Dissecting Mysten’s Sui Protocol
Sui is a permissionless Layer 1 blockchain that allows creators and developers to build experiences more easily for the next billion Web 3 users
When comparing Layer 1 networks, it is critical to understand their consensus mechanism and its benefits and drawbacks. Consensus mechanisms typically trade off security, speed, or decentralization.
Each consensus mechanism offers different levels of speed, security, and throughput. The two most commonly used Layer 1 solutions are consensus protocol changes and sharding.
In terms of the consensus protocol evolution, networks like Ethereum are transitioning from the archaic proof-of-work (PoW) consensus protocol to the much faster and less energy-intensive proof-of-stake (PoS).
Enter the battle of the shiny new high-performance Layer 1 PoS blockchains: Aptos vs Sui
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Sui Protocol
Sui is a permissionless Layer 1 blockchain that allows creators and developers to build experiences more easily for the next billion Web 3 users. Sui is a decentralized proof-of-stake blockchain with horizontally scalable throughput and storage, allowing unrivaled speed and low-cost application development.
Who is behind this initiative?
Mysten Labs is the creator behind Sui. The Diem blockchain and Move programming language were developed by its five co-founders and several Mysten employees. Four of the five co-founders worked at Facebook before leaving to work on the blockchain.
“Current blockchain infrastructure is limited and is simply not meeting the needs of developers or consumers,” stated Evan Cheng, Co-founder & CEO of Mysten Labs. “Existing technology suffers from restrictive storage methods and inherently unsafe programmability models, which force developers to compromise functionality and user experience. Sui solves the most notorious problems in the blockchain.”
What’s the hype about Sui?
The parallel agreement system design is one key feature that distinguishes the protocol.
Sui was designed to address the most common blockchain pain points, using horizontal scalability to maintain low gas fees and high transaction processing capacities beyond legacy payment rails like Visa and SWIFT. Sui executes transactions using Byzantine consistent broadcast, which eliminates the overhead of global consensus without sacrificing safety and liveness guarantees.
Parallel agreement system design eliminates a critical bottleneck in existing blockchains: the requirement for global consensus on a total-ordered list of transactions. This computation is unnecessary because most transactions are not competing for the same resource as other transactions.
Protocol Highlights:
Scalability, immediate settlement
A secure smart contract language that mainstream developers can use
The ability to define rich and modular on-chain assets
Improved Web 3 app user experience
Sui is scaling horizontally to meet the needs of applications. Network capacity grows in proportion to processing power as workers are added, resulting in low gas fees even during high network traffic. This scalability feature starkly contrasts with other blockchains that suffer from severe bottlenecks.
What’s under the hood?
Sui is a distributed ledger at its core, storing a collection of programmable objects, each with a globally unique ID. A single address owns each object, and each address can hold an arbitrary number of things. Validators on the Sui network approve and execute transactions in parallel using high-throughput Byzantine Consistent Broadcast.
At a high level, the Sui blockchain achieves excellent speed and scalability with simple transaction optimization by making each transaction idempotent, meaning that transactions retain their end state regardless of repeated times. This is especially important in blockchain and payment systems to avoid duplicate transactions.
By design, Sui authorities (nodes) can effectively scale the network throughput infinitely to meet the demand of builders and creators.
What's the Move?
The Move is another hidden gem of the Sui platform. Move is a safe, smart contract language accessible to mainstream developers.
Sui applications are powered by Move smart contracts. It is a programming language created at Facebook to power the Diem blockchain to write secure smart contracts. The Move is a platform-independent language that allows shared libraries, tooling, and developer communities to be shared across blockchains. Move's design prevents issues like re-entry vulnerabilities, poison tokens, and spoofed token approvals, which attackers have used to steal millions on other platforms. Its emphasis on safety and expressivity makes it easier for developers to transition from Web 2 to Web 3 without understanding the underlying infrastructure's complexities.
How secure is Sui?
Sui was designed with several security guarantees for asset owners on the network:
An owned asset is only usable by the owner. The asset owner's private signature key is used for authorization.
Everyone can operate on shared assets. Smart contracts can be used to implement additional access control logic.
Following the smart contract creator's predefined rules, transactions can only be performed on assets.
Once a transaction is completed, changes to assets or the creation of new assets are persisted and available for further processing.
Even though the Sui network operates via a protocol between independent validators, all security properties are preserved even if a small subset of validators do not adhere to the protocol.
All Sui blockchain operations are transparent and can be audited to ensure processes are carried out correctly.
Users choose validators through the delegation of $SUI tokens.
Sui Tokenomics
The $SUI token serves as the network's native asset, paying for gas fees and rewarding proof-of-stake (PoS) participants. $SUI is also used for on-chain governance and protocol upgrade voting.
The total supply of $SUI tokens is ten billion. There is no detailed distribution plan for the tokens other than a mention that a percentage of $SUI will be liquid at the mainnet launch, with the remainder vested and distributed as staking incentives.
Sui proposes a Storage Fund, which redistributes storage fees from previous transactions to future validators. Users pay upfront fees for computation and storage, which are then saved in the Storage Fund to incentivize future validators to keep the network secure.
Sui users can use the open-source Sui Wallet to create an address, manage assets on the Sui network, and interact with dApps. The Sui Wallet is a model for other potential wallets and applications in the Sui ecosystem. It will highlight the most recent and distinctive Sui capabilities. The Sui wallet is an essential ecosystem enablement tool as Sui begins to support large-scale use cases, Move-powered ownership models, and other Sui-specific features.
Sui allows you to build more utility into NFTs and store them directly on-chain
Sui's scalability extends beyond transaction processing. Storage is also cost-effective and scalable horizontally, allowing developers to define complex assets with rich attributes that live directly on-chain rather than introducing layers of indirection to off-chain storage to save on gas fees. Moving attributes on-chain enables the implementation of application logic that uses these attributes in smart contracts, increasing application composability and transparency.
Rich on-chain assets will boost new utility-based applications and economies that do not rely solely on artificial scarcity. Developers can implement dynamic NFTs, such as avatar changes and customizable items based on gameplay, that can be upgraded, bundled, and grouped in an application-specific manner. This capability results in stronger in-game economies as NFT behavior is fully reflected on-chain, increasing the value of NFTs and providing more engaging feedback loops.
Closing Thoughts
Sui was created by a team of veteran innovators, storytellers, and developers on a mission to bring digital ownership to the masses. The team wants to make Sui the most accessible smart contract platform, empowering developers to create great user experiences in Web 3. Their core team includes four co-founders:
Evan Cheng (CEO)
Adeniyi Abiodun (CPO)
Sam Blackshear (CTO)
George Danezis (Chief Scientist)
To usher in the next billion users in Web 3, they plan to enable developers with various tools to take advantage of the power of the Sui blockchain. The Sui Development Kit (SDK) allows developers to build without boundaries.
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