Sui is the first permissionless Layer 1 blockchain with POS (proof of stake) consensus mechanism designed from the ground up to enable creators and developers to build experiences that cater to the next billion users in web3. It uses the Move programming language to define assets as objects that may be owned by an address.

Developers on Sui write smart contracts with the Sui Move. Sui Move is an upgraded version of Move. Sui Move addressed the embedding and depicted problems on Move. The Move is based on the Rust programming language. MOVE was designed for the Diem blockchain by Facebook, which serves the function of implementing smart contracts and custom transactions. Origins of Move largely arise from the known issues in the existing blockchain programming languages such as Solidity, which has security and verifiability issues. Any asset in Move can be represented by or stored within resources while scarcity is enforced by default since structs cannot be duplicated.

• Announced Date: Dec 6, 2021

• Money Raised: $36M

• Lead Investor: a16z

• Famous Investors: NFX, Scribble Ventures, Redpoint, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Electric Capital, Samsung NEXT, Slow Ventures, Standard Crypto, Coinbase Ventures

• Announced Date: Currently Pending

• Estimated Money Raise: $200M

• Investor (rumored / Known): FTX Ventures

• A total of $236 million is expected to be raised.

The Figure below shows the high-level interactions between a client and Sui authorities to commit a transaction.

• A user with a private signing key creates and signs a user transaction to mutate objects they own, or shared objects, within Sui. Subsequently, user signature keys are not needed, and the remaining of the process may be performed by the user client or a gateway on behalf of the user (denoted as a keyless operation in the diagram).

• The user transaction is sent to the Sui authorities, each checks it for validity, and upon success signs it and returns the signed transaction to the client. The client collects the responses from a quorum of authorities to form a transaction certificate.

• The transaction certificate is then sent back to all authorities, and if the transaction involves shared objects it is also sent to a Byzantine agreement protocol operated by the Sui authorities. Authorities check the certificate, and in case shared objects are involved also wait for the agreement protocol to sequence it in relation to other shared object transactions, and then execute the transaction and summarize its effects into a signed effects response.

• Once a quorum of authorities has executed the certificate its effects are final (denoted as finality in the diagram). Clients can collect a quorum of authority responses and create an effects certificate and use it as proof of the finality of the effects of the transaction.

Token’s name: SUI

Total supply: 10,000,000,000.

Token Utility:

• SUI can be staked within an epoch in order 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 Sui economy contains three main participants:

• Users submit transactions to the Sui platform in order to create, mutate, and transfer digital assets or interact with more sophisticated applications enabled by smart contracts, interoperability, and composability.

• SUI token holders bear the option of delegating their tokens to validators and participating in the proof-of-stake mechanism. SUI owners also hold the right to participate in Sui’s governance.

• Validators manage transaction processing and execution on the Sui platform.

The Sui economy has five core components:

• The SUI token is the Sui platform’s native asset.

• Gas fees are charged on all network operations and used to reward participants of the proof-of-stake mechanism and prevent spam and denial-of-service attacks.

• Sui’s storage fund is used to shift stake rewards across time and compensate future validators for storage costs of previously stored on-chain data.

• The proof-of-stake mechanism is used to select, incentivize, and reward honest behavior by the Sui platform’s operators – i.e. validators and the SUI delegators.

• On-chain voting is used for governance and protocol upgrades.

Throughout, we use the visual representation in the following figure to aid the discussion.

SUI Token Flow:

Core Members of Mysten Labs:

Sui was founded by Mysten Labs. Most of them worked for Diem blockchain and Move programming language before. Four of them worked at META (Facebook) before. Although the team members have the same experience as Aptos team members, they have clarified that there is no relationship between the two projects. The Mysten Labs Team also has many experienced designers, analysts, engineers, and so on. Obviously, it is a professional team, with the ability to develop the Sui very well.

• Both are committed to solving the blockchain trilemma

• Both use Move for their smart contract programming language, but Sui’s Move is a little bit different from Apto’s

• Parallel transaction execution and consensus (for lower latency and higher throughput) based on block software transactional memory (“STM”) – instead of in-order transactions and sequential execution of blocks in other L1 designs

• State synchronization to optimize data availability

• SDK, API for improving DX/UX

• Tier 1 Venture Investor Cap Table

• Valuation (more or less)

• Sui released its whitepaper, but Aptos did not

• Sui’s Move is a little bit different from Aptos’s Move

• Gas Mechanism: Sui is able to keep gas prices low and predictable while incentivizing validators to optimize transaction processing and prevent denial of service (“DoS”) attacks.

