What is the Sui blockchain?

Author: Trace

Source: Twitter

Sui is the first permissionless Layer 1 blockchain, and its vision is designed from the ground up to allow creators and developers to build experiences that can satisfy 1 billion Web3 users. This article will introduce Sui from three aspects: technology, token economics and team.

technology

Based on the team's years of technical experience in Meta, Sui is unlike any blockchain we have seen.

First of all, the Sui blockchain has extremely high performance. Early data running a Sui node on a MacBook Pro shows the ability to process over 120,000 token transactions per second. The reason why Sui achieves such high performance lies in the parallelization of transactions. In most blockchains, transactions must be ordered and placed in a block for sequential execution.

In-order execution unnecessarily limits the throughput on these chains - since most transactions are independent. Whereas Sui requires that transaction affiliations be clearly and explicitly declared, so it can process them in parallel. In the case of a small number of intertwined transactions, Sui still allows transactions to be sequenced and executed sequentially.

Sui can achieve consensus in two different ways:

- Byzantine consensus broadcast for independent transactions

- BFT consensus for slave transactions

Since independent transactions can be verified in parallel, Sui can scale by increasing throughput linearly by increasing the number of machines per validator.

Sui not only has high throughput, but also has low latency. Its consensus algorithm focuses on minimizing the communication required between validators to process transactions. So, Sui can verify simple transfers almost instantly, as well as execute complex transactions in 2-3 seconds.

Of course, we'll need to see how the network performs in public deployments, but the early results are promising.

Sui's smart contracts use the Move VM and the Move programming language. Move is as memory-safe as Rust, but more expressive than other smart contract languages.

Sui uses a small variant of Move to improve network performance and simplify the developer experience. Sui's Move is different from normal Move in many ways. Storage on most blockchains is account-centric, while Sui's storage is designed around objects. Every object belongs to an address, which is mutable by default but can be made immutable or shared between multiple addresses. Sui's Move smart contract can receive these objects as input, manipulate them, and return objects as output.

This is a completely different smart contract programming paradigm than Solidity or Rust.

Sui is more intuitive - here's how one of Sui's engineers described programming Move:

"When I explain Move at a bar, I say, 'Here's this bottle, here's this mug. Imagine they're all NFTs, and if we had a function like... 'pour' water from this bottle into a mug , you're really putting the two together.' This function will perform the operation and return you a full glass of water."

This intuitive programming is ideal for dynamic NFTs and crypto games where digital objects are constantly mixed and modified.

Token Economics

The total supply of SUI tokens is 10 billion, which will be distributed among the founding team, investors, public sale, Sui Foundation and future releases.

The exact initial token distribution will be announced in the coming weeks.
Sui tokens serve four purposes:

1. Staking/Security

2. Transaction fees

3. Governance

4. Unit of Account/Medium of Transaction

Most blockchains face large fluctuations in Gas costs due to changes in network requirements. To keep gas fees low and predictable, Sui implemented a novel gas market design:

Sui runs in epochs. Every epoch (24 hours), the validator set changes. At that time, the validators of the new epoch vote to determine the reference gas price for the entire epoch. The Sui protocol then provides a number of incentives for validators to keep transaction fees close to the reference price throughout the period. By providing a more stable gas price, transactions submitted to Sui are processed at a more predictable rate.

This undoubtedly creates a better user experience.

But how do gas fees stay low during times of network congestion?

Because the throughput of the network increases linearly with the number of participants, the validator can add more participants in proportion to the increase in network demand, so that the gas price is close to the reference price.

Sui also solves the problem of state inflation (state bloat).

Whenever users submit data on-chain, they must simultaneously pay gas fees and other fees to Sui's "storage fund". This fund covers the actual cost of validators storing user data. As the network matures and storage costs increase, validators will be paid by the storage fund. Additionally, once users no longer need to store this data, they can delete it and receive a rebate from the storage fund.

The full economics behind a storage fund are fascinating. You can view Sui’s overview of token economics in pictures.

Sui's team

Sui was developed by Mysten Labs, with team members including Evan Cheng, Adeniyi Abiodun, Sam Blackshear, George Danezis, Kostas Chalkias and more. All of them have been involved in Novi or Diem projects in Meta. These scientists and engineers are the central figures behind many of Meta's breakthroughs, including the Move programming language, Narwhal/Tusk mempool, and BFT consensus.

The team has 4 key applications for Sui:

1. Games

2. DeFi

3. Business

4. Social

All 4 applications will take full advantage of Sui's high throughput and low latency to provide users with the best possible user experience. Games and social applications have unique advantages on the basis of Sui. Games can take advantage of Move's security and expressiveness with digital objects. Social applications can leverage Sui's data storage economics to store all data directly on-chain.

Sui is currently operating a public development network and will launch its incentivized test network next month. Further details of the mainnet are expected to be announced in the coming months.