One of the Largest Lending Protocol Expands to Sui for First Launch Outside of Solana

Solend’s expansion is set to compound Sui’s remarkable DeFi momentum, which has seen TVL grow by over 500% since September.

Solend, the largest lending and borrowing protocol on Solana, today announced its impending launch on the Sui blockchain, which was created by a team of technology leaders that emerged from Facebook’s blockchain initiative. This new integration marks Solend’s first deployment on a blockchain other than Solana and underscores the team’s confidence in the strength of Sui’s technology and the Sui network’s potential as a long-term partner.

As the largest lending and borrowing product on Solana, Solend boasts over $140 million in total value locked (TVL) across over 170,000 users and supports over 70 assets. Solend also currently has over 20 developer integrations, making it one of Solana’s most prominent platforms for DeFi development. Expansion to Sui will introduce Solend’s robust DeFi offerings to a new community of users and bring even more builders to the Sui ecosystem. 

Rooter, the pseudonymous Founder of Solend, said:

“We’re not maximalists by any means — I left that behind when I left Ethereum. We’re building on Sui for the same reason we decided to build on Solana three years ago: because they’re doing something special. For Solana it was performance, for Sui it’s the developer experience. The current state of smart contracts doesn’t reflect the aspirations of the industry. Move fixes this. Most of the team is 100% focused on Solana, and we’ve spun up a sub-team dedicated to Sui.”

The Solend expansion news comes on the heels of Bluefin, an ascending DEX with over $100 million in daily volume, announcing they will build their V2 exclusively on Sui and unveiling their product roadmap for well into 2024. 

It is critical for a growing DeFi platform to secure the assets entrusted to it, and Sui is leaving no stone unturned in safeguarding its ecosystem. Security on Sui starts with the security features embedded in the Move language itself, which add a unique protection for smart contracts on Sui Further.

Sui supports its developers by working with partners and leading blockchain security firms, Zellic and Ottersec, to check projects’ individual codebases. Solend’s code will benefit from their rigorous audits that will ensure that the application meets the highest security standards and is fully compatible with the Sui blockchain. 

At the same time, for DeFi application builders, top-tier performance in the underlying network and easy access for new users are also paramount. From a performance perspective, DeFi projects on Sui benefit from the network’s use of parallel processing for the vast majority of transactions, which results in unprecedented low latency and enables horizontal scaling.

It was this same technology stack which enabled Sui to benchmark a peak throughput of up to 297,000 TPS and time to finality of ~480 milliseconds, and in just its fourth month to achieve the greatest number of transactions processed in a single day by any blockchain network ever. 

Likewise, for accessibility, Sui offers DeFi protocols extremely easy onboarding for new users through its native zkLogin feature which enables end users to authenticate with the same Web 2 social logins from Google, Twitch and others that they are already familiar with. Any DeFi protocol building on Sui can incorporate zkLogin, eliminating the need for new users to manage wallets and seed phrases and removing a huge hurdle to mainstream use of DeFi protocols on Sui, while still remaining non-custodial. 

“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,” said Greg Siourounis, Managing Director of the Sui Foundation. “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 with both the Web2 and the Web3 world, with members having previously worked at industry stalwarts Coinbase, Robinhood, Cruise, Twitch, and Two Sigma. Solend is backed by a strong group of investors, including Dragonfly, Polychain, Race Capital, and Coinbase Ventures.