Sui Network

Sui is a smart contract platform maintained by a permissionless set of validators that play a role similar to validators or miners in other blockchain systems.

Sui offers scalability and unprecedented low-latency for simple use cases. Sui makes most transactions processable in parallel. This better utilizes processing resources and offers the option to increase throughput by adding more resources. Sui forgoes consensus to instead use simpler and lower-latency primitives for simple use cases, such as payment transactions and assets transfer. This is unprecedented in the blockchain world and enables a number of new latency-sensitive distributed applications ranging from gaming to retail payment at physical points of sale.

Sui is written in Rust and supports smart contracts written in Sui Move—a powerful asset-centric adaptation of Move for the Sui blockchain—to define assets that may have an owner. Sui Move programs define operations on these assets, including: custom rules for their creation, the transfer of these assets to new owners, and operations that mutate assets. To learn about the differences between core Move and Sui move, see How Sui Move differs from Core Move.

Sui has a native token called SUI, with a fixed supply. The SUI token 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. The voting power of validators within this epoch is a function of the amount of SUI in their staking pool, including both validator and user SUI tokens. In any epoch, the set of validators is Byzantine fault tolerant. At the end of the epoch, fees collected through all transactions processed are distributed to validators according to their contribution to the operation of the network. Validators can in turn share some of the fees as rewards to users that stake their SUI with them.

Sui is backed by a number of state-of-the-art peer-reviewed works and years of open source development.

Sui scales horizontally with no upper bound to meet application demand while maintaining extremely low operating costs per transaction. Its system design breakthrough eliminates a critical bottleneck in existing blockchains: the need to achieve global consensus on a total-ordered list of transactions. This computation is wasteful given many transactions are not contending for the same resource against other transactions.

Sui takes a significant leap in scalability by enabling parallel agreement on causally independent transactions. Sui validators commit such transactions using Byzantine Consistent Broadcast, eliminating the overhead of global consensus without sacrificing safety and liveness guarantees.

This breakthrough is possible only with Sui's novel data model. Thanks to its object-centric view, and Move’s strong ownership types, dependencies are explicitly encoded. As a result, Sui both agrees on, and executes transactions on many objects in parallel. Meanwhile, transactions that affect shared state are ordered via Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus and executed in parallel.