NAVI Protocol has launched NAVI Prime, an institutional lending framework deployed on the Sui blockchain and aimed at funds that require greater clarity, transparency, and control over capital management. The announcement, made on Aug. 17, 2026, positions the new product as an extension of NAVI Protocol’s existing liquidity role within the Sui ecosystem, with a specific focus on professional and institutional market participants rather than retail borrowers and lenders.
NAVI Prime’s design emphasizes transparent and controllable fund management through onchain lending. Because the framework runs on Sui, participating funds can use the network’s object-based infrastructure for clearer oversight of assets. NAVI Protocol said the product was built for funds seeking more authority over how their assets are managed in lending environments. The protocol already operates lending and borrowing markets on Sui, supporting tokens including SUI, USDC, USDT, wrapped Ether, and wrapped Bitcoin, along with isolated lending pools and flash loans. According to DefiLlama, NAVI Protocol managed approximately $124.6 million in total value locked as of Aug. 17, with active loans near $65.8 million. Over the preceding 30 days, the protocol generated about $404,300 in fees and roughly $153,700 in revenue, while annualized fees were estimated at $23.2 million. NAVI’s NAVX governance token had a circulating market value of about $5.7 million, with 816.2 million tokens circulating from a maximum supply of 1 billion. NAVI Protocol raised $4 million through two early 2024 funding rounds from investors including OKX Ventures, Hashed, Mysten Labs, Mechanism Capital, Coin98 Ventures, and Gate.io.
The Sui ecosystem has expanded its dollar-denominated lending assets. NAVI supported native USDC from its first day on Sui in October 2024, and in June 2025 it ran a two-month xBTC campaign with OKX that offered $700,000 in incentives. NAVI co-founder Elliscope Fang said the partnership was intended to develop BTC-based decentralized finance within the Sui ecosystem. More recently, Sui added the USDsui stablecoin from Bridge, a Stripe subsidiary, in March 2026, with NAVI among the Sui applications supporting the asset from mainnet release. For regulated U.S. exposure, CME Group launched SUI futures in May 2026, offering standard contracts of 50,000 SUI and micro contracts of 5,000 SUI, settled in cash using the CME CF Sui-Dollar Reference Rate.
A separate comparative analysis published on Aug. 18, 2026, argues that Solana remains the more established Layer-1 choice, while Sui wins on technology but trails on nearly every adoption metric. The piece reports Solana’s price near $76.05 with a market cap of roughly $44.5 billion and DeFi TVL around $4.9 billion, versus Sui’s price around $0.65, market cap near $2.7 billion, and DeFi TVL around $450 million. It highlights that Sui’s DeFi TVL collapsed from roughly $2.1 billion in Q3 2025 to about $450 million, and that Sui’s daily DEX volume was recently near $17.7 million compared with billions on Solana. The analysis credits Sui’s object-based architecture, Move language, and Mysten Labs’ Diem and Novi engineering background for a technology advantage, but gives Solana the edge in ecosystem, economics, tokenomics, and risk. It notes Sui’s fully diluted valuation near $6.7 billion and scheduled token unlocks have repeatedly capped rallies, while Solana’s more mature float and deeper application layer make it the lower-risk incumbent. The report concludes that a sustained reversal in Sui’s TVL and DEX volume trends would be the key factor that could overturn the verdict.
