoming the track with the largest fund capacity in the DeFi space.

DeFi Llama data also shows that among Sui ecosystem projects, the top five by TVL are all DeFi projects.

From a TVL perspective, within the Sui ecosystem, NAVI Protocol leads with an absolute advantage of over $530 million TVL. Scallop Lend ranks second with TVL around $250 million, while Suilend ranks third with TVL exceeding $240 million, with little difference between second and third place.

What'smore, NAVI alone contributes nearly 40% of Sui's entire ecosystem TVL, more than double that of the second-place protocol. This demonstrates not only NAVI's competitive advantage in the Sui ecosystem but also its strong leadership position.

Of course, while TVL is an intuitive metric, it's also a general one. For lending projects, a more meaningful comparison lies in the loan volume - the total amount of assets borrowed through the protocol. This metric measures the protocol's usage and liquidity.

From a loan volume perspective, NAVI's loan volume exceeds $120 million; Scallop's loan volume exceeds $88 million; Suilend's loan volume exceeds $57 million. Compared to other lending protocols, NAVI still outperforms in terms of actual lending business performance.

According to data from the NAVI official website, the platform has surpassed 850,000 active users, demonstrating strong user demand and trust in NAVI's lending protocol.

In any blockchain ecosystem, the significance of a robust lending protocol cannot be overstated. It serves not only as a crucial gateway for capital and user traffic but also as a fundamental source of underlying liquidity, enhancing capital efficiency and liquidity depth across the ecosystem.

DeFi Llama data reveals that the top three protocols by TVL in the Sui ecosystem are lending platforms, highlighting the intense competition within Sui's lending sector.

NAVI has distinguished itself amid this fierce competition, maintaining dominant market positions across multiple metrics including TVL, loan volume, and active users. It has emerged as a key driver of Sui's ecosystem growth and represents an essential opportunity for users seeking to capitalize on Sui's potential.

Looking beyond surface metrics to understand the fundamentals, let's examine the technical innovations and core elements that have driven NAVI's success. We'll also analyze upcoming milestones for both NAVI and the broader Sui ecosystem to evaluate the protocol's future growth potential.

Dual Engine of Lending + LST: Becoming a One-Stop Liquidity Hub for Sui and MOVE Ecosystem

Specifically, NAVI's business consists of two main components:

• NAVI Lending: This is NAVI's foundational business, enabling users to participate in the Sui ecosystem as either liquidity providers or borrowers.

• Volo LST: Through the acquisition of Sui's leading liquid staking protocol Volo, NAVI has deeply positioned itself in LST, allowing users to earn additional yields by staking SUI tokens to receive the liquid staking token vSUI.

In terms of lending, NAVI has long excelled through innovations like "Leverage Vaults" and "Isolation Mode," offering higher capital efficiency, enhanced security, and superior user experience.

• The "Leverage Vaults" includes multiple features: automated leverage functionality meets users' needs for repeated asset borrowing to further improve capital utilization, with simple and intuitive operations. Low annual interest rate asset lending, high mining rewards, and leverage strategies for native APY assets (liquid staking assets and LP tokens) further unlock capital efficiency and enhance user returns.

• "Isolation Mode" safeguards trading security: this feature requires new assets to be approved through NAVI governance before they can be used as collateral, further ensuring users can participate in new trading opportunities with minimal risk.

Additionally, NAVI has multiple well-received design features in UI display and product functionality: the introduction of the Health Factor (Hf) concept clearly shows users their lending risk; 24-hour notification features help users track market volatility and make timely decisions; transaction history functionality allows users to easily check all interactions with the NAVI protocol with just a few clicks... Through multiple product iterations, NAVI has received unanimous community praise for its product experience, helping it quickly grow into a leading lending project in the Sui ecosystem since its inception in 2023.

In terms of LST, the acquisition and deep integration of Volo's business is NAVI's clever differentiation strategy that sets it apart from other lending protocols.

We know that liquidity is crucial for DeFi development, and LST was created to unlock liquidity. Since Ethereum's transition from PoW to PoS brought staking narratives, LSTFi's popularity has surged, being viewed as the next trillion-dollar sector.

