Sui and Ethereum both run smart contracts, and they take opposite routes to doing it at scale. Ethereum keeps its base layer conservative and pushes most activity onto Layer 2 rollups. Sui, which launched in 2023, scales on its base layer, settles transactions in roughly 390 milliseconds and writes its contracts in Move, a language built to stop common asset bugs from compiling. For anyone playing or trading on either chain, the differences come down to how long a transaction takes to settle, what it costs and how many layers sit between you and the app.
Ethereum is the incumbent. About $49 billion sits in Ethereum DeFi, against $5.9 billion on Solana and $473 million on Sui, based on September 2026 figures. Ethereum also has the most developers, the most audited contracts and the longest track record. Sui started from a clean design, with the benefit of seeing where the first generation of chains hit their limits.
Rollups versus one layer
Ethereum’s roadmap is built around rollups. Rollups now carry about 95 percent of Ethereum’s transactions, and the main chain typically runs well below its block target. There are two main types. Optimistic rollups assume transactions are valid and rely on a challenge window, commonly seven days, before withdrawals to mainnet finalize. Zero-knowledge rollups post validity proofs and finalize withdrawals faster.
Rollups cut costs by executing transactions away from the main chain and posting the results back in compressed batches, so one posting fee covers the whole batch. EIP-4844 gave that batch data its own lane, called blobs, priced separately from execution gas and deleted after a short window. Pectra doubled blob capacity in May 2025, and Fusaka’s PeerDAS, live in December 2025, let validators sample blob data instead of downloading all of it, which raised capacity again.
The cost is complexity. Developers have to pick a rollup, work out how liquidity is split across rollups and handle how value and messages move between layers. Composability, the ability for any contract to call any other, was one of Ethereum’s strengths on mainnet. It weakens when apps sit on separate rollups that don’t share state directly.
Sui keeps everything on one layer. Its object model lets the chain see exactly which objects a transaction touches, so transactions that don’t overlap run in parallel. Throughput rises as hardware is added, without congestion pricing, and developers don’t have to choose a rollup or deal with cross-layer bridges.
Finality: 390 milliseconds against 15 minutes
Ethereum produces a block roughly every 12 seconds, and a transaction in a block is usually treated as confirmed within that window. Full finality takes about 15 minutes because it spans two consensus epochs. Single-slot finality would shorten that, but it is still in research and expected only after major upgrades such as Verkle trees and Danksharding. For most everyday activity the practical wait is the block time. For high-value settlement, 15 minutes is the figure that counts.
Sui settles in roughly 390 milliseconds with deterministic finality. Once a transaction settles, there is no probabilistic waiting period after it. That matters for payments, trading and any app where a delay is noticeable.
Fees have mostly converged
Ethereum fees have dropped. As of May 2026, standard gas on Ethereum was around 0.15 gwei, which put a basic ETH transfer under $0.03, an ERC-20 transfer near $0.08 and a token swap near $0.21. Layer 2 fees run at a fraction of a cent.
Sui’s average transaction costs under $0.02. Stablecoin transfers on Sui are gasless at the protocol level, so moving them costs nothing at any size. On ordinary transactions the gap has largely closed. Sui’s remaining advantages are the free stablecoin transfers and the lack of congestion pricing when demand spikes.
Security: track record or language design
Ethereum’s case is its history. The EVM has run since 2015, billions of dollars have stress-tested it, and its catalog of audited libraries and hardened patterns is the largest in crypto.
Sui’s case starts in the language. Most major smart contract exploits came from Solidity letting dangerous patterns compile, such as the reentrancy bugs and accounting errors that have drained billions. Sam Blackshear, who created Move and co-founded Mysten Labs, designed the language so those patterns can’t be written at all. Assets in Move are resources that the type system protects from being copied or destroyed, and Sui’s object model gives every asset explicit on-chain ownership.
Audits still matter on Sui. The Sui Foundation runs the Sui Security Expansion Program with HackenProof, which gives ecosystem projects bug bounties, crowdsourced audits and pre-launch review from Move and Rust researchers. Six firms audit Sui projects: Asymptotic, which built the Sui Prover for formal verification of Move contracts; Certora; MoveBit; OtterSec; Zellic; and Blaize.Security. Move Registry publishes package source, documentation and audit reports on-chain next to the deployed contract, so anyone can compare what was audited with what is running.
Sui’s built-in stack
Sui ships several of its own components:
- Walrus for decentralized storage
- Seal, which encrypts data and manages who can decrypt it
- Nautilus for trusted off-chain computation
- DeepBook for on-chain liquidity
- zkLogin for one-step sign-in with an existing Google or Apple account
- Confidential transfers, in public beta on devnet, which hide transaction amounts from public view while staying visible to specific parties when required
For players, zkLogin and gasless stablecoins are the parts that touch day-to-day use: signing in with an account you already have and moving stablecoins without paying fees. On Ethereum, the equivalents exist as separate third-party projects, often good ones, which developers put together and trust individually. Ethereum’s open ecosystem offers more choice and more mature parts. Sui’s stack means fewer decisions and pieces designed to work together.
Which chain fits which project
Projects that depend on existing Ethereum DeFi liquidity, need the largest pool of Solidity developers or benefit from EVM network effects have good reason to stay on Ethereum and its rollups. Sui is built for projects that need high base-layer throughput, sub-second deterministic finality, asset safety enforced by the language and gasless stablecoin transfers. That covers payments, consumer apps at scale and gaming marketplaces such as OVERTAKE, which offers on-chain escrow and creator storefronts for gamers who trade, pay and sell online.
Sui doesn’t use Layer 2s. It scales on the base layer through parallel execution, so apps stay on one layer and can still call each other directly.
