What does Sui stand for, and how do you pronounce it?
October 26, 2026
Sui doesn't stand for anything. It's a name, not an acronym, so you write it "Sui" (not "SUI") when you mean the blockchain. It is usually pronounced "swee", like "sweet" without the final t. The name is widely reported to come from the Japanese word sui (水), meaning water, but we couldn't find an official Mysten Labs statement explaining where the name came from.
Sui vs SUI vs MIST
The capitalization tells you which thing someone means:
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Sui | The blockchain and network |
| SUI | The native token, used for gas, staking and governance |
| MIST | The smallest unit of SUI. 1 SUI = 1,000,000,000 MIST |
| Sui Move | The Move dialect used to write Sui smart contracts |
The framework defines the MIST relationship directly in sui::sui:
/// The amount of Mist per Sui token based on the fact that mist is
/// 10^-9 of a Sui token
const MIST_PER_SUI: u64 = 1_000_000_000;That's why CLI flags such as --gas-budget and SDK fields such as referenceGasPrice are in MIST, not SUI. A gas budget of 10000000 is 0.01 SUI.
Other names in the ecosystem
Several products built around Sui have their own names, which makes searching harder:
- Mysticeti is Sui's consensus protocol (see what is Mysticeti).
- Walrus is the decentralized blob storage network coordinated on Sui (see what is Walrus).
- Slush is the Mysten Labs wallet, formed in April 2025 when Sui Wallet and Stashed were merged (see is Sui Wallet now Slush).
- Mysten Labs is the company that built Sui, and the Sui Foundation supports the ecosystem (see who created Sui).
What we couldn't confirm
Exchange explainers and blogs agree on the "swee" pronunciation and the water meaning. Primary sources such as the Sui docs, the whitepaper and the Sui blog don't explain the name, though. Treat the water story as widely repeated, not documented.
Sources
sui::suimodule source, MystenLabs/sui on GitHub- sui::sui reference, Sui documentation
- Sui Wallet and Stashed are now Slush, Mysten Labs blog