Why Sui Is Betting on Agentic Payments To Edge Out Other Blockchains
Sui co-founder Adeniyi Abiodun explains why payments are the new target
By Zack Guzman
June 4, 2026
The WhatsApp of money was supposed to be built inside Meta years ago with the Libra payments project that never was.
Instead, it may end up being built on Sui.
That’s the argument Sui co-founder Adeniyi Abiodun is making as stablecoins finally move from crypto speculation into the real world of payments. After years of chasing the promise of blockchain-based money movement, Abiodun believes the industry is finally approaching the point where sending money can become as simple — and as free — as sending a text message.
For Abiodun, the vision is hardly new. Before founding Mysten Labs, he and the rest of Sui’s co-founders worked at Meta on the company’s ambitious Libra project, which sought to reinvent global payments before being ultimately abandoned under regulatory pressure. But the core idea never disappeared.
“While we're at Meta, like our goal was to simplify sending money as easy as it is to send messages,” Abiodun told Coinage in a new interview. “Sending messages is ultimately free on the internet today and a number of platforms make that possible.”
Now, he argues, the blockchain industry finally has the pieces Meta was never able to build.
Sui recently launched support for gasless stablecoin transfers, allowing users to send supported stablecoins without holding SUI tokens to pay transaction fees. The feature is designed to remove one of crypto’s longest-standing onboarding problems: Requiring users to understand wallets and buy crypto to cover transaction fees before they can move money.
“We couldn't realize that in Libra,” Abiodun said. “But, you know, we're very glad today that we've been able to achieve that with Sui.”
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The announcement comes as stablecoins have emerged as one of crypto’s fastest-growing sectors. With regulators advancing stablecoin legislation and major financial institutions increasingly exploring blockchain-based payment rails, the conversation has shifted away from whether stablecoins will matter toward how they’ll be used.
Abiodun believes the next frontier isn’t just payments — it’s AI. “Stablecoins would be the language of money that agents use,” he said.
The theory is simple. If AI agents are eventually booking flights, making purchases, managing subscriptions, or handling business operations autonomously, they will need a native payment system. Traditional financial infrastructure was built for human interactions. Agentic commerce requires something faster, cheaper, and programmable.
To support that vision, Sui recently unveiled a feature called Payment Intents, which allows multiple transactions and actions to execute together atomically. Rather than an AI booking a flight, then separately attempting to reserve a hotel and risking failure midway through the process, the transactions can execute as a single coordinated action.
“The internet needs to work at the speed that agents need,” Abiodun said. But if AI is one pillar of Sui’s strategy, scale is the other. And the Sui community has long believed that their chain is one of the only ones that will be able to meet the moment.
“Fundamentally, we believe all existing chains will fail under real load,” he said.
The critique stems from the team’s background building systems at Meta. According to Abiodun, most blockchains were architected for early crypto users rather than billions of consumers and automated agents. Sui’s approach, he argues, mirrors the philosophy behind companies like Google and Amazon: Capacity should expand dynamically as demand grows rather than operate within fixed limits.
That same philosophy extends to privacy.
One of crypto’s long-running contradictions is that public blockchains make transactions transparent while consumers generally expect financial privacy. Sui plans to launch privacy features later this year that conceal transaction details while still allowing compliance and auditing where necessary.
“What consumers expect today is that when they do a transaction... they don't broadcast your entire history,” Abiodun said.
The combination of free transfers, privacy, stablecoins, and AI-native infrastructure has led Sui to increasingly position itself not as a general-purpose blockchain but as a payments network.
That distinction has become more explicit as the industry matures.
After years of narratives centered around NFTs, gaming, DeFi, and memecoins, Abiodun believes crypto is finally returning to its most important use case: moving money.
“Our goal for Sui is to replace Swift, CHIPS (Clearing House Interbank Payments System) any form of traditional rail that you use to move money before,” he said. “There will be no reason to operate traditional payment technologies.”
It’s an ambitious vision. Replacing global payment infrastructure is easier said than done, especially when incumbents like Visa, Mastercard, and SWIFT process trillions of dollars annually. Yet the timing may be working in crypto’s favor. Stablecoins are increasingly being embraced by banks, regulators are beginning to provide legal clarity, and enterprises are searching for cheaper settlement rails.
For Abiodun, the destination remains the same one he was chasing years ago inside Meta.
“If you had to say, what is the goal of Sui,” he said, “it's to build a public good for everybody to make money movement as simple and as free as messaging.”