According to Defillama data, Volo's current TVL has reached $83.7 million, with daily new stakers reaching a high of 891 in September. Both in terms of TVL and staker numbers, Volo leads the SUI ecosystem's LST protocols.

Through the Volo acquisition, from a business perspective, NAVI further integrates upstream and downstream liquidity, aiming to bring users deeper liquidity, flexible composability, and richer yield composition, enabling NAVI users and stakeholders to access larger markets and enjoy various cross-vertical industry synergies.

From a market positioning perspective, integrating Volo helped NAVI quickly capture over 30% of the Sui LST market, not only further expanding NAVI's service coverage but also pushing NAVI towards becoming a "one-stop liquidity hub" for the Sui and entire Move ecosystem through this combined approach.

Beyond specific business logic, NAVI's several functional iterations and upgrades in Q3 2024 further improved functionality and optimized product experience, driving significant growth in its on-chain data.

In this September, NAVI launched leverage strategies, helping users more easily use leverage strategies through one-click operations based on Sui PTB, enabling simpler participation methods for more substantial returns.

Just recently in August, NAVI announced the launch of "NAVI Pro," a DApp supported by Mysticeti and Sui's new consensus algorithm. This product includes a feature-rich UI interface, advanced DeFi strategies, improved liquidity management, community building tools, and developer guides, aimed at further lowering Sui ecosystem DeFi participation barriers and providing users with richer and more advanced DeFi strategy options.

Since these features launched, NAVI has shown significant growth in new users, on-chain transaction activity, and TVL, while receiving widespread praise from the broader DeFi community.

Beyond product advantages, NAVI has also gained capital market favor:

Earlier this year, NAVI announced completion of a $2 million funding round to expand its innovative integrated lending, borrowing, and LSDeFi platform.

The round was co-led by OKX Ventures, dao5, and Hashed, with other participating institutions including Mysten Labs, Comma3 Ventures, Mechanism Capital, Coin98 Ventures, Gate.io, and LBank Labs.

The backing of various renowned VCs not only represents capital's recognition of NAVI's narrative logic and future development, but also lays a more solid foundation for NAVI's continued positive development through stronger funding/resource support.

Notably, within NAVI's funding lineup, community discussion has focused heavily on the participation of Mysten Labs and OKX Ventures:

On one hand, as Sui's developer, Mysten Labs' choice to invest in NAVI can essentially be viewed as an endorsement of NAVI's development prospects in the Sui ecosystem. This support will enable NAVI to receive more technical backing beyond funding, allowing for better product presentation and deeper integration with the Sui ecosystem.

On the other hand, we see that NAVI's token NAVX has already listed on many second-tier exchanges and announced its listing on Bybit Launchpool and spot trading platform on October 7th. Additionally, this listing activity includes a reward pool of 2.5 million NAVX targeted at SUI token holders, where users can participate to win rewards by staking NAVX, SUI, and USDC.

The community eagerly awaits whether NAVX's next step will target major exchanges, and with OKX Ventures' investment boost, there are higher expectations for NAVX token listing on OKX and accessing OKX's rich ecosystem resources.

While both Sui and NAVI have demonstrated strong growth momentum historically, Q4 2024 stands as a pivotal period with multiple milestone deployments planned for both the Sui ecosystem and NAVI protocol. Beyond exchange listing prospects, current community engagement and social media analytics suggest continued bullish sentiment for both Sui's ecosystem development and NAVI's accelerated growth trajectory in the upcoming phase.

Native USDC Coming to Sui, NAVI Poised for Another Rise

Entering Q4, NAVI's most unmissable milestone is the upcoming launch of native USDC on Sui, a key reason why the community believes NAVI will maintain its growth momentum.

At the recently concluded Sui Builder House event in this September, Sui announced to the global community the upcoming launch of Circle's native USDC. Simultaneously, the Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) will also launch on Sui. As a permissionless on-chain utility, CCTP can verify secure USDC transfers between blockchains, providing safer and more capital-efficient transaction methods.

Through this collaboration, Sui becomes the first Move public chain to support native USDC. As the largest compliant USD-backed stablecoin in the crypto industry, USDC's integration on the Sui network will immediately enhance Sui's utility and interoperability for users and developers, greatly improving user experience for DApps in DeFi, gaming, DePin, cross-border payments, commerce, and other sectors.

