Sui Developers Hand Move Projects to Rival Chains as Contributors Fall 55%

A 55% Drop in Active Developers

Development work on Sui is moving to other chains, and the scale of the handover now has a number attached. According to WuBlockchain, which gathered four people who build or have built on the network for a podcast published on October 8, 2026, third-party GitHub statistics put the Sui ecosystem at more than 600 independent developers and more than 180 full-time developers, a drop of roughly 55% year over year. Chen, a Sui developer ambassador who joined through an overseas bootcamp a week before the mainnet went live, cited those figures and estimates monthly active developers now stand near 500, down from more than 600 at the start of the year. Mike, the developer behind BLUB, once one of the largest meme projects on the chain, has decided to leave. Arthur's team built one of the first auto-burn meme coins on Sui and, with TradePort, the chain's first protocol for fragmenting NFTs; he says he is weighing the same move. Lae, who works on the same project, put their entry at June 28, 2025; for four to five months afterward their project ranked first among non-foundation teams by users and community discussion. Arthur says the departures are not about the SUI price or a missed grant, and not about the wider market either, since Bitcoin also slid from above $120,000 to the $60,000 range this year. What drew them in was the technology: Move's object model separates assets from execution logic and cuts the unlimited-approval risk familiar on EVM chains, while SUI reaching CME crypto futures markets, with a two-times leveraged ETF product following, read to his team as a chain committed to compliance. Cetus and TradePort, he adds, helped a small team without asking for anything in return. None of the four disputes that the technology itself remains sound.

JSON-RPC Removal Broke Wallet Support

The trigger for the loudest exits was an infrastructure decision. Sui began phasing out JSON-RPC, the generic query interface most major blockchains still expose, as it moved to gRPC, which its own blog had flagged about a year in advance. But when the removal took effect in July 2026, major APAC wallets, including OKX Wallet, OneKey Wallet and Binance Wallet, had not finished gRPC compatibility, and a wave of DApps stopped working. Arthur describes the confusion that followed: users saw applications fail and suspected a rug pull, because nothing on the client side explained that a chain-level interface change was to blame. When he pressed foundation staff, he says the reply was that notice had been given long ago, and he was then muted in the project's Telegram group. The second grievance predates the RPC change. At a Sui House event in Hong Kong around April or May 2026, Arthur says an APAC lead at the Sui Foundation told him, before he had shown her the project's full materials, that Sui was “not welcome, and does not support meme.” He cannot judge whether that was a personal view or an official stance, since Mysten Labs co-founder Anthony has publicly engaged with meme communities. Chen, who served as a developer ambassador for the Chinese-speaking region, adds structural context: Mysten Labs, the Sui Foundation, the regional teams, developer relations and outside contractors are not one decision-making body. His own program shows the looseness: roughly 100 ambassadors in one Discord channel, weekly meetings set for North American hours, tasks never really reviewed despite signed agreements and KYC on entry, and no minutes circulated. On funding, Sui Group, a Nasdaq-listed treasury vehicle, buys SUI over the counter from Mysten Labs or the foundation, but the guests say no full treasury accounting has been published. The departure that stings most is Sam Blackshear's: the Move creator, until recently Mysten Labs' CTO, has gone to Anthropic, and Mike says that alone told him his Sui chapter was closing.

Mysten, Foundation and the APAC Split

The record points to an organizational failure rather than a technical one. The guests praise the Move stack and the peer protocols that helped them when they were small; what broke is the layer between those and the foundation, where an APAC arm relayed neither the wallet-adaptation reality nor the meme stance upward, and answered public criticism with silence, a muting and, eventually, word of an internal investigation rather than an apology. The GitHub-tracked figures put a measurable floor under the shift. No successor has been named: the roughly 500 monthly active developers Chen still counts hold Sui's development in the meantime, and several of them are openly evaluating other altcoin networks.