What is Sui?

Do we need another Layer-1 blockchain?

Layer 1s like Solana and Avalanche have been competing for mass adoption, but none have succeeded so far.

Enter Sui, a Layer-1 blockchain with a fresh approach to address the challenges of scalability and user adoption.

The team behind Sui, Mysten Labs, brings years of experience from Meta and Apple, with a proven track record of scaling products to the masses. In fact, the device you're reading this on likely contains software developed by one of Sui’s co-founders, Evan Cheng.

Leveraging their expertise, Sui has been designed from the ground up to onboard the next billion users into web3. While other L1s have focused on the 1% already familiar with web3, Sui is designed for the 99% who aren’t.

They have not only built a blockchain that can scale, but they've also developed the primitives and infrastructure needed to support that growth.

In this article, we’ll explain everything you need to know about Sui.

Sui is object-centric

Sui's unique data model sets it apart from other Layer 1 blockchains like Ethereum and Solana. Unlike the account-centric models of these blockchains, Sui adopts an object-centric approach.

In Sui’s system, every object has a globally unique identifier (UID) and metadata that provides detailed information about the object. This includes ownership details, transaction history, and other relevant attributes. All these elements are stored onchain, allowing owners to view and manage their objects easily.

Using a Sui block explorer will reveal additional details such as the owner, object ID, type, version, and the digest of the last transaction block. Developers have the flexibility to incorporate extra fields into their objects, tailoring the system to better meet specific use cases.

This object-centric architecture offers the following two significant advantages.

1. Causal order vs total order.

2. Linear scaling for validators.

1. Causal order vs total order

In traditional account-centric blockchains, transactions must adhere to a total order. All transactions are sequentially ordered, requiring extensive steps for strict global sequence enforcement, validation checks, and consensus mechanisms.

Conversely, Sui's object-centric architecture facilitates parallel processing and minimizes the need for global checks. This setup allows for independent validation and consensus on each transaction that impacts different objects, streamlining the entire process and enhancing efficiency.

On Sui, there are two types of transactions.

Simple transactions for non-shared objects. These transactions do not require sequencing or consensus. If multiple unrelated transactions do not interact with the same object, they can be processed in parallel and any order. In controlled environments, Sui has demonstrated impressive capabilities, achieving throughputs of up to 297,000 transactions per second with a latency of just 480 milliseconds.

Complex transactions for shared objects. These transactions need to be ordered and require consensus through Sui’s Narwhal and Bullshark protocols.

Narwhal is a DAG-based mempool that organizes transactions, ensuring efficient processing and rapid identification of transactions that require consensus. Bullshark is the consensus engine that processes and validates the transactions identified by Narwhal.

2. Linear scaling

Sui's architectural design cleverly separates the transaction ordering layer from the execution layer. Many blockchains can achieve large-scale consensus, handling over 100,000 TPS. However, due to hardware limitations, executing these transactions often becomes a bottleneck for validators.

To address this problem, Sui introduced Pilotfish, the first multi-machine contract execution engine. Instead of solely relying on vertical scaling, which has inherent limits, Sui validators can deploy multiple machines to enhance their capacity. This setup allows them to automatically adjust and scale up transaction execution capabilities in response to increased network activity.

In this system, transactions are organized based on the specific objects they affect. Execution workers within a validator’s setup process these groups, facilitating efficient parallel processing.

This ensures that Sui can maintain high throughput with low latency, achieving true linear scaling in transaction execution.

Sui’s consensus mechanism

Sui uses Narwhal and Bullshark to optimize achieving consensus, focusing on transaction ordering and finality.

For governance and selecting validators, Sui uses Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS). This system determines the validators for each 24-hour epoch. Within this framework, each validator's voting power is directly influenced by the total amount of SUI staked with them—this includes both their stake and the stakes delegated by other SUI token holders.

Validators who consistently operate honestly are rewarded for their service. Compensation comes in gas fees and temporary unlocking of subsidies or inflationary rewards. These incentives are proportionate to the amount of SUI staked with them during each epoch, aligning the interests of validators with the long-term health and security of the network.

Gas fees on Sui

Gas fees on Sui are a combination of computation fees and storage fees.

1. Computation fees

Gas fees are determined collaboratively among Sui validators. At the start of each epoch, validators submit the minimum price they will accept to process transactions. Based on these submissions, the gas price for the epoch is set based on the 2/3 percentile by stake, which guarantees that at least 66% of validators agree to process transactions at this price.

Sui's gas fees are designed to be low, predictable and stable, which has been demonstrated during periods of high network activity. There have been three notable instances of high traffic on Sui:

• the first 100 days following the mainnet launch;

• the popularity of Sui inscriptions; and

• a SPAM test designed to stress-test the network.

In each scenario, Sui successfully maintained stable transaction fees without any gas spikes or failed transactions.

Another feature that Sui offers is programmable transaction blocks (PTBs). These allow users to batch up to 1024 transactions in a single execution block, significantly reducing the transaction cost.

2. Storage fees

Sui enables users to store large amounts of data entirely onchain. To manage this, Sui incorporates storage fees that are charged based on the upload size, which are distinct from computation fees. These storage fees are pooled into a storage fund that earn staking rewards.

Unlike computation fees, storage fees do not go to validators. Validators benefit indirectly by earning a share of the staking rewards from this storage fund, distributed based on the size of the fund.

