Sui Network Halts Second Day in a Row as SUI Slides 20% Weekly, Trades 83% Below ATH

Sui News

The Sui mainnet went offline again on Friday morning, marking the second consecutive day of disruption for the layer-1 blockchain. The network team confirmed that activity had stalled and that the core engineering group was actively investigating the cause. On-chain trackers showed the chain had not processed a fresh block for nearly two hours when the alert was issued. The repeat halt fueled renewed criticism of the protocol's reliability, particularly given the recent rollout of significant protocol changes. The SUI token slipped a further 2% on the day, drifting toward the $0.89 area as traders priced in the operational risk premium attached to back-to-back failures.

Thursday's outage proved to be the more severe of the two events, lasting five hours and 55 minutes — the longest recorded on the network's official status page. Validators eventually adopted a patch that brought the chain back online, but the recovery turned out to be temporary. The team attributed the initial halt to a defect in the gas charging logic introduced by the latest protocol upgrade. A full post-mortem has yet to be released, leaving the community without a definitive answer on whether Friday's stall stems from the same root cause or from regression issues tied to the rushed remediation patch.

The faulty release at the center of the incident is version 1.72, which shipped two notable protocol enhancements. Engineers had positioned the upgrade as a major step in modernizing the chain's transaction architecture. Once Thursday's outage occurred, attention focused on the gas accounting subsystem, where the bug allegedly produced an unrecoverable state during normal execution. Validator telemetry indicated that at least two-thirds of the set had upgraded to the corrective patch before Friday's renewed stall, raising questions about the network's consensus mechanism resilience and whether the fix introduced a separate regression or whether unpatched nodes contributed to the second cascade.

Among the headline features in the 1.72 release was Address Balances, a move away from the chain's existing UTXO-style accounting toward a single canonical balance per token type. The release also introduced Gasless Stablecoin Transfers, allowing supported assets to be sent peer-to-peer — including in batched programmable transaction blocks — without any gas fees or gas token requirement. Both features were intended to streamline user experience for retail-facing applications and broader DeFi integrations. The outages, however, have shifted the conversation from feature parity toward execution discipline, with developers now weighing whether ambitious protocol changes were shipped without sufficient testnet exposure.

Sui has a documented history of reliability issues. The mainnet experienced a similar stall in January that left the chain offline for roughly six hours, and Friday's incident marks the third significant outage of the year. Often promoted as a high-throughput rival to Solana, the network has now encountered some of the same operational vulnerabilities that affected its peer altcoin. Solana's history of multi-hour halts was widely cited during its early growth phase, and Sui appears to be navigating a similar maturation curve. The repeat downtime invites scrutiny from institutional integrators who require uptime guarantees comparable to traditional financial rails.

The token's market performance has reflected the operational anxiety. SUI is among the five worst performers in the top-100 cohort over the past week, with declines of roughly 20% pushing the price more than 83% below its January 2025 all-time high of $5.35. Trading volume across major exchange venues remained elevated as the second outage broke, suggesting active risk redistribution rather than passive holding. Long-term holders accumulated near the local lows are now sitting on substantial drawdowns, and derivatives data points to expanding short exposure as traders position for the possibility of additional protocol turbulence in the days ahead.

SUI trades near $0.9067 with momentum firmly tilted bearish. The RSI at 36.36 sits in the lower-neutral zone, approaching but not yet confirming oversold conditions, while a bearish MACD signal aligns with the prevailing downtrend. Immediate support clusters at $0.8868, with deeper buyer interest expected at $0.8197 and the long-term floor at $0.6558. Resistance starts at $0.9262, followed by $0.9671 and the psychologically significant $1.0499 zone. A confirmed reclaim of $0.9262 on rising volume would open the door to a relief rebound; a sustained close below $0.8868 invalidates the recovery thesis and exposes the lower support shelf.