How do SUI tokenomics work?

SUI tokenomics rest on three pieces. There's a fixed supply of 10 billion SUI with no inflation. There's a stake reward that each epoch pays stakers the computation gas fees plus a temporary stake subsidy drawn from a pre-funded pool. And there's a storage fund, which holds users' storage fees and earns stake rewards on that balance to pay validators for storing data over time. Validators also set the gas price together each epoch.

Participants

The docs describe three groups. Users submit transactions and pay gas. SUI holders delegate stake to validators. Validators process transactions and earn rewards based on their stake. Validators also get a share of the storage fund's rewards.

Stake rewards and the subsidy

At the end of each epoch, the protocol adds the epoch's computation fees to the stake subsidy and splits the total among validators' staking pools by stake. Each validator keeps its commission and the rest goes to its stakers.

The subsidy comes from SUI set aside at genesis, not from new minting. The stake_subsidy module pays out a fixed amount per epoch and cuts it at the end of every period:

Parameter (mainnet system state, epoch 1291)	Value
Subsidy started at epoch	20
Current payout per epoch	~254,186.58 SUI
Period length	90 epochs
Decrease per period	10% (1000 basis points)
Remaining subsidy balance	~225.97 million SUI

For epoch 1290, total stake rewards were about 256,516 SUI. About 254,187 SUI of that was subsidy and about 2,330 SUI was gas fees. That means the subsidy currently makes up most of staking yield. The docs describe it as temporary, shrinking as circulating supply approaches the total.

Gas price

At the start of each epoch, every validator submits the minimum gas price it will accept. The protocol takes the 2/3 percentile by stake as the reference gas price. Users can pay more to tip for priority on congested shared objects. As of epoch 1291 (2026-10-25), the reference gas price is 100 MIST per computation unit. See gas on Sui.

Storage fund

Storage fees go into the storage fund, which counts toward total stake and earns rewards. Most of its rewards go to validators to pay for storage, and 5% (the storage_fund_reinvest_rate protocol setting) is reinvested in the fund. Only returns are paid out, never principal. Deleting data refunds most of the original storage fee.

Token allocation

The Sui Foundation published the allocation in December 2022. A Community Reserve it manages holds "more than half" of all SUI and pays for delegation programs, grants, research and early stake subsidies. The other buckets are early contributors, investors, the Mysten Labs treasury, and the Community Access Program. About 5% of supply circulated at launch, and the rest unlocks on a published schedule. Exact current percentages change over time, so check the Foundation's token schedule page instead of relying on old figures.

Read the live numbers

TypeScript

import { SuiGrpcClient } from '@mysten/sui/grpc'

const client = new SuiGrpcClient({
  network: 'mainnet',
  baseUrl: 'https://fullnode.mainnet.sui.io:443',
})

const { systemState } = await client.getCurrentSystemState()
console.log(systemState.epoch, systemState.referenceGasPrice, systemState.stakeSubsidy)

Per-epoch totals (totalStakeRewards, totalStakeSubsidies, totalGasFees, fundSize) can be queried over GraphQL with epoch(epochId: N).

Sources

Tokenomics, Sui documentation
stake_subsidy.move, MystenLabs/sui on GitHub
SUI token allocation, Sui blog
Gas in Sui, Sui documentation