Sui is a smart contract platform that uses a permissionless set of validators to process transactions. It offers scalability and low-latency for simple use cases and makes most transactions processable in parallel, better utilizing processing resources. Sui uses simpler and lower-latency primitives for simple use cases, such as payment transactions and asset transfers, instead of consensus. This allows for a number of new latency-sensitive distributed applications.

Sui is written in Rust and supports smart contracts written in Sui Move, which is a powerful asset-centric adaptation of Move for the Sui blockchain. Sui Move programs define operations on assets, including custom rules for their creation, the transfer of assets to new owners, and operations that mutate assets.

Sui has a native token called SUI, which is used to pay for gas, and users can stake their SUI tokens with validators in a Delegated Proof-of-Stake model within an epoch. Validators are chosen based on their amount of SUI tokens in their staking pool, and fees collected through all transactions processed are distributed to validators according to their contribution to the operation of the network. Validators can also share some of the fees as rewards to users that stake their SUI with them.

Transactions in Sui can be simple, affecting only single-owner, single-address objects, or more complex, affecting objects that are shared or owned by multiple addresses. Complex transactions go through the Narwhal and Bullshark DAG-based mempool and efficient Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus. Sui is backed by state-of-the-art peer-reviewed works and years of open-source development.