Sui is an innovative, decentralized Layer 1 blockchain that redefines asset ownership.
The first internet-scale programmable blockchain platform, a foundational layer for web3.
Sui (swē) is the water element in Japanese philosophy. The power of the sui element lies in its fluidity—its ability to easily adapt to and transform any environment. Similarly, the Sui platform seeks to provide a flexible network that you can leverage to shape the web3 landscape.
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.
It’s 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.
Unparalleled scalability, immediate settlement
Today, users of existing blockchains pay a considerable tax as network usage increases due to limited throughput. In addition, high latency limits the responsiveness of applications. These factors contribute to the poor user experiences that are all too common in web3:
- Games are slow and prohibitively expensive to play
- Investors lose funds when they can’t liquidate under-collateralized loans in Decentralized Finance (DeFi)
- High-volume, low-value, per-transaction mass-market services like micro-payments and coupons are priced out of the network
- Artificially high floor prices on assets due to high gas prices
Sui scales horizontally to meet the demands of applications. Network capacity grows in proportion to the increase in Sui validators' processing power by adding workers, resulting in low gas fees even during high network traffic. This scalability characteristic is in sharp contrast to other blockchains with rigid bottlenecks.
By design, Sui validators (nodes) can effectively scale the network throughput infinitely to meet the demand of builders and creators. Sui can do for web3 what broadband internet did for web2.
Highlights
- A safe smart contract language accessible to mainstream developers
- Ability to define rich and composable on-chain assets
- Better user experience for web3 apps
- Narwhal and Bullshark DAG-based mempool and efficient Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus.
Parallel agreement - A breakthrough in system design
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.
Sui Tokens and ValidatorsMove LinguagemConnect to a Sui NetworkFull node setup