To start, SuiNS has closed our pre-seed funding round with participation from Mysten Labs. We are extremely excited to have the opportunity to work with some of the best teams in Blockchain and the immense responsibility we have been given by our investors. The SuiNS team will be releasing the first MVP of our decentralized application in early November with a name registration auction set for Mainnet.

What is a Name Service? Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow…

Name Services were originally built as a way for humans and machines to communicate over a network. Instead of using an IP address (e.g. 127.0.0.1), users could refer to other users on a network with a simple name (e.g. localhost).

The first Name Services were centralized and used for a small number of individuals. In fact, they were so centralized they basically lived as a single file on a personal computer. But as the Internet grew, a new system was built in the 1980s: The Domain Name System (DNS). DNS still lives on today and is what you know as .com, or more recently domains such as .xyz. These technologies require a single group in charge of what names are allowed and what they represent.

Blockchain technology disrupted these systems by allowing Name Services to distribute control and privacy to the community. Being permission-less, these communities are being built by technologists and early adopters with a passion for decentralization.

One of the earliest forks of Bitcoin (aka Altcoin) was actually a Name Service known as Namecoin which had a goal of decentralized control of DNS. However Namecoin was plagued with name squatting and speculation, making the blockchain almost unusable as a Name Service. More recently Ethereum Name Service and Unstoppable Domains have been successful in building a decentralized Name Service, however have had a different focus than what is being built here at SuiNS.

Sui takes a different approach. Since many transactions naturally are not causally related to each other, Sui does away with having each transaction validated by all nodes in the network. Instead, it takes a look only at the relevant piece of data instead of validating the entire chain. In order to accomplish this efficiently, Sui uses an object-centric model, where the chain data storage is not centered around accounts but around objects. This novel type of data storage allows Sui nodes to validate uncorrelated transaction flows independently and individually, instead of having to order all transactions like in the traditional blockchain model.

The transaction broadcasting and validation on Sui looks as follows:

1. The sender broadcasts a transaction to all validators.

2. Validators check the transaction for validity and send their weighted votes based on their stake.

3. The sender collects a Byzantine-resistant majority and broadcasts the result as a certificate to validators.

This presumably allows Sui to reach transaction speeds of over 100,000 transactions per second. Furthermore, in the object model of ownership employed by Sui, there are three different types of ownership of an asset: Owned by an address (e.g. coins, or NFTs) Owned by another object (an NFT that is part of another NFT) Shared (e.g. AMM pools) Transactions with shared objects are ordered, but transactions involving owned objects can be executed at a near-instant speed in so-called “single writer apps.” This means that Sui can target verticals such as NFTs, gaming, messaging services, social networks, and decentralized identity platforms that heavily leverage single-writer apps and build them with web3 properties at web2 speed of execution.