A pseudonymous crypto founder with very public criticisms of DeFi’s points trend opened up his own points program on Suilend, one of the fastest growing borrow-and-lending protocols on the Sui blockchain.
Launched Tuesday, Suilend’s incentives program addresses some of the most jarring issues that founder Rooter said protocols run into when wooing users with points. Countless protocols ran their own points programs over the past 12 months, almost always as the prelude to a token.
Sui’s DeFi landscape grew nearly threefold this year on the back of the resurgent market and boosted by the Sui Foundation’s “Sui Rewards” incentives programs to attract new users. Protocols including Suilend offered interest rates as high as 19% on stablecoin deposits because of that program.
Points programs pervade Sui DeFi as well as Solana, a rival ecosystem that Rooter and Suilend’s team knew well. They previously built Solend, one of Solana’s largest borrow-and-lend protocols.
Rooter has previously taken umbrage at some Solana programs’ tendency to obfuscate how their points work behind the scenes. “Points today are predatory, lazy and are really just gambling,” he wrote in a late March article for Consensus Magazine that was highly critical of “black box” tactics.
One notable difference in Sui’s points program is its reliance on blockchain tech, Rooter said. In an interview with CoinDesk, Rooter said the points earned by users for, say, depositing USDC will be recorded on the blockchain, where other smart contracts can digest the data.
“The design space is open for people to build stuff on top of this,” he said.
Suilend will hand out 10 million points daily in proportional amounts to all users, Rooter said. The more deposits one has, the greater share of the pie they’ll get.
At $45 million in total-value-locked, Suilend was the third-largest borrow-and-lend protocol on Sui behind Navi ($121 million) and Scallop ($112 million), according to DefiLlama. Its TVL grew 44% in the past month, far outpacing those lending rivals and all other Sui protocols that DefiLlama tracked.
Suilend’s points program will likely continue for “months,” Rooter said. He was reluctant to speak in absolutes but stressed it won’t run “forever.” He also declined to say if it would ultimately yield a token – not an unusual stance as founders often balk at openly discussing those points due to regulatory concerns.