What is the Sui Network (SUI) inflation rate?

+5.37% a year, and +1.50% in the next 90 days. That is new SUI minus what is burned or bought back, checked Oct 12 2026.

Is SUI inflationary or deflationary?

Inflationary: SUI's supply is growing, about +5.37% a year.

Where does new SUI supply come from?

Stakers got 25.48M SUI from the launch reward pot, early team members 22.31M and the Foundation reserve plus Mysten Labs 18.21M in 90 days. No new coins are minted.

MrNasdog Pressure Framework · Inflation Analysis

SUI Inflation Analysis · October 2026 · Supply growing · projected to keep growing

SUI supply is growing: in the last 90 days 65.999M SUI reached the market while only 162.5K SUI left it for good, a net rise of +1.60% on a float of 4.12B SUI. The Sui network never mints new SUI. All 10B coins were made at launch, and the float grows because locked coins are released: a staking reward paid each day from a pot set aside at launch, plus a release to early team members, the Foundation reserve and Mysten Labs on the 1st of every month. The next 90 days look a little lighter, about +1.50%, and the hard ceiling is the 10B cap.

The verdict, in one paragraph

Our ledger reads SUI at +1.60% net over the last 90 days (65.999M SUI in, 162.5K SUI out) and projects +1.50% for the next 90 days. The inflation monitor, which tracks the circulating supply number day by day, reads +1.55% for the same stretch. The gap is 0.05 percentage points, well inside our 0.5-point tolerance, so no warning chip is shown: the two methods agree. SUI is a capped coin with a steady unlock: no new coins are created, but about 1.6% more of the existing supply becomes tradable every quarter.

Sell pressure: where new SUI comes from

Protocol inflation is 25.48M SUI. Sui pays stakers a fixed amount every 24-hour epoch from a stake subsidy pot created at launch. The pot paid about 282,430 SUI a day in this window and now holds 229.3M SUI. The amount paid each day falls by 10% every 90 epochs, and the next cut lands on Oct 14 2026, taking it to about 254,187 SUI a day. That is why the next 90 days bring only about 22.93M SUI from staking rewards. These coins are not newly minted; they move from the locked pot to stakers, who can sell them.

Vesting unlocks add 22.31M SUI. Early team members receive a release on the 1st of each month: about 7.65M SUI on Aug 1 2026, 7.47M on Sep 1 and 7.19M on Oct 1. The amount shrinks a little each month, so Nov 1, Dec 1 and Jan 1 2027 add about 20.75M SUI together. The large investor releases for the Series A and Series B rounds ended in May 2026, which is why the amount added to the float each month roughly halved, from about 52M to about 23M SUI, after that.

Foundation and unscheduled unlocks add 18.21M SUI. On each monthly release date, 4M SUI goes to the Sui Foundation's community reserve and about 2.07M SUI to the Mysten Labs treasury. Both are team-controlled pools that fund grants, validators and the company behind the network, and coins released to them join the float on their release date, so we count them in full.

Long-term locked or bankruptcy is zero. No bankruptcy estate or court trustee holds SUI. The largest listed company holding SUI reports about 109.1M SUI, mostly staked, but those coins are already part of the circulating supply, so they add nothing new.

Buy pressure: where new SUI goes

Programmatic buyback is zero, even though a buyback runs. Since late June 2026 the Sui Foundation spends yield earned on stablecoins to buy SUI on the open market almost every day: about 705.2K SUI for roughly $568.7K in these 90 days. The bought coins are then handed out to apps, validators and ecosystem partners, so they go straight back into the market. Coins that leave the float and come back to it remove nothing.

Protocol fee burn is 162.5K SUI. Sui does not burn gas the way some chains do: the computation part of each fee goes to stakers. But storage fees go into a storage fund, and a share of that fund can never be paid back. That non-refundable part grew by 162,477 SUI in 90 days, about 1,805 SUI a day, and we count it as coins removed for good. Next 90 days we assume the same pace.

Foundation buy is zero: apart from the buyback above, no team or treasury purchase of SUI appeared this window. The Foundation's $30M investment in an AI data project on Oct 11 2026 buys into that project, not into SUI. New long-term lock is also zero. About 7.08B SUI is staked, but staking can be undone and staked coins still count as circulating, and refundable storage deposits rose only 30,325 SUI.

Foundation and overhang

About 5.88B SUI, close to 59% of the 10B supply, is still locked. The Foundation's published plan releases another 664.5M SUI between now and May 2030, through the monthly releases and the staking reward pot (229.3M SUI of it sits in the pot today). The remaining 5.22B SUI has no release date at all: the plan simply stops in May 2030. That undated block is the largest overhang on SUI, and it is held by the Foundation's community reserve and other team pools in custody, not in wallets anyone can watch on-chain.

We check the reward pot on-chain every day and the release plan and Foundation news about every two weeks. The buyback does not build up a stock, because its coins are handed back out. If any of these locked pools falls faster than the published plan between our checks, for example through a direct sale of locked coins to a treasury company, the extra outflow enters Foundation and unscheduled unlocks at the next refresh.

How SUI compares to other proof-of-stake Layer 1s

SUI sits in the group of young proof-of-stake Layer 1s that launched with most of their supply locked. What sets SUI apart is the hard cap. Solana and Ethereum have no fixed supply: Solana mints new SOL for stakers on a schedule that falls each year, and Ethereum mints new ETH for validators while burning part of every fee. Aptos also pays stakers with newly minted APT on top of its monthly unlocks. Sui pays stakers from coins that already exist: the code that created the 10B SUI at launch threw away the ability to make more.

The cost of that design is a long unlock. Only about 41% of SUI circulates today, so the float keeps growing by about 1.5% to 1.6% a quarter even with zero new minting, which is faster than a mature chain like Ethereum. And unlike chains with a large fee burn, Sui removes very little: its fees are kept low on purpose, gasless stablecoin transfers went live in May 2026, and the only coins removed for good are the small non-refundable share of storage fees.

What to watch in the next 90 days

Oct 14 2026: the staking reward drops 10%, to about 254,187 SUI a day, as the reward pot's 90-epoch cut kicks in.

Nov 1 2026, Dec 1 2026 and Jan 1 2027: monthly releases of about 13.15M, 12.97M and 12.84M SUI to early team members, the community reserve and Mysten Labs.

Foundation deals: whether the Foundation pays for investments such as the Oct 11 2026 AI data project deal with locked SUI, or sells locked SUI to treasury companies, which would move coins outside the published plan.

Storage fees and the buyback: whether more network use (new stablecoin transfers in phone wallets, Bitcoin lending apps) lifts the non-refundable storage share above about 1,805 SUI a day, and whether the Foundation ever keeps or destroys the coins it buys instead of handing them out.

Summary

SUI is a capped coin whose tradable supply grows by about +1.60% every 90 days, with +1.50% projected for the next 90 days. The growth comes from releasing coins made at launch: about 25.48M SUI of staking rewards and about 40.52M SUI of monthly team, reserve and Mysten Labs releases in the last window, against only 162.5K SUI removed through storage fees. The key risk is the 5.88B SUI still locked, of which 5.22B has no release date, while the Foundation's buyback hands its coins back out. The ceiling is the 10B SUI made at launch; no new coins are minted.

MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of SUI, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Checked Oct 12 2026.