Gasless Stablecoins on Sui: Why Mysten Labs Gave Up the Fee

Free transfers by design

Louisa Bai says Mysten Labs grandfathered in all existing stablecoins natively integrated with Sui. "We don't want to add to the cost that ultimately the end user will have to pay for," she says. The company is also part of an open stablecoin alliance, she says.

Next, she says, the company is building confidential transactions so that use cases like payroll can run without someone reading a wallet's monthly pay. The goal is for the infrastructure of blockchain to feel invisible.

A payments chain from the start

Bai says all five cofounders of Mysten Labs came from Meta and worked on the Libra Diem project, which was meant to be a blockchain for payment settlement. Sam Blackshear created Move because other languages were not going to handle real-world payment volumes, she says. Sui drew gaming companies at launch, but she says the founders never meant to build a gaming chain.

She says Move is object based rather than account based, which financial institutions see as an advantage. Perp DEXs can execute very fast and settle near instantaneously, she says, pointing to Aftermath Finance, an external builder on the ecosystem since day one.

Where stablecoins fit

"We're not trying to fix something that's not broken," Louisa Bai says. Her three areas are cross-border payments, dollar access where it is expensive, and agentic payments. She puts the chance of the dollar being replaced in the next five to ten years as quite low, and she questions the need for a Brazilian real stablecoin when Pix is extremely efficient.

The app layer bet

Bai contrasts Solana, which she says succeeded by not building first-party products, with Polygon Labs, which she says has refocused on payments in the past twelve months and made acquisitions to own the full payment flow. Her view is that Mysten Labs should own first-party products and accrue revenue at the app layer. She adds that suppressed token prices limit the bigger bets the company can take.