Introduction

Sui is a permissionless, PoS-powered Layer 1 blockchain that has been designed in an attempt to provide instant settlement and high throughput as well as empower a multitude of next-gen latency-sensitive decentralized applications.

The Sui blockchain is the brainchild of Mysten Labs, an R&D company founded by former senior executives at Meta’s Novi Research and lead architects of the Diem blockchain and Move programming language. The firm is set to redefine the Web3 landscape and produce high-end solutions that will prove to be a hit with developers and creators regardless of their backgrounds.

Mysten Labs has already managed to raise $300 million in the Series B funding round and is well placed to keep moving forward.

Here is what Evan Cheng, Co-Founder and CEO at Mysten, says about the company’s inaugural Sui blockchain platform:

“Current Web3 infrastructure is in the dial-up era — it’s slow, expensive, capacity constrained, insecure, and simply hard to build for. With Sui, we are endeavoring to build a blockchain that scales with demand and incentivizes growth, eliminating middlemen, and enabling users across applications to seamlessly integrate and interact with their favorite products.”

What is Sui’s architecture?

According to Sui’s technical documentation, the blockchain consists of three main components:

• Objects. Sui possesses programmable objects built and managed by Move-enabled smart contracts, which are referred to as objects too. Sui’s objects are also categorized into mutable data values and immutable packages.
• Transactions. Transactions describe any changes and updates made to the Sui ledger.
• Validators. The entire Sui network is handled by independent validators. Each of them runs their own instance of the Sui software on a separate machine.

Another aspect worth highlighting is the Sui Consensus Engine, which comprises Narwhal and either Bullshark or Tusk.

Narwhal is responsible for ensuring the availability of data submitted to consensus.

Bullshark or Tusk is used to agree on a specific ordering of this data.

What is the Sui Explorer and what does it offer?

Launched in August 2022, the Sui Explorer is a special tool for users and developers who are eager to start building on Sui. Its key goals are as follows:

• Store and handle relevant and accurate on-chain data, activity, and performance metrics
• Enable the verification and tracking of all assets and contracts
• Serve as a robust tool for debugging and auditing
• Facilitate trouble-free smart contract development and introduce unique features to Move

What language is Sui based on?

The Sui blockchain is written in the Rust-based Move programming language.

Move is a bytecode language that enables the development of customizable transaction logic and smart contracts. It is considered to be platform agnostic, enabling shared libraries and tools as well as the formation of developer communities across various blockchain platforms.

Move is centered around the idea of bringing greater safety and security and facilitating a hassle-free transition from Web2 to Web3. It is also considered strong at tackling issues related to poison tokens, re-entrancy vulnerabilities, and spoofed token approvals.

As well as this, Move’s type system and data model support Sui’s parallel agreement, which in turn makes the blockchain highly scalable. So, as of March 19, 2022, it was claimed that an unoptimized single-worker Sui validator running on an 8-core M1 Macbook Pro could execute and commit 120,000 token transfer transactions per second (TPS).

What are the features and benefits of the Sui blockchain?

According to its developers, Sui comes with its own set of unique technical features, some of the most interesting of which are parallel transaction execution, a simplified developer experience, a unique approach to security, and enhanced UX for Web3 solutions.

Parallel transaction execution

By using the Byzantine Consistent Broadcast, Sui is able to circumvent consensus and parallelize the execution of numerous unrelated transactions, which results in minimized latency and higher throughput.

In addition to this, compared to many other blockchains where transactions are batched into traditional blocks, Sui validates them individually. Upon successful execution, each transaction is given a certificate of finality that guarantees that the transaction will not be revoked.

Simplified developer experience

Sui’s blockchain-oriented Move programming language eases the developer experience. This should mean that programmers will be able to write less boilerplate code and make fewer errors with foundational concepts.

Another great benefit to Sui developers is that the blockchain empowers them to effectively implement composable objects or dynamic NFTs that can be upgraded and/or grouped in an application-specific manner. This contributes to more sophisticated in-game economies and produces better feedback.