As Sui ecosystem's largest DeFi protocol, NAVI will undoubtedly receive significant empowerment from USDC. The most direct boost will come after native USDC launches on Sui, when major exchanges will support native USDC deposits and withdrawals on Sui, providing ample liquidity. NAVI, aiming to become Sui ecosystem's liquidity hub and already firmly holding absolute market share, will be people's first choice for increasing leverage, not only capturing on-chain liquidity first but also adding a series of empowerments to NAVI's native token NAVX to capture revenue from NAVI's massive liquidity absorption.

Beyond USDC, according to the official roadmap, NAVI will also complete Volo integration in Q4 2024, undoubtedly injecting stronger confidence in NAVI's continued growth.

We know that based on Sui ecosystem's recent undeniable growth momentum, many view Sui as the next Solana and believe Sui will replicate Solana's development path, expecting Sui ecosystem to produce leading projects that bring traffic, influence, and wealth effects.

After acquiring LST protocol Volo, NAVI has successfully upgraded its narrative from a pure lending protocol to a "Sui ecosystem one-stop liquidity protocol" combining lending + LSTFi. This combination inevitably draws comparisons to Solana ecosystem's Kamino + Jito.

Kamino is a lending, liquidity, and leverage protocol built on Solana, while Jito is Solana's first liquid staking protocol combining MEV yields with staking yields. Both performed exceptionally strong in Solana's recovery wave beginning in late 2023, being major contributors to Solana's TVL. Currently in the Solana ecosystem, Jito ranks first with $1.9 billion TVL, while Kamino ranks second with $1.6 billion.

For the Sui ecosystem, NAVI + Volo's ecosystem positioning is like Solana ecosystem's Kamino + Jito. This configuration's synergistic advantages have already been proven in the Solana ecosystem, and Kamino and Jito's current success has led the community to expect multiple times growth potential for NAVI and Volo.

Worth mentioning, according to Volo's whitepaper information, Volo will issue project governance tokens in the future and is currently in the blind mining stage. Long-term Sui holders can deposit in Volo for potential airdrop opportunities, undoubtedly giving users higher attraction to participate in NAVI and Volo.

Of course, facing NAVX (NAVI's native token) which has already achieved a 211.5% token increase in the past 30 days, many still question: Is now still a good time to participate?

Perhaps on-chain data can largely answer these concerns.

We know that as NAVI's native token, NAVX has a total supply of 10 billion tokens, with governance, incentives, protocol fee sharing, and other application scenarios. Its specific distribution is as follows:

According to Coingecko data, although NAVX has achieved a 211.5% token increase in the past 30 days, let's look from a different angle:

Taking Sui ecosystem's top TVL DEX project Cetus as an example, we can see that currently NAVI's TVL is around $530 million, while Cetus' TVL is around $190 million, nearly a 3x difference;

From a market cap perspective, NAVX's market cap is around $42 million, while Cetus' is $55 million.

This disparity and mismatch have led more people to hold very optimistic expectations for NAVI's future growth, further driving NAVI to become the current first choice for positioning in the Sui ecosystem.

Conclusion

On October 7th, as this article was being written, Sui token price achieved another 20% single-day increase, currently quoted at $2.1. Sui's future continued growth momentum is evident, leading the community to hold higher expectations for Sui ecosystem's leading projects' performance. On the same day, NAVI's native token NAVX also achieved a 14.3% increase. As Sui ecosystem's absolute leading project, NAVI's wealth effect is already initially showing.

Through clever product design, narrative upgrade through Volo acquisition, and strong ecosystem dominance, we can also see NAVI's development pattern and ambition: NAVI doesn't want to be just a follower of Sui's growth, but rather aims to become an important driving force maintaining Sui's high-speed growth through innovative product design, continuously growing on-chain data, and outstanding market performance.

With the launch of native USDC on Sui, the completion of Volo integration, and the achievement of more milestones, NAVI has built a stronger foundation to realize its vision of becoming a one-stop liquidity protocol for both the Sui and the broader Move ecosystem.

Are you still finding this market cycle too mundane and boring while Sui and NAVI are showing such vibrant development? The real action is happening right here.

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