Sui’s incredible DeFi momentum—which has seen TVL increase by more than 500% since September—will be exacerbated by Solend’s expansion.

The top Solana lending and borrowing protocol, Solend, has today announced that it will soon launch on the Sui blockchain. The Sui team consists of IT industry heavyweights that came out of Facebook’s blockchain program. With this new connection, Solend has deployed on a blockchain other than Solana for the first time, demonstrating the team’s faith in Sui’s technology and ability to be a reliable long-term partner.

Solend, the biggest loan and borrowing product on Solana, covers over 70 assets and has over $140 million in total value locked (TVL) among more than 170,000 members. One of Solana’s most well-known platforms for DeFi development is Solend, which also offers more than 20 developer integrations. By expanding to Sui, Solend will be able to reach a more extensive user base and attract other builders to the Sui ecosystem with its extensive DeFi services.

Rooter, the pseudonymous Founder of Solend, said, “We’re not maximalists by any means — I left that behind when I left Ethereum. We’re building on Sui for the same reason we decided to build on Solana three years ago: because they’re doing something special. For Solana it was performance, for Sui it’s the developer experience. The current state of smart contracts doesn’t reflect the aspirations of the industry. Move fixes this. Most of the team is 100% focused on Solana, and we’ve spun up a sub-team dedicated to Sui.”

The announcement of Solend’s growth follows that of Bluefin, a rising DEX with a daily turnover of over $100 million, which declared that they would build their V2 only on Sui and unveiled a feature plan that extends well into 2024.

A developing DeFi platform has to protect the resources entrusted to it, and Sui is doing everything in its power to protect its ecosystem. Sui’s security begins with the Move language’s built-in security mechanisms, which give smart contracts on Sui additional protection. Sui also provides support to its developers by collaborating with partners and top blockchain security companies, Zellic and Ottersec, to inspect the codebases of particular projects. Their thorough audits will help Solend’s code by guaranteeing that the program satisfies the highest security requirements and is completely compatible with the Sui blockchain.

Simultaneously, DeFi application developers also place a high priority on superior network speed and user-friendliness. Sui’s DeFi initiatives benefit from the network’s widespread usage of parallel processing for most transactions, which achieves historically low latency and allows for horizontal scaling. With this same technology stack, Sui was able to set a standard for peak throughput of up to 297,000 TPS and time to finality of ~480 milliseconds. In only four months, Sui also became the first blockchain network to process the most transactions in a single day.

“Solend has achieved a level of success that is unmatched by the vast majority of projects in our industry and we are thrilled to welcome them to the Sui ecosystem,” said Greg Siourounis, Managing Director of the Sui Foundation. “Sui was created with the scalability and efficiency that DeFi projects require at its core. We look forward to Solend’s continued upward trajectory building on Sui.”

Similarly, Sui’s native zkLogin feature makes it very simple for new users to onboard using DeFi protocols. This allows end users to authenticate using Web 2 social logins they already know, such as those from Google, Twitch, and other sites. Any DeFi protocol that builds on Sui can use zkLogin to stay non-custodial while removing a significant barrier to the widespread adoption of DeFi protocols on Sui by removing the requirement for new users to maintain wallets and seed phrases.

The Solend team, whose members have worked at industry heavyweights Coinbase, Robinhood, Cruise, Twitch, and Two Sigma, provides a lot of experience from both the Web2 and Web3 worlds. Strong investors such as Dragonfly, Polychain, Race Capital, and Coinbase Ventures support Solend.