• Sui’s SDK is pay more effort on game and NFT, and Aptos’ SDK is pay more effort on DX/UX.

• For Sui, the storage fees are paid separately to transaction execution.

• There are only two projects (Sui wallet and Ethos) that are known on the Sui network, but there are more than one hundred projects on Aptos economy.

In the layer 1 blockchain field, Sui is an excellent blockchain:

1. Strong backers: it was invested by a16z, FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and many famous investors. These investors have supported many famous projects and they also have many professional analysts to choose good projects.

2. Excellent team: all team members are experienced and worked at famous companies and projects before. I'm sure that they have enough strength to develop Sui.

3. High performance: as written in docs, an unoptimized single-worker Sui validator running on an 8-core M1 Macbook Pro can execute and commit 120,000 token transfer transactions per second (TPS). Throughput scales linearly with the number of cores–the same machine processes 25,000 TPS in a single core configuration. High performance can give users very good experiences.

4. Good programming language: Sui uses Move as its programming language. The Move is designed to solve the safety problems for assets on the blockchain.

However, Sui is facing a strong opponent, Aptos. Aptos began to start a few months earlier than Sui, and Aptos have these points better than Sui:

• ~2x community/users (by Discord members and Twitter followers);

• ~3x developer activity (as measured by GitHub stargazers);

• Similar throughput magnitudes, but largely unclear at this point;

• More metrics can be analyzed after the mainnet, such as TVL, active users (wallet addresses), active nodes, minimum staking requirements, etc.

Although Sui is a good Layer 1 blockchain and Sui’s design (the storage fees are paid separately to transaction execution) fills the blank of current Layer 1 blockchains, it still has some shortcomings compared to Aptos. If Sui wants to have the same valuation as Aptos in the series B funding round, it needs to pay more effort into expanding the size of the community and incentivize more developers to build on Sui.

Written by: Lucio Lyu

Twitter: @imLucio_eth

Sui is the first permissionless Layer 1 blockchain with POS (proof of stake) consensus mechanism designed from the ground up to enable creators and developers to build experiences that cater to the next billion users in web3. It uses the Move programming language to define assets as objects that may be owned by an address.

Developers on Sui write smart contracts with the Sui Move. Sui Move is an upgraded version of Move. Sui Move addressed the embedding and depicted problems on Move. The Move is based on the Rust programming language. MOVE was designed for the Diem blockchain by Facebook, which serves the function of implementing smart contracts and custom transactions. Origins of Move largely arise from the known issues in the existing blockchain programming languages such as Solidity, which has security and verifiability issues. Any asset in Move can be represented by or stored within resources while scarcity is enforced by default since structs cannot be duplicated.

• Announced Date: Dec 6, 2021

• Money Raised: $36M

• Lead Investor: a16z

• Famous Investors: NFX, Scribble Ventures, Redpoint, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Electric Capital, Samsung NEXT, Slow Ventures, Standard Crypto, Coinbase Ventures

• Announced Date: Currently Pending

• Estimated Money Raise: $200M

• Investor (rumored / Known): FTX Ventures

• A total of $236 million is expected to be raised.

The Figure below shows the high-level interactions between a client and Sui authorities to commit a transaction.

• A user with a private signing key creates and signs a user transaction to mutate objects they own, or shared objects, within Sui. Subsequently, user signature keys are not needed, and the remaining of the process may be performed by the user client or a gateway on behalf of the user (denoted as a keyless operation in the diagram).

• The user transaction is sent to the Sui authorities, each checks it for validity, and upon success signs it and returns the signed transaction to the client. The client collects the responses from a quorum of authorities to form a transaction certificate.

• The transaction certificate is then sent back to all authorities, and if the transaction involves shared objects it is also sent to a Byzantine agreement protocol operated by the Sui authorities. Authorities check the certificate, and in case shared objects are involved also wait for the agreement protocol to sequence it in relation to other shared object transactions, and then execute the transaction and summarize its effects into a signed effects response.

