• Sui is a DPoS layer 1 blockchain based on the Move programming language.

• SUI is the native utility token. The current use cases for SUI include:

  • Network Fees: Pay for transaction fees on the network.

  • Validator Staking: SUI holders have the option to delegate their holdings to validators that manage transaction processing and execution on the Sui platform.

  • Native Liquidity: SUI provides native asset liquidity to on-chain applications deployed on the Sui blockchain.

  • Governance: SUI is a claim on future governance.

• The protocol consists of the following major components working in conjunction:

  • Sui Move Programming Language: Move is inspired by the Rust programming language and initially developed at Facebook for writing smart contracts in the Libra (later called Diem) project. Move’s design prevents issues such as re-entrancy vulnerabilities, poison tokens, and spoofed token approvals. Sui Move adapts Move to the object-centric data model of Sui.

  • Parallel Transaction Processing: Sui utilizes the parallel data model & execution engine to improve execution efficiency. More notably:

    • Horizontal Scaling: Network capacity grows in proportion to the increase in Sui validator’s processing power, resulting in low gas fees even during high network traffic.

    • Object-centric Data Model: Sui processes and executes transactions using a causal-ordering approach. If the objects in two transactions are fully independent, then they are processed in parallel without waiting for full consensus sequencing.

  • Consensus Mechanism: Due to Sui Move’s object-centric models, transactions are grouped by objects. Validators can process different objects’ transactions in parallel; both in relation to each other and on their own machines. This enables parallel transaction submission and execution on a massive scale.

    • Complex Transactions (Shared Objects): For more complex transactions, Sui utilizes the Narwhal and Bullshark protocol. This provides a DAG-based mempool and efficient Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus.

      • Narwhal: Mempool maintains the availability of submitted transaction data.

      • Bullshark: Linearizes and orders the Narhwhal DAG.

    • Simple Transactions (Non-Shared Objects): Simple transactions, which only involve non-shared objects, do not require sequencing through Narwhal and Bullshark.

• As at April 30th 2023, the max supply of SUI is 10,000,000,000 and the circulating supply upon listing will be 528,273,718 (~5.28% of the total token supply).

• Learn more about the token distribution of SUI here.

1. What is Sui?

• Sui is a Layer 1 blockchain and smart contract platform designed from the bottom up to make digital asset ownership fast, private, secure, and accessible to everyone.

• Its object-centric model, based on the Move programming language, enables parallel execution, half-second finality, and rich on-chain assets.

• With horizontally scalable processing and storage, Sui supports a wide range of applications with fast speed at low cost.

1.1 Value Proposition

• Parallel processing allows simple transactions, such as asset transfers, to finalize in real-time, without sacrificing security.

• Object-centric data model allows dynamic on-chain digital assets that can evolve in rich ways.

• Gas Mechanism ensures that gas fees remain low and predictable when traffic increases and the chain scales horizontally.

• Delegated Proof-of-Stake mechanism aligns the incentives between SUI token holders and the network’s operators, delivering a performant and financially viable network.

• Storage Fund prices on-chain data storage efficiently and compensates validators for the cost of storing data, thus ensuring the chain can store large amounts of data on-chain while remaining financially healthy.

• First-rate developer experience means that any developer can ramp up quickly to write dynamic and safe smart contracts. Sui’s inherent expressivity and compositionality (First-class abstraction of assets, Programmable Transaction Blocks, Sponsored Transactions) enables developers to craft performant, engaging, and frictionless web3 experiences with ease.

• Demonstrated performance of ~300,000 TPS and ~500ms time-to-finality on a globally distributed 100-validator network

2. Project Key Highlights

• Permissionless: Sui is a permissionless Layer 1 blockchain designed from the ground up to enable creators and developers to build experiences that cater to the next billion users in web3. Horizontally Scalable: Sui is horizontally scalable to support a wide range of application development with fast speed at low cost and latency, without breaking atomic composability. Sui can take advantage of more machines per validator to increase its performance. Traditional blockchains are often designed to run on a single machine per validator.

