Sui is a high-performance first-level (L1) blockchain developed by Mysten Labs to serve latency-sensitive decentralized applications; Blockchain Sui, like Aptos, uses the work of Diem, a failed blockchain platform from Meta Corporation. In particular, when writing the Sui code, a modified version of the Move language created for Diem was used. The operation and security of the Sui network is provided by the Proof-of-Stake algorithm with the possibility of staking and delegation. Sui's consensus process uses the unique Narwhal and Bullshark protocols to allow computation to run in parallel, making Sui highly scalable. As of October 2022, the Sui blockchain is running on a testnet. 2 Who develops and finances the project The Sui blockchain is being developed by Mysten Labs, founded in September 2021 in California by a group of former top managers and developers from Novi Research, a division of Meta Corporation that worked on the Diem blockchain and the Move programming language. The co-founder and CEO of Mysten Labs is Evan Cheng, former director of research and development at Novi Research. For the first time, the team publicly announced the new project on March 22, 2022, and work on it began in the fall of 2021.
As of October 2022, the startup has held two funding rounds. Andreessen Horowitz led a $36 million Series A round at the beginning of 2022, $300 million was raised in the second round of Series B, and Mysten Labs received a $2 billion valuation.
The Sui testnet was launched in August 2022.
3 Sui features and benefits The developers of Sui are positioning themselves as a general purpose network with high bandwidth, fast and cheap transactions, and a user-friendly interface for Web3. The goal of Mysten Labs is to create a platform for running high-performance decentralized applications.
The Sui architecture is described in detail in the whitepaper and technical documentation. A feature of the project is the use of its own programming language Sui Move - a modified version of Move, developed for the Diem project. If in other blockchains the basic unit of storage is an account, then in Sui these are objects that are created and managed by smart contracts. An object can be any type of asset, and each has a unique ID, owner, and the property to be mutable or immutable.
Blockchain Sui contains a causal history of each object from the moment of its occurrence. If the histories of objects do not overlap, then transactions with them can be processed in any order or in parallel. With this feature, Sui can process groups of transactions in parallel, but without the risk of double spending.
Due to this feature, horizontal scaling of network bandwidth is achieved, and its overall performance depends only on the number of nodes processing transactions. In test conditions, the Sui blockchain showed a speed of over 120,000 transactions per second with an average latency of about 2 seconds.
4 How Sui Works The Sui blockchain uses the popular Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm. Transactions are processed by a group of validators, the composition of which changes every epoch (24 hours) from among the currently active full nodes. As of the end of October 2022, there are 4 validators and over 3600 active nodes on the testnet.
The procedure for processing transactions depends on whether it concerns an object with a single owner (any kind of assets) or a “common object” (for example, public smart contracts).
The first type of transactions include coin transfers, NFT issuance, and voting. Such transactions are processed under a simplified Fast Pay procedure based on the Byzantine Consistent Broadcast mechanism. It includes four stages:
The transaction is sent to the node, which "propagates" it to the validators; Validators vote to confirm the transaction and pass the result to the sender; The sender creates a certificate containing the signatures of at least 2/3 of the validators; The certificate is sent to validators who validate it. After that, the transaction enters the blockchain. In this process, there is no search for consensus between validators, which significantly reduces the time to process a transaction. In turn, the procedure for performing transactions with shared objects contains one more stage - the search for consensus between validators using the Sui Consensus Engine. It consists of two components:
Narwhal is a high-capacity mempool (“waiting room” for unconfirmed transactions) that is responsible for ensuring the synchronization and availability of data submitted for confirmation to validators. Bullshark (or the older Tusk solution) is a consensus protocol based on a combination of Directed Acyclic Graph and Byzantine Fault Tolerance technologies. The peculiarity of Bullshark is that it allows consensus to be reached without the need to exchange information between validators. Such a process provides not only high network performance, but also failure resistance, since even a large number of faulty validators does not lead to performance degradation, as happens in existing PoS blockchains.
5 Tokenomics and functions of Sui cryptocurrency There is no data yet on the launch dates for the main network and the native SUI coin. However, the team has already shared the features of the project tokenomics. The maximum offer will be 10 billion coins. Each SUI coin will be divisible by one billion MIST units.
When the mainnet is launched, only a part of the SUI emission will go into circulation, and the rest will be distributed among the Mysten Labs team, investors, community members, rewards for validators and other purposes. A significant share of the coins will go to the Sui Foundation, an organization independent of Mysten Labs that will fund hackathons, conferences, app development, and development teams. It is planned that the SUI coin will have several uses:
validators rate; delegation to validators through staking (for ordinary coin owners); payment of transaction fees; a means of exchange, settlement and accumulation in the Sui ecosystem; participation in the management of the Sui blockchain through on-chain voting. Each of the validators has a certain share of the SUI coins delegated by the holders of the SUI tokens. Delegated coins are locked for the entire epoch and receive a portion of the staking reward at the end of the epoch. Accordingly, owners can only revoke their SUI or change their delegate when the era changes. It is already known that the Sui team will reward full node owners, developers, and active participants in the testnet. In particular, after the launch of the Sui protocol on the main network, node owners will receive 2000 SUI, which will be blocked for sale for one year.