$450 million financing for the Sui treasury launch, what is the background of this company?

Stock price has big pump of 300% in three days, "Sui Micro Strategy" makes its debut.

Written by: kkk, Rhythm

On July 28, Mill City Ventures III, Ltd. (stock code: MCVT) announced a $450 million private placement financing to launch the SUI treasury strategy. Hedge fund Karatage serves as the lead investor, and the Sui Foundation also provided a matching investment. Well-known institutions such as Galaxy Digital, Pantera Capital, and Electric Capital have also come out to support this initiative, and Galaxy Asset Management will oversee Mill City's financial operations, further enhancing market confidence.

Driven by news, the stock price of MCVT surged from 2 dollars to a peak of 8 dollars within three days, with a cumulative rise of up to 400%. It closed at 6.65 dollars yesterday. This not only marks the official entry of a traditional publicly listed financial company into a new era of crypto infrastructure but also announces the launch of another "altcoin microstrategy". Following ETH, SOL, and BNB, SUI is welcoming its institutional consensus moment.

Two Major Institutions Join Forces to Promote SUI Micro Strategy: Karatage and Sui Foundation Appear

Mill City Ventures III, Ltd., a non-bank lending institution and financial company, recently announced that it has signed a securities purchase agreement to invest in public equity through a private investment, purchasing and selling 83,025,830 shares of common stock at a price of $5.42 per share, with total proceeds expected to be approximately $450 million. The issuance is expected to be completed around July 31, 2025. The company plans to use approximately 98% of the net proceeds from the private placement to acquire the native token SUI of the Sui blockchain, and approximately 2% of the net proceeds to support the company's short-term lending business. SUI will serve as the company's primary financial reserve asset. This strategic shift marks Mill City's transformation from its traditional business of short-term lending and specialized financing, officially entering a new era of financial structure centered around crypto-native assets.

The smooth progress of this transformation is inseparable from the deep involvement and full support of Karatage and the Sui Foundation.

This round of financing is led by the London-based hedge fund Karatage. This proprietary fund, focused on digital assets and cutting-edge technology, was co-founded by Marius Barnett and Stephen Mackintosh. They not only participated in the funding but also directly engaged in the strategic formulation and governance restructuring of Mill City—Barnett will serve as the chairman of the board, while Mackintosh will take on the role of chief investment officer, fully responsible for the company's SUI investment execution and asset management.

In fact, the addition of Karatage is not a spur-of-the-moment decision, but rather has a profound strategic foundation. The fund participated in the construction of core protocols such as Walrus and Suilend early in the Sui ecosystem and established a long-term partnership with Sui's original contributor, Mysten Labs, accumulating rich experience in ecological operation. Mysten Labs is the technical core supporting the Sui Network, founded in 2021 by former Meta-Novi R&D director Evan Cheng and chief engineer Sam Blackshear, and has led the development of key infrastructures such as Sui Wallet and Sui Explorer.

Stephen Mackintosh, co-founder of Karatage, pointed out that "We are at a critical moment where institutional cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence are reaching a tipping point, which will bring significant opportunities for the entire blockchain infrastructure. Sui has the speed and efficiency required by institutions for large-scale cryptocurrency, as well as a technological architecture capable of supporting artificial intelligence workloads while maintaining security and decentralization, thus is fully capable of being adopted on a large scale."

With these early deep engagements and technical collaborations, Karatage has a profound understanding of the architecture and ecological development path of the Sui network, and it provides strong confidence endorsement and execution support for Mill City's strategic transformation.

In addition, the Sui Foundation is also one of the important drivers of this strategic transformation, not only participating in this round of financing but also continuously supporting the development and growth of the entire Sui ecosystem through various means.

As an independent organization dedicated to promoting the construction and application of the Sui network, the Sui Foundation is not only an early core investor but also an important driving force behind the prosperity of the ecosystem. The Sui Foundation has been committed to building the Sui ecosystem, including providing funding to developers, supporting the construction of the next generation of decentralized applications (dApps), and further improving the core infrastructure on the Sui network, such as the DeepBook centralized limit order book (CLOB), automated market maker mechanism (AMM), liquidity staking protocols, and lending systems.

The foundation has consistently adhered to the strategy of "repurchase and redistribution," reasonably allocating resources to channel funds back into the projects that drive the most growth for the network. At the same time, the Sui Foundation continues to provide SUI token incentives to top DeFi protocols. Currently, almost all leading projects within the ecosystem have received official support, greatly enhancing the TVL and actual usage popularity of the Sui network, and also driving the price of the SUI token to traverse bull and bear markets with long-term stable performance.

As Christian Thompson, Managing Director of the Sui Foundation, stated: "The establishment of Sui is to provide the necessary scalability, speed, and security to support the next generation of decentralized applications and real-world crypto use cases, aimed at both consumers and institutions—from stablecoins to artificial intelligence, to gaming and broader finance."

As a groundbreaking Layer 1 hailed as "one of the most outstanding blockchain networks," Sui, with its industry-leading throughput capability and concurrent architecture, is attracting the attention and trust of more and more developers and institutions, becoming an important focus of the altcoin micro-strategy in the crypto world.

Summary

The Sui ecosystem is experiencing a big pump due to artificial intelligence and decentralized finance. Currently, the total value locked (TVL) on Sui has surpassed 2 billion USD, setting a historical record, and the daily trading volume is also rising steadily, significantly increasing the ecosystem's activity. On July 27, the price of SUI reached as high as 4.5 USD, marking a new high in six months and making it one of the most outstanding altcoins recently.

From the treasury micro-strategy of Mill City to the collaboration between Karatage and the foundation, Sui not only demonstrates strong capital attraction but also proves that its technical architecture and ecological potential are gaining mainstream recognition. A micro-strategy paradigm driven by institutions and powered by the ecosystem is gradually taking shape, and the subsequent performance of Sui is worth looking forward to.