Sui Is Up 49% This Month While Solana Gained 8%. Can the Newcomer Keep Pulling Ahead?
Sui has quietly surged while Solana coasts, but whether that momentum reflects a genuine shift in the crypto landscape or just a fleeting rotation into smaller coins is the question every investor should be asking right now.
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Sui (CRYPTO:SUI) has risen 49.2% over the past month, while Solana (CRYPTO:SOL) has risen only 7.9%. This puts Sui significantly ahead in the Sui vs. Solana comparison for the month. Like Solana, Sui operates as a layer-1 blockchain, serving as a base network for applications and using its own coin for transaction fees.
Sui trades at around $1.05, up 6.2% in the last 24 hours but down 1.8% over the week. In contrast, Solana’s price is about $106. Throughout October, Sui’s price has fluctuated between approximately $0.99 and $1.26.
Both cryptocurrencies are trading well below their January 2025 highs. Sui is 80.4% below its peak of $5.35, while Solana sits 63.7% below its record of $293. This raises the question. Can Sui keep outperforming Solana, or will this recent rise be short-lived?
Solana Is Still Worth About 15 Times More Than Sui
To compare these two cryptocurrencies fairly, we can look at their market values, which reflect each network’s total worth. Sui’s market value is around $4.3 billion, ranking it 28th, while Solana boasts about $62.7 billion, placing it 7th—roughly 14.6 times Sui’s.
One challenge for Sui is its supply. Currently, about 4.1 billion Sui coins are circulating out of a total maximum supply of 10 billion, meaning only 41% of the total is in circulation.
If all 10 billion coins were available at the current price, Sui’s market value would be about $10.5 billion, known as the “fully diluted value.” In comparison, Solana has around 93% of its value already circulating, so it faces less pressure from additional supply.
This dilution can have a significant impact. If Sui returns to its previous high of $5.35 with the current supply, its market value would be around $22 billion. If all coins were in circulation, that same price would mean a market value of $53.5 billion. To match Solana’s current market value with the current supply, Sui would need to reach about $15.
Sui’s Rally Has No Single Trigger
Interestingly, no single major event has driven Sui’s price increase. As of October 15, Sui’s developers hadn’t announced any major news, suggesting its 30-day surge isn’t driven by a specific catalyst.
Our October 11 analysis noted that the rise coincided with a new system called Hashi, which lets institutions borrow against Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC), although Hashi has not shared any usage statistics. This increase also seems related to traders shifting their focus to smaller coins with more volatile price movements.
However, Sui’s upward trend has shown signs of cooling off. Starting the 30-day window near $0.69, it peaked at about $1.29 in September, but has dropped 12.9% over the past two weeks and is down 27.1% so far this year.
Solana’s Alpenglow Upgrade Goes Live October 21
On October 13, Anza, a core Solana developer, announced that the Alpenglow upgrade will go live on October 21. This upgrade aims to improve the network by replacing validator voting with certificates, significantly reducing transaction finality—the point at which a transaction cannot be reversed—to around 150 milliseconds.
Past upgrades on other blockchains offer valuable insights into how such events can affect prices. For example, Ethereum (CRYPTO:ETH) saw price drops in the 30 days after its 2022 Merge and its 2024 Dencun upgrade. In contrast, after the Pectra upgrade in 2025, Ethereum’s price increased as buyers didn’t rush in ahead of the upgrade.
Solana’s situation appears more similar to the setup before Pectra. According to SoSoValue, Solana’s exchange-traded products experienced net outflows on eight of the first nine trading days in October, and Solana fell 9% in the week before the announcement.
Can Sui Keep Outpacing Solana?
While Sui may continue to show stronger percentage growth than Solana for a few more weeks, closing the market value gap by December seems unlikely. Smaller coins tend to move more dramatically with less investment, which explains Sui’s advantage, but Solana’s significant market size and Sui’s increasing supply make a sustained catch-up challenging. For Sui, the immediate goal is to maintain its price above $1 and eventually surpass its September high of approximately $1.29.
If Sui falls below its October low of about $0.99, it could signal a reversal in interest toward smaller cryptocurrencies. For Solana, the key will be whether the Alpenglow upgrade rolls out successfully on October 21 and pushes the price above $107 the following month, ideally with fund inflows returning. If Alpenglow succeeds while Sui dips below $0.99, the Sui vs. Solana dynamic might favor Solana again by the end of 2026.
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Sam Daodu is a crypto analyst who's spent nearly a decade making blockchain understandable—no easy task when most whitepapers read like fever dreams. He writes for 24/7 Wall St., covering Bitcoin, altcoins, and crypto market analysis for investors. Before crypto, he was a tech writer (back when explaining "the cloud" was peak innovation). Since 2018, he's written for CoinTelegraph, Yahoo Finance, The Block, Cryptonews, Zypto, Rain, and more—basically anywhere people want crypto news without the headache. Sam runs MacLabs Marketing, a content agency for crypto brands tired of sounding like AI wrote their website. He also publishes free crypto education on his site for Web3 enthusiasts who think "gas fees" is a typo. When he's not writing or staring at charts, Sam's either: - Watching anime (currently convinced One Piece has better tokenomics than most altcoins) - At the gym sculpting himself into a Greek god - Listening to the music your mum warned you only bad boys listen to Connect: LinkedIn | Email | MacLabs Marketing
