What is the Sui Network (SUI) inflation rate?

+5.54% a year, and +1.20% in the next 90 days. That is new SUI minus what is burned or bought back, checked Oct 1 2026.

Is SUI inflationary or deflationary?

Inflationary: SUI's supply is growing, about +5.54% a year.

Where does new SUI supply come from?

Stakers are paid from a launch-time pot (25.8M SUI in 90 days, cut 10% on Oct 14 2026) and locked SUI is released on the 1st of each month to early contributors, the community reserve and Mysten Labs (40.5M in 90 days).

MrNasdog Pressure Framework · Inflation Analysis

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

SUI is inflationary on its circulating float. In the 90 days to Oct 1 2026 the Sui network added 66.34M SUI to the market — 25.83M paid to stakers from a launch-time pot and 40.52M from monthly releases to early contributors, the community reserve and Mysten Labs — and took 0 away, for net supply growth of +1.62%. The next 90 days project +1.20%, because the SUI staking payout drops 10% on Oct 14 2026 and the monthly releases keep shrinking. Total SUI supply is capped at 10B; the open question is how fast the 5.90B still outside the market comes out.

The verdict, in one paragraph

The framework reads SUI at +1.62% net supply growth over the last 90 days and +1.20% over the next 90. The inflation monitor reads +1.47% for the same 90 days, a gap of −0.15 percentage points, well inside the 0.5-point tolerance, so no warning chip is shown. Every new SUI in the window came from coins that were made at launch and held back; no SUI was minted and none was burned. The cite-able label: a fixed-cap chain that is inflationary on its float by schedule, with a staking subsidy that steps down every 90 days.

Sell pressure: where new SUI comes from

Protocol inflation: 25.83M SUI. Sui pays stakers each 24-hour epoch from a stake subsidy pot set aside at launch. The SUI payout was 313,811 per epoch until Jul 16 2026, when it fell 10% to 282,430; across epochs 1177 to 1266 the pot paid exactly 25,826,612 SUI, and its balance fell by the same amount, to 232.4M SUI. The next 10% cut lands on Oct 14 2026, to 254,187 SUI per epoch, so the next 90 days carry about 23.24M.

Vesting unlocks: 22.31M SUI. Early contributors receive a SUI release on the 1st of every month: 7.65M on Aug 1, 7.46M on Sep 1 and 7.19M on Oct 1 2026, each a little smaller than the last. The Series A and Series B investor releases ended in May 2026, which is why the monthly unlock fell by more than half in June. Next: about 7.08M on Nov 1 and 6.90M on Dec 1 2026, 13.98M in all.

Foundation + unscheduled unlocks: 18.21M SUI. On the same days the community reserve receives 4.00M SUI and the Mysten Labs treasury 2.07M, 6.07M a month. Three releases fell in the window; two fall in the next one, 12.14M. These amounts follow the Sui Foundation's own published circulation calendar, which is also the figure the market uses for circulating supply, so each release counts once, on its date.

Long-term locked or bankruptcy: 0. There is no estate or trustee holding SUI. A listed company holds about 109M SUI and has lent 6M of it to a trading app until Sep 2028, but no lock or court release falls inside the next 90 days.

Buy pressure: where new SUI goes

Programmatic buyback: 0. The Sui Foundation buys SUI on the open market every day, paid for with the interest earned on stablecoins held on Sui — about 715.8K SUI for about $547.7K in these 90 days. The Foundation does not burn or hold that SUI; it hands it out to apps, validators and partners, so the coins come from the market and go straight back to it. The SUI buyback is real buying, but it removes nothing from supply.

Protocol fee burn: 0. Sui has no burn: all 10B SUI still exist. Computation fees, about 238,669 SUI in 90 days, are paid to stakers. Storage fees go into a storage fund that grew 190,288 SUI to 2.85M and are paid back when data is deleted, so the fund is a deposit, not a sink.

Foundation buy: 0. Apart from the buyback, no Foundation or team purchase of SUI appeared in announcements or news during the window. New long-term lock: 0. About 7.02B SUI is staked, down from 7.16B at the start of the window; Sui staking has no fixed lock and does not change the circulating count.

Foundation and overhang

Of the 10B SUI, 4.10B circulate and 5.90B sit outside the market. About 0.69Bof that is on the Sui Foundation's published calendar through May 2030 — the monthly releases to early contributors, the community reserve and Mysten Labs, plus staking payouts. The remaining 5.22B has no release date yet. The stake subsidy pot holds 232.4M SUI and pays out every epoch at a set rate. The buyback destination holds nothing by design. The calendar is checked at every rebuild and the subsidy pot every day; if any of these balances falls faster than the calendar says between refreshes, the outflow enters the Foundation + unscheduled unlocks row at the next refresh.

How SUI compares to other Move-based and staking Layer 1s

SUI sits in a small group of Layer 1s with a fixed 10B cap made in full at launch. Nothing new is ever minted: inflation on the market comes only from coins held back at launch and released later. Aptos, the other large Move-based chain, works the other way — it pays stakers by minting new APT, so its total supply keeps rising. For SUI the total never moves; only the share that is free to trade does.

Compared with Ethereum and Solana, the difference is the burn. Ethereum destroys the base fee on every transaction and Solana burns part of its fees, so heavy use can offset some issuance. Sui burns nothing: its fees go to stakers and a refundable storage fund, so more activity raises staker income but never shrinks supply. The Foundation's stablecoin-funded buyback is the closest thing to a buyer built into Sui, and it recycles the coins rather than removing them.

The SUI subsidy also has a built-in brake that most staking chains lack: a 10% cut every 90 epochs. Together with the end of investor releases in May 2026, that makes SUI's float growth slow down step by step — from more than 52M a month in early 2026 to about 21M a month now, by the Foundation's own calendar.

What to watch in the next 90 days

Oct 14 2026: the SUI staking subsidy steps down 10%, to 254,187 SUI per epoch, about 28,243 SUI a day less.

Nov 1 2026 and Dec 1 2026: the monthly releases, about 13.15M and 12.97M SUI, to early contributors, the community reserve and Mysten Labs.

Any change to the Sui Foundation calendar: the 5.22B SUI with no release date is the largest overhang; a new schedule for it would change this reading more than anything else.

The buyback's destination: if the Foundation ever starts burning or holding the SUI it buys, the buy side would stop being zero.

Summary

SUI is inflationary on its circulating float: +1.62% in the last 90 days and a projected +1.20% in the next 90, with the inflation monitor at +1.47%. All of it comes from coins made at launch — stake subsidies and monthly releases — while nothing is minted and nothing is burned, and the Foundation's buyback hands its coins back out. The pace slows each quarter as the subsidy steps down, but 5.90B SUI still sit outside the market, and 5.22B of them have no release date. The cap is fixed at 10B; the risk is the timing of the rest.

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