SuiBall Team Ends Hardware Wallet Project, Refunds Due in USDC Within a Week

A Finished Device, a Withdrawn Backer

The team behind SuiBall, the hardware wallet developed for the Sui network by Citadel Wallet, announced on November 11 that the project is ending and that every pre-order will be refunded in full, paid in USDC, the dollar-pegged stablecoin. Refunds run until every buyer has been paid; only then does the shutdown become official. The refund applies across both order channels, on-chain and credit card. The team attributed the decision to a party outside its own control. After a wave of recent attacks on hardware wallets across the industry, the Sui Foundation, the organization that backs development across the Sui ecosystem and sits apart from the wallet's maker, judged that the risk of supporting a project of this type is too high at present. The team said it accepts that judgment and that Sui treats the security of its users and its ecosystem as the first priority.

What the announcement leaves unexplained is why a product the team describes as finished could not proceed on its own. By the team's own account, the device had already entered manufacturing and the first batch was ready to ship to early supporters. The closing message acknowledges the gap: after years of building and with a finished product in hand, the team writes, being forced to stop is a hard outcome to deliver to the community that backed it. The explanation on record comes from the SuiBall side alone, with the Foundation's reasoning relayed second-hand. SuiBall had been positioned as more than a standard crypto wallet, a device fully native to Sui that also handled Bitcoin. The team closed on the framing that it had the right intent and the right skills, but that this venture was not meant to be. The announcement ends with thanks to the supporters who backed the device.

SuiBall was unveiled on October 1, 2025 at SuiFest, the ecosystem event held in Singapore, and Citadel Wallet opened pre-orders shortly after. A hardware wallet keeps the private keys that control crypto funds on a dedicated offline device rather than in software connected to the internet, which is why this category of product is marketed as a cold wallet in physical form. SuiBall supported tokens issued on Sui as well as Bitcoin, and the project carried a Sui and Bitcoin native label from the start. Pre-orders came in through two channels, and the shutdown plan sends each channel down a different refund path.

On-chain orders make up roughly 80% of the total. For this group, USDC will be airdropped within one week of the November 11 announcement, sent directly to each wallet holding the soulbound pre-order NFT, the non-transferable token issued at the time of purchase. Because that NFT cannot move between wallets, the refund lands where the original order was placed, and the team states that buyers in this group need to do nothing. Credit card buyers follow a second route: they receive an email asking them to confirm a Sui wallet address, and a second airdrop follows once the addresses come in.

The plan also covers the personal side of the ledger. Names, email addresses, shipping addresses and phone numbers collected for device delivery will be permanently deleted once refunds are complete, with no records retained. Alongside the refund schedule, the team issued a warning: it will never ask for a seed phrase, a private key or any payment, and buyers should respond only to messages sent from info@citadelwallet.io. Readers rethinking device custody can start with How to Use Sui, a beginner guide to the network.

The refund announcement the team published on X is the primary record for the shutdown, and it describes a structured wind-down rather than a rug pull: on-chain buyers take no action, and the payout is a stablecoin rather than a project token. The trigger was a risk assessment by the Sui Foundation, not weak sales or a product defect, and that is the detail other wallet builders in the ecosystem will weigh most closely. Suiet Wallet separately plans to end development and maintenance after November 14. Market data puts Sui 6.7% lower over the past 24 hours, a slide the announcement does not address; Sui technical analysis tracks where the price stands now.