# Sui Blockchain

By [Amrit](https://paragraph.com/@argha-2) · 2023-03-13

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Sui is the first permissionless Layer 1 blockchain designed from the ground up to enable creators and developers to build experiences that cater to the next billion users in web3. Sui is horizontally scalable to support a wide range of application development with the unrivaled speed at a low cost.

**What is Sui ?**

Sui is a [smart contract](https://docs.sui.io/devnet/learn/sui-glossary#smart-contract) platform maintained by a permissionless set of [validators](https://docs.sui.io/devnet/learn/sui-glossary#validator) that play a role similar to validators or miners in other blockchain systems.

Sui offers scalability and unprecedented low latency for simple use cases. Sui makes most transactions processable in parallel. This better utilizes processing resources and offers the option to increase throughput by adding more resources. Sui forgoes consensus to instead use simpler and lower-latency primitives for simple use cases, such as payment transactions and asset transfers. This is unprecedented in the blockchain world and enables a number of new latency-sensitive distributed applications ranging from gaming to retail payment at physical points of sale.

Sui is written in [Rust](https://www.rust-lang.org/) and supports smart contracts written in the [Move programming language](https://golden.com/wiki/Move_\(programming_language\)-MNA4DZ6) to define assets that may have an owner. Move programs define operations on these assets, including customs rules for their creation, the transfer of these assets to new owners, and operations that mutate assets.

**Sui tokens and validators :**

Sui has a native token called SUI, with a fixed supply. The SUI token is used to pay for gas and is also used as a [delegated stake on validators](https://learn.bybit.com/blockchain/delegated-proof-of-stake-dpos/) within an epoch. The voting power of validators within this epoch is a function of this delegated stake. Validators are periodically reconfigured according to the stake delegated to them. In any epoch, the set of validators is [Byzantine fault tolerant](https://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/osdi99.pdf). At the end of the epoch, fees collected through all transactions processed are distributed to validators according to their contribution to the operation of the system. Validators can in turn share some of the fees as rewards to users that delegated stakes to them.

**Some important features of Sui :**

1.  A transaction in Sui is a change to the blockchain. This may be a _simple transaction_ affecting only single-owner, single-address objects, such as minting an NFT or transferring an NFT or a different token. These _simple transactions_ may bypass the consensus protocol in Sui.
    
2.  Sui scales horizontally with no upper bound to meet application demand while maintaining extremely low operating costs per transaction. Its system design breakthrough eliminates a critical bottleneck in existing blockchains: the need to achieve global consensus on a total-ordered list of transactions. This computation is wasteful given many transactions are not contending for the same resource against other transactions.
    
3.  Sui takes a significant leap in scalability by enabling parallel agreement on causally independent transactions. Sui validators commit such transactions using Byzantine Consistent Broadcast, eliminating the overhead of global consensus without sacrificing safety and liveness guarantees.
    
4.  Sui scales horizontally to meet the demands of applications. Network capacity grows in proportion to the increase in Sui validators’ processing power by adding workers, resulting in low gas fees even during high network traffic. This scalability characteristic is in sharp contrast to other blockchains with rigid bottlenecks.
    
5.  Move smart contracts to power Sui applications. The move is a programming language initially developed at Facebook for writing safe smart contracts. It is a platform-agnostic language that enables shared libraries, tooling, and developer communities across blockchains.
    
6.  Move’s design prevents issues such as [reentrancy vulnerabilities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reentrancy_\(computing\)), [poison tokens](https://www.theblock.co/post/112339/creative-attacker-steals-76000-in-rune-by-giving-out-free-tokens), and [spoofed token approvals](https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/20/22943228/opensea-phishing-hack-smart-contract-bug-stolen-nft) that attackers have leveraged to steal millions on other platforms. Its emphasis on safety and expressivity makes it easier for developers to transition from web2 to web3 without understanding the intricacies of the underlying infrastructure.
    
7.  Sui’s scalability is not limited to transaction processing. Storage is also low-cost and horizontally scalable. This enables developers to define complex assets with rich attributes that live directly on-chain instead of introducing layers of indirection into off-chain storage to save on gas fees. Moving attributes on-chain unlocks the ability to implement application logic that uses these attributes in smart contracts, increasing composability and transparency for applications.
    
    **Highlights of Sui :**
    
    1.  Unmatched scalability, instant settlement
        
    2.  A safe smart contract language accessible to mainstream developers
        
    3.  Ability to define rich and composable on-chain assets
        
    4.  Better user experience for web3 apps
        
    5.  [Narwhal and Bullshark](https://docs.sui.io/devnet/learn/architecture/consensus) DAG-based mem pool and efficient Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus
        

**Security features of Sui :**

1.  Only the owner of an owned asset can authorize a transaction that operates on this asset. Authorization is performed through the use of a private signature key that is known only to the asset owner.
    
2.  Everyone can operate on shared assets or immutable assets, but additional access control logic can be implemented by the smart contract.
    
3.  Transactions operate on assets according to predefined rules set by the smart contract creator that defined the asset type. These are expressed using the Move language.
    
4.  Once a transaction is finalized, its effects — namely changes to the assets it operates on or new assets created — will be persisted, and the resulting assets will be available for further processing.
    
5.  The Sui system operates through a protocol between a set of independent validators. Yet all its security properties are preserved when a small subset of the validators do not follow the protocol.
    
6.  All operations in Sui can be audited to ensure any assets have been correctly processed. This implies all operations on Sui are visible to all, and users may wish to use multiple different addresses to protect their privacy.
    
7.  Validators are determined periodically through users of Sui locking and delegating SUI tokens to one or more validators.
    

**Sui Tokenomics :**

Sui’s native asset is called SUI and we generally use the capitalized version of SUI to distinguish the token from the Sui platform.

The total supply of SUI is capped at 10,000,000,000 (i.e. ten billion tokens). A share of SUI’s total supply will be liquid at the main net launch, with the remaining tokens vesting over the coming years or distributed as future stake reward subsidies. Each SUI token is divisible up to a large number of decimal places.

**Tokenomics White Paper :**

[https://github.com/MystenLabs/sui/blob/main/doc/paper/tokenomics.pdf/](https://github.com/MystenLabs/sui/blob/main/doc/paper/tokenomics.pdf/)

**The SUI token serves four purposes on the Sui platform:**

*   You can stake SUI to participate in the proof-of-stake mechanism.
    
*   SUI is the asset denomination needed for paying the gas fees required to execute and store transactions or other operations on the Sui platform.
    
*   SUI can be used as a versatile and liquid asset for various applications including the standard features of money — a unit of account, a medium of exchange, or a store of value — and more complex functionality enabled by smart contracts, interoperability, and composability across the Sui ecosystem.
    
*   SUI token plays an important role in governance by acting as a right to participate in on-chain voting on issues such as protocol upgrades.
    

**The official accounts of Sui ~**

_~Mysten Labs~_

_Website:_ _https://mystenlabs.com/_

_Medium:_ [_https://medium.com/mysten-labs_](https://medium.com/mysten-labs)

~Sui~

_Website:_ [_https://sui.io/_](https://sui.io/)

_Twitter:_ [_https://twitter.com/SuiNetwork_](https://twitter.com/SuiNetwork)

_Developer Documentation:_ [_https://docs.sui.io/_](https://docs.sui.io/)

_Github:_ [_https://github.com/MystenLabs/sui_](https://github.com/MystenLabs/sui)

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*Originally published on [Amrit](https://paragraph.com/@argha-2/sui-blockchain)*