Instead of the traditional blockchain’s fire-and-forget broadcast, Sui's design enables a requestor or a proxy to proactively talk to validators to bring a transaction to finality. This results in near instant finality for simple transactions.

Despite the growing interest in Web 3.0, more than 75% of the 27 million software developers have never worked in blockchain due, in part, to the immaturity of the technology. Of these 27 million developers, roughly 200,000 are Solidity developers – equating to less than 1%. Ethereum, for example, remains the most-used blockchain, despite its glaring scalability limitations and poor user experience. Sui eliminates the most common blockchain pain points with horizontal scalability to maintain low gas fees and high transaction processing capacities beyond legacy payment rails such as VISA and SWIFT.

In 2021, we decided to leave the comfort of Meta to build Mysten Labs — a company dedicated to rethinking web3 infrastructure from first principles. Sui is our first act, and it’s a big step. It is not a derivative of the Diem network or an incremental improvement. It is a step-function advancement in blockchain technology to meet the needs of the next generation of crypto users and developers.

Mist is not a separate token, but functions similar to how 100 cents become $1. Each SUI will be broken up into 1 billion MIST, developers said, allowing for low gas fees while conducting transfers worth a few dollars.

Gas fees refers to a fee paid by users to perform any function on a blockchain. These can range from a few pennies to several hundred dollars based on demand or the underlying network.

Utilizing MIST will also mitigate the insufficient gas problems caused by coin dust, a phenomena where coins with very low value that are stored in a users’ wallet add up to tens of dollars over time and become unusable due to high gas fees.

The SUI coin balance in Move or Sui protocol was previously interpreted as SUI directly. For example, a SUI coin with a balance of 100 used to be interpreted as 100 SUI. With the MIST update, the value will be interpreted as 100 MIST or 10^-7 SUI, as per developers.

The new SUI and MIST values will soon be displayed on the Sui Wallet and Sui blockchain explorer.

The testnet “Wave 1” will be used for validators and full nodes to “improve decentralized coordination + incident response, and identify a core group of operators who have experience in deploying, monitoring, and debugging,” the company shared over Twitter.

Sui has gained a lot of momentum over the past few months and is seen as a competitor to the Aptos blockchain – another layer 1 that was founded by ex-Meta employees. Aptos and Sui both use the same programming language called Move.