Both Sui and Ethereum execute smart contracts, yet they scale in opposite ways. Ethereum keeps its base layer conservative and moves most activity to Layer 2 rollups. Sui launched in 2023 and scales on the base layer itself. It settles transactions in about 390 milliseconds, and its contracts are written in Move, a language designed so that common asset bugs fail to compile. If you play or trade on either chain, three questions matter most: how fast a transaction settles, how much it costs and how many layers stand between you and the app.
Ethereum is the established player. September 2026 figures put roughly $49 billion in Ethereum DeFi, compared with $5.9 billion on Solana and $473 million on Sui. Ethereum also leads on developer count, number of audited contracts and length of track record. Sui began with a fresh design and could study where first-generation chains ran into their limits.
One layer or many rollups
Rollups sit at the center of Ethereum’s roadmap. They now handle about 95 percent of Ethereum’s transactions, and the main chain usually runs well under its block target. Rollups come in two main kinds. Optimistic rollups treat transactions as valid by default and depend on a challenge window, often seven days, before withdrawals to mainnet are final. Zero-knowledge rollups submit validity proofs, so withdrawals finalize sooner.
The savings come from running transactions off the main chain and sending results back in compressed batches, which means a single posting fee pays for the entire batch. EIP-4844 created a separate lane for that batch data, known as blobs, with pricing apart from execution gas and deletion after a short period. In May 2025, Pectra doubled blob capacity. Fusaka’s PeerDAS went live in December 2025 and raised capacity again by letting validators sample blob data without downloading the full set.
The trade-off is complexity. Developers must choose a rollup, figure out how liquidity is divided between rollups and manage the movement of value and messages across layers. On mainnet, composability (any contract being able to call any other) was one of Ethereum’s strengths. That weakens when apps live on different rollups without direct shared state.
Sui runs everything on a single layer. Because of its object model, the chain knows exactly which objects each transaction touches, so transactions without overlap execute in parallel. Adding hardware raises throughput with no congestion pricing, and developers never have to pick a rollup or work with cross-layer bridges.
Finality: 390 milliseconds versus 15 minutes
Ethereum creates a block about every 12 seconds, and a transaction included in a block is generally considered confirmed within that time. Reaching full finality takes about 15 minutes, since it covers two consensus epochs. Single-slot finality would cut that down, but it remains in research and is expected only after big upgrades like Verkle trees and Danksharding. For most daily use, the block time is the real wait. For high-value settlement, the 15-minute figure is what matters.
Sui reaches deterministic finality in about 390 milliseconds. After a transaction settles, no probabilistic waiting period follows. This counts for payments, trading and any app where users would notice a lag.
Fees are now close
Ethereum has become cheaper. In May 2026, standard gas sat at around 0.15 gwei, putting a basic ETH transfer below $0.03, an ERC-20 transfer at about $0.08 and a token swap at about $0.21. On Layer 2, fees are a fraction of a cent.
An average Sui transaction costs less than $0.02. At the protocol level, stablecoin transfers on Sui are gasless, so sending them is free regardless of amount. For ordinary transactions, the difference has mostly disappeared. What Sui still has over Ethereum is free stablecoin transfers and no congestion pricing during demand spikes.
Security: history or language design
Ethereum’s argument rests on its past. The EVM has been running since 2015, billions of dollars have tested it under pressure, and it has the biggest collection of audited libraries and hardened patterns in crypto.
Sui’s argument begins with the language. Most large smart contract exploits happened because Solidity allowed dangerous patterns to compile, including the reentrancy bugs and accounting errors that have drained billions. Sam Blackshear, Move’s creator and a co-founder of Mysten Labs, built the language so those patterns cannot be written in the first place. In Move, assets are resources, and the type system prevents them from being copied or destroyed. Sui’s object model also assigns every asset explicit on-chain ownership.
Sui projects still need audits. Together with HackenProof, the Sui Foundation operates the Sui Security Expansion Program, which offers ecosystem projects bug bounties, crowdsourced audits and pre-launch review by Move and Rust researchers. Six firms audit Sui projects: Asymptotic, which created the Sui Prover for formal verification of Move contracts; Certora; MoveBit; OtterSec; Zellic; and Blaize.Security. Move Registry posts package source, documentation and audit reports on-chain alongside the deployed contract, so anyone can check what was audited against what is actually running.
What Sui builds in
Sui comes with several components of its own:
- Walrus for decentralized storage
- Seal, which encrypts data and controls who is able to decrypt it
- Nautilus for trusted off-chain computation
- DeepBook for on-chain liquidity
- zkLogin for one-step sign-in using an existing Google or Apple account
- Confidential transfers, in public beta on devnet, which keep transaction amounts out of public view while letting specific parties see them when required
The pieces players will notice day to day are zkLogin and gasless stablecoins: logging in with an account they already own and sending stablecoins with no fees. Ethereum has equivalents, but they come from separate third-party projects, many of them good, which developers assemble and must trust one by one. Ethereum’s open ecosystem gives more options and more mature components. Sui’s approach means fewer choices to make and parts built to fit together.
Matching projects to chains
Ethereum and its rollups make sense for projects that rely on existing Ethereum DeFi liquidity, need the biggest pool of Solidity developers or gain from EVM network effects. Sui targets projects that need high base-layer throughput, sub-second deterministic finality, language-enforced asset safety and gasless stablecoin transfers. That includes payments, consumer apps at scale and gaming marketplaces like OVERTAKE, which provides on-chain escrow and creator storefronts for gamers who trade, pay and sell online.
Sui has no Layer 2s. Parallel execution lets it scale on the base layer, so apps remain on a single layer and can call one another directly.