One of the Largest Lending Protocols Expands to Sui

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Solend Lending Protocol Expands to Sui

Solend, the leading lending and borrowing protocol within the Solana ecosystem, recently announced its upcoming launch on the Sui blockchain. Developed by a team of tech innovators stemming from Facebook’s blockchain initiative, this integration signifies a significant milestone for Solend, marking its initial foray beyond the Solana blockchain. The decision to expand onto Sui underscores the team’s trust in Sui’s robust technology and its potential as a enduring partner.

As the premier lending and borrowing platform on Solana, Solend has amassed a total value locked (TVL) exceeding $140 million, serving a user base of over 170,000 and facilitating transactions with more than 70 different assets. With over 20 ongoing developer integrations, Solend stands as one of Solana’s flagship platforms for DeFi development. The expansion onto Sui represents a strategic move to introduce Solend’s comprehensive DeFi offerings to a fresh user community, further enriching the Sui ecosystem by attracting additional builders.

Rooter, the pseudonymous Founder of Solend, expressed the rationale behind this move:

“We’re not maximalists by any means—I left that mindset behind when I departed from Ethereum. Our choice to build on Sui aligns with the same principles that led us to build on Solana three years ago: recognizing something extraordinary. In Solana’s case, it was performance; for Sui, it’s the developer experience. The present state of smart contracts falls short of the industry’s ambitions, and Move addresses this gap. While most of our team remains intensely focused on Solana, we’ve established a dedicated sub-team committed to Sui.”

The expansion announcement from Solend closely follows Bluefin, an emerging decentralized exchange (DEX) with a daily volume exceeding $100 million, revealing their exclusive commitment to building their V2 on the Sui blockchain. Bluefin has also disclosed a comprehensive product roadmap extending well into 2024.

Ensuring DeFi Platform Security

Ensuring the security of entrusted assets is paramount for any growing DeFi platform, and Sui is leaving no aspect unaddressed in fortifying its ecosystem. The foundation of security on Sui begins with the inherent features of the Move language, providing unique protections for smart contracts on the Sui platform. To further enhance security, Sui collaborates with esteemed partners, including leading blockchain security firms Zellic and Ottersec, to conduct thorough audits of individual codebases for projects. Solend’s code, in particular, will undergo rigorous scrutiny to ensure compliance with the highest security standards and seamless integration with the Sui blockchain.

Simultaneously, for builders of DeFi applications, optimal network performance and user accessibility are of utmost importance. In terms of performance, DeFi projects on Sui leverage the network’s utilization of parallel processing for the majority of transactions, resulting in remarkably low latency and facilitating horizontal scaling.

This technology stack enabled Sui to achieve a peak throughput benchmark of up to 297,000 transactions per second (TPS) and a time to finality of approximately 480 milliseconds. Remarkably, in just its fourth month, Sui set a record for the highest number of transactions processed in a single day by any blockchain network to date.

Similarly, in terms of user accessibility, Sui streamlines the onboarding process for DeFi protocols by incorporating its native zkLogin feature. This functionality allows end users to authenticate using familiar Web 2 social logins from platforms such as Google, Twitch, and others. This approach eliminates the need for new users to navigate the complexities of managing wallets and seed phrases, addressing a significant barrier to the mainstream adoption of DeFi protocols on Sui. It’s worth noting that this streamlined onboarding process remains non-custodial, preserving the core principles of decentralized finance.

Greg Siourounis, Managing Director of the Sui Foundation, expressed enthusiasm about Solend joining the Sui ecosystem, stating, “Solend has achieved a level of success that is unmatched by the vast majority of projects in our industry, and we are thrilled to welcome them to the Sui ecosystem. Sui was created with the scalability and efficiency that DeFi projects require at its core. We look forward to Solend’s continued upward trajectory building on Sui.”

The Solend team brings a wealth of experience spanning both the Web2 and Web3 realms, with members having previously contributed to industry giants such as Coinbase, Robinhood, Cruise, Twitch, and Two Sigma. Solend has garnered support from a formidable group of investors, including Dragonfly, Polychain, Race Capital, and Coinbase Ventures.