What is the SUI token used for?

SUI is Sui's native token, and the docs list four uses for it. It pays gas (computation and storage fees) on every transaction. It gets staked with validators, which decides who runs the network and earns rewards. It works as a liquid asset inside apps. And it gives holders a say in governance, such as protocol upgrades. Supply is capped at 10 billion SUI, and each SUI divides into 10^9 MIST.

Paying for gas

Every transaction pays a computation fee and a storage fee in SUI. Gas is usually paid from a Coin<SUI> object. The storage portion goes into the storage fund, and you get most of it back when you delete the data. Details are in gas on Sui and the storage fund.

Amounts on the wire are always in MIST:

Terminal

# send 1 SUI (10^9 MIST) with a 0.01 SUI gas budget
sui client transfer-sui --to 0xRECIPIENT --sui-coin-object-id 0xCOIN \
  --amount 1000000000 --gas-budget 10000000

Staking

Sui is delegated proof of stake. Holders stake SUI to a validator's staking pool and receive a StakedSui object. Stake decides each validator's voting power for the next epoch, and stakers earn a share of each epoch's rewards (gas fees plus a temporary stake subsidy), minus the validator's commission. Your SUI stays in the staking pool, which you control through StakedSui. The validator never holds it. See staking SUI and how to unstake.

As of epoch 1291 (2026-10-25), about 7.08 billion SUI is staked across 125 active validators, according to the onchain system state.

A liquid asset in apps

Coin<SUI> is an ordinary Move coin type (0x2::sui::SUI), so apps can take it as payment, use it as collateral, trade it on DeepBook, or hold it in their own objects. A Move function can accept it like any other coin:

Move

module example::shop;

use sui::coin::Coin;
use sui::sui::SUI;

public fun buy(payment: Coin<SUI>, seller: address) {
    transfer::public_transfer(payment, seller);
}

Governance

SUI stake carries voting weight. Validators vote on protocol upgrades by signaling support for new protocol versions, and their weight comes from the SUI staked with them.

Checking it yourself

The SUI coin metadata and supply are available over GraphQL: