CoinMarketCap takes a deep dive into Sui — a new, horizontally scalable layer-one chain, built on the Move language, promising revolutionary transaction speeds at low cost.
This piece was written with input from the Mysten Labs team.
Sui is a new layer-1 chain that promises to operate at a speed and scale previously thought unattainable. It aims to “cater to the next billion users in web3” and offer decentralized application (Dapp) deployment, competing with existing smart contract chains like Ethereum.
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What Is Sui?
Sui is a layer-1 blockchain optimizing for low-latency blockchain transfers. Its focus on instant transaction finality and high-speed transaction throughput make Sui a suitable platform for on-chain use cases like games, finance, and other real-time applications. Sui’s smart contracts are written in Move, a Rust-based programming language that prioritizes fast and secure transaction executions.
Sui’s “horizontal scaling” is achieved through a process called “transaction parallelization,” allowing “parallel agreement” across different, independent types of transactions. Thanks to the organization of data as independent objects, transactions that are independent of one another are validated by Sui nodes via byzantine fault-tolerant proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.
The Mysten Labs Team, Investors and Roadmap
The Sui team consists of Evan Cheng, Adeniyi Abiodun, Sam Blackshear, George Danezis and Kostas Chalkias, five ex-Meta engineers who previously worked in the Novi division. They started up Mysten Labs to build and develop Sui.
Mysten Labs is backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which invested $36 million in a Series A raise in December 2021. This was followed up by a $300 million Series B announcement led by a $140 million commitment from FTX Ventures, valuing the startup at $2 billion. Other funds that committed include: Jump Crypto, Apollo, Binance Labs, Franklin Templeton, Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sino Global, Dentsu Ventures, Greenoaks Capital, and O’Leary Ventures.
Sui announced the launch of their incentivized testnet, originally scheduled for August 2022, which will gradually introduce key features to stress-test the network. The technical roadmap can be found here.
How Does Sui Work?
Sui differs from other blockchains by employing a different consensus and transaction processing mechanism. Traditional blockchain validators sequentially add transactions to the blockchain, thus adding new records to the chain sequentially and limiting the scalability of a blockchain to increase the speed of the said incremental additions (vertical scaling).
Sui takes a different approach. Since many transactions naturally are not causally related to each other, Sui does away with having each transaction validated by all nodes in the network. Instead, it takes a look only at the relevant piece of data instead of validating the entire chain. In order to accomplish this efficiently, Sui uses an object-centric model, where the chain data storage is not centered around accounts but around objects. This novel type of data storage allows Sui nodes to validate uncorrelated transaction flows independently and individually, instead of having to order all transactions like in the traditional blockchain model.
The transaction broadcasting and validation on Sui looks as follows:
1. The sender broadcasts a transaction to all validators.
2. Validators check the transaction for validity and send their weighted votes based on their stake.
3. The sender collects a Byzantine-resistant majority and broadcasts the result as a certificate to validators.
This presumably allows Sui to reach transaction speeds of over 100,000 transactions per second. Furthermore, in the object model of ownership employed by Sui, there are three different types of ownership of an asset:
- Owned by an address (e.g. coins, or NFTs)
- Owned by another object (an NFT that is part of another NFT)
- Shared (e.g. AMM pools)
Transactions with shared objects are ordered, but transactions involving owned objects can be executed at a near-instant speed in so-called “single writer apps.” This means that Sui can target verticals such as NFTs, gaming, messaging services, social networks, and decentralized identity platforms that heavily leverage single-writer apps and build them with web3 properties at web2 speed of execution.
The Sui Token and Sui Airdrop
Sui’s native token, SUI, will be launched when the mainnet goes live. SUI will be used for gas fees charged on all network operations. It will also be used to pay for the Sui storage fund to shift stake rewards across time and compensate future validators for the costs of previously stored on-chain data.
In other words, users are paying upfront for storage. Fees are collected in a fund used to adjust the future share of staking rewards. The higher the demand for storage, the higher the rewards for validators will be.
Sui has not yet announced the SUI token airdrop, although it will be running incentivized testnets soon, which will reward participants.
How To Use the Sui Wallet?
You can install the Sui Wallet browser extension with a few simple steps:
1. Head to the Sui Wallet browser extension and download the wallet by clicking “Add to Chrome” and then “Add Extension.”
2. Open the extension in the browser and click “Get Started