A unique aspect of Sui is the ability for users to delete stored data and receive a 99% rebate on their storage fees. This feature allows users to reclaim most of their storage costs if they no longer see the value in keeping their data onchain.

Sui tokenomics

Sui has a maximum supply of 10 billion tokens. The distribution is as follows.

• 5 billion tokens (50%) - Community Reserve

• 2 billion tokens (20%) - Early Contributors

• 1.4 billion tokens (14%) - Investors

• 1 billion tokens (10%) - Mysten Labs Treasury

• 600 million tokens (6%) - Community Access Program and App Testers

Sui has released the current vesting schedule until April 2030. This shows how 48% of the supply will be introduced into circulation by 2030. The remaining 52% has been allocated and will be released after 2030.

How Sui will achieve mass adoption

Mysten Labs hasn’t just stopped at creating a scalable L1 blockchain. They’ve also developed the primitives to help it achieve mass adoption.

Sui Move

Sui utilizes the developer-friendly Move programming language, making a number of changes to improve security and reduce vulnerabilities. Mysten Labs has tailored Move to also support Sui’s object-centric model, resulting in "Sui Move". The simplicity of building on Sui Move attracts more developers, which will bring more applications and users.

Equally important is security. Before deploying any code on-chain, it must pass through the Move bytecode verifier. This process safeguards against exploits like object manipulation, double-spending, and reentrancy, relieving developers of the burden of writing complex safety rules.

zkLogin

One of the biggest hurdles for mainstream adoption of Web3 is the complexity of the onboarding process. zkLogin simplifies this process by allowing users to create wallets through the single sign-on offered by companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitch.

Users can sign in through their preferred method and create accounts on Sui, all while ensuring their privacy is protected. The connection between a user’s off-chain identity (their email) and their onchain identity (their Sui address) remains confidential across platforms they interact with.

It’s even possible to send money to an email address, even if the recipient has not yet created a Sui account. To learn more about zkLogin, check out our detailed article.

Sponsored transactions

Gas fees present another challenge to widespread adoption, requiring users to acquire tokens before they can interact with dApps. Simplifying this process dramatically lowers the barrier to entry, inviting more individuals to explore and utilize dApps.

Sui has developed tools that allow both users and developers to sponsor transactions, effectively abstracting away the complexity of gas fees. This enables applications to onboard a larger number of users smoothly.

As shown in the diagram below, users can create a Tusky account and immediately start uploading to Walrus, making the experience fast, seamless, and user-friendly.

Sui Kiosks

Sui Kiosks are a framework for on-chain commerce, placing creators in control.

A critical problem with the current web3 ecosystem is the non-enforceability of royalties at the smart contract level. Traditionally, creators have had to depend on the discretion of marketplaces to ensure that royalties are fairly distributed.

Even prominent NFT marketplaces, such as OpenSea, have made royalty enforcement optional, allowing NFT owners to decide whether or not to direct royalties to the original creators. The lack of reliable enforcement mechanisms undermines creator rights and revenue.

Sui Kiosks empowers creators to define the policies and rules governing their sales. Code, rather than a marketplace, guarantees their interests are protected and prioritized.

Supporting Infrastructure

While Mysten Labs' primitives provide a solid foundation for developers, they have gone a step further by building supporting infrastructure. This includes tools like Walrus and Enoki, which further simplify and enhance the developer experience on the Sui blockchain.

Walrus, decentralized storage

Walrus is a decentralized storage network created by Mysten Labs, designed to function with Sui as its coordination layer.

While Sui facilitates onchain data storage, managing replication across its network presents a challenge. Each Sui validator is required to replicate the full dataset, resulting in approximately 106 replications given the current number of validators. Although crucial for maintaining the blockchain's state, this model is less efficient for large-scale unstructured data like music and videos.

To optimize data storage, Mysten Labs developed Walrus. Walrus distributes data in fragments across the network using erasure encoding, achieving a far more cost-efficient replication factor of 4x-5x. This approach mirrors the redundancy typical of Web2 cloud storage systems but leverages the advantages of decentralization.

Walrus effectively merges the best of both worlds: it ensures onchain data provenance while enabling off-chain scalability and efficiencies.

Enoki, developer tooling

Enoki consolidates all Sui primitives into a single, streamlined interface, allowing businesses from various industries to create more impactful customer experiences. This comprehensive toolset will further simplify the developer experience on Sui, enhancing both accessibility and utility.

Final thoughts

Sui's object-centric design and cutting-edge consensus mechanism clearly set it apart from other Layer-1 blockchains. By addressing the major challenges of scalability, gas fees, and user onboarding, Sui is positioning itself as the foundational technology for web3 mass adoption.

With features like zkLogin and sponsored transactions, Sui makes onboarding new users seamless. Meanwhile, Sui Move equips developers with the tools they need to build dapps at scale. Add to that a supporting infrastructure, with Walrus for decentralized storage and platforms like Enoki, and you’ve got a complete ecosystem setup for both developers and users.

By delivering a better user experience and powerful developer tools, Sui is well on its way to making major inroads to web2 user adoption. 

Whether it’s gaming, DeFi, or enterprise solutions, Sui’s speed and ease of use make it the main contender for the 'Solana killer' to watch in the next bull run.