• Once a quorum of authorities has executed the certificate its effects are final (denoted as finality in the diagram). Clients can collect a quorum of authority responses and create an effects certificate and use it as proof of the finality of the effects of the transaction.

Token’s name: SUI

Total supply: 10,000,000,000.

Token Utility:

• SUI can be staked within an epoch in order 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 Sui economy contains three main participants:

• Users submit transactions to the Sui platform in order to create, mutate, and transfer digital assets or interact with more sophisticated applications enabled by smart contracts, interoperability, and composability.

• SUI token holders bear the option of delegating their tokens to validators and participating in the proof-of-stake mechanism. SUI owners also hold the right to participate in Sui’s governance.

• Validators manage transaction processing and execution on the Sui platform.

The Sui economy has five core components:

• The SUI token is the Sui platform’s native asset.

• Gas fees are charged on all network operations and used to reward participants of the proof-of-stake mechanism and prevent spam and denial-of-service attacks.

• Sui’s storage fund is used to shift stake rewards across time and compensate future validators for storage costs of previously stored on-chain data.

• The proof-of-stake mechanism is used to select, incentivize, and reward honest behavior by the Sui platform’s operators – i.e. validators and the SUI delegators.

• On-chain voting is used for governance and protocol upgrades.

Throughout, we use the visual representation in the following figure to aid the discussion.

SUI Token Flow:

Core Members of Mysten Labs:

Sui was founded by Mysten Labs. Most of them worked for Diem blockchain and Move programming language before. Four of them worked at META (Facebook) before. Although the team members have the same experience as Aptos team members, they have clarified that there is no relationship between the two projects. The Mysten Labs Team also has many experienced designers, analysts, engineers, and so on. Obviously, it is a professional team, with the ability to develop the Sui very well.

• Both are committed to solving the blockchain trilemma

• Both use Move for their smart contract programming language, but Sui’s Move is a little bit different from Apto’s

• Parallel transaction execution and consensus (for lower latency and higher throughput) based on block software transactional memory (“STM”) – instead of in-order transactions and sequential execution of blocks in other L1 designs

• State synchronization to optimize data availability

• SDK, API for improving DX/UX

• Tier 1 Venture Investor Cap Table

• Valuation (more or less)

• Sui released its whitepaper, but Aptos did not

• Sui’s Move is a little bit different from Aptos’s Move

• Gas Mechanism: Sui is able to keep gas prices low and predictable while incentivizing validators to optimize transaction processing and prevent denial of service (“DoS”) attacks.

• Sui’s SDK is pay more effort on game and NFT, and Aptos’ SDK is pay more effort on DX/UX.

• For Sui, the storage fees are paid separately to transaction execution.

• There are only two projects (Sui wallet and Ethos) that are known on the Sui network, but there are more than one hundred projects on Aptos economy.

In the layer 1 blockchain field, Sui is an excellent blockchain:

1. Strong backers: it was invested by a16z, FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and many famous investors. These investors have supported many famous projects and they also have many professional analysts to choose good projects.

2. Excellent team: all team members are experienced and worked at famous companies and projects before. I'm sure that they have enough strength to develop Sui.

3. High performance: as written in docs, an unoptimized single-worker Sui validator running on an 8-core M1 Macbook Pro can execute and commit 120,000 token transfer transactions per second (TPS). Throughput scales linearly with the number of cores–the same machine processes 25,000 TPS in a single core configuration. High performance can give users very good experiences.

4. Good programming language: Sui uses Move as its programming language. The Move is designed to solve the safety problems for assets on the blockchain.

However, Sui is facing a strong opponent, Aptos. Aptos began to start a few months earlier than Sui, and Aptos have these points better than Sui:

• ~2x community/users (by Discord members and Twitter followers);

• ~3x developer activity (as measured by GitHub stargazers);

• Similar throughput magnitudes, but largely unclear at this point;

• More metrics can be analyzed after the mainnet, such as TVL, active users (wallet addresses), active nodes, minimum staking requirements, etc.

Although Sui is a good Layer 1 blockchain and Sui’s design (the storage fees are paid separately to transaction execution) fills the blank of current Layer 1 blockchains, it still has some shortcomings compared to Aptos. If Sui wants to have the same valuation as Aptos in the series B funding round, it needs to pay more effort into expanding the size of the community and incentivize more developers to build on Sui.

Written by: Lucio Lyu

Twitter: @imLucio_eth