• Causal Ordering: Sui takes a significant leap in scalability by enabling parallel agreement on causally independent transactions and making most transactions processable in parallel.

• Frontier Tokenomics: Sui’s tokenomics have been designed to work hand-in-hand with its optimized engineering design, ensuring that transaction fees can remain low and stable as the chain scales horizontally and that the chain remains financially healthy when storing large amounts of data on-chain.

• No System Timeouts: Sui operates at network speed without waiting for system timeouts between protocol steps. This significantly reduces latency when the network is good and not under attack. In contrast, most other traditional and proof-of-work blockchains need to wait for predefined timeouts before committing transactions.

• Low Latency: Latency is proportional to the amount of contention a transaction creates, resulting in very low latency for common transactions like payments and transfers.

• Asset-Oriented Data Model: Sui allows for composable and secure programmability via its asset-oriented data model.

• Safe Programmable Objects: strongly typed objects are first class, with runtime-level access control and bytecode-level integrity verification.

• On-the-Fly Composability: Programmable Transaction Blocks elevate the fundamental, atomic unit of execution to the level of a complex, composable sequence of transactions. Developers can create sophisticated, atomic, expressive (up to 1024 operations of any on-chain Move functions) customized for their application all on-the-fly without publishing any new smart contract code.

• Sponsored Transactions: Removes user friction and simplifies asset management by enabling a gasless experience .

3. Existing Products

Testnet metrics since network inception in late March 2023:

• ~17MM account addresses.

• ~90K Sui Move packages on-chain.

• ~430MM transactions processed.

• ~22MM NFTs.

• ~770MM on-chain objects.

• Peak TPS of ~130Ktransactions per second.

4. Token sales and economics

4.1 Token sales data

4.2 Token allocation

SUI token allocation

Disclaimer: 0.40% of SUI tokens distributed as Sui Binance Launchpool Token Rewards in May 2023 were distributed from a combination of the Community Reserve and Staking Subsidies allocation.

SUI token release schedule

Disclaimer:

• 0.40% of SUI tokens distributed as Sui Binance Launchpool Token Rewards in May 2023 were distributed from a combination of the Community Reserve and Staking Subsidies allocation.

• The remaining tokens under Mysten Labs Treasury, Early Contributors, Community Reserve, and Stake Subsidies will vest beyond May 2030.

5. Roadmap, updates, and business development

5.1 Completed Milestones

• Link to current whitepaper

5.2 Updated roadmap

Q2 2023:

• Mainnet launch.

• ZK Login.

Q3 / Q4 2023:

• State Snapshot.

• Archival Node.

• Light Client & Sparse Node.

• Intra-validator scaling and sharding.

• Optimizations across signature verification, networking storage, indexing.

• Sui Move developer experience: prover, improved language server, linting, auto-formatting, repl/language shell, debugger.

• MEV prevention, congestion pricing.

• Short vs long-term storage pricing, storage economics for archival nodes.

5.3 Commercial partnerships and business development progress

• The Sui Foundation Partners with BitGo for Digital Asset Management: The Sui Foundation chose BitGo as custodian of the SUI tokens it maintains as its community reserve.

• DeepBook to Serve as a Foundational Liquidity Layer on Sui: DeepBook, a decentralized limit order book, will allow builders to easily create DeFi apps.

• The Sui Foundation Announces Bug Bounty Program with Immunefi: Incentivize white hat hackers to report issues, helping maintain a secure and stable platform while rewarding responsible disclosure, via Immunefi dashboard.

• Sui Demo Day in Hong Kong: $50K of prizes were awarded to 16 teams across four tracks: (1) NFT & Gaming, (2) Infrastructure & Dev Tooling, (3) DID, Governance, & Social, and (4) DeFi & Payments.

• Sui Foundation Awards Over $400,000 to Developers in Grant Program: Grants to developers of projects that benefit the Sui ecosystem.

6. Community

• Website

• Twitter

• Blog

• CoinMarketCap

• Discord

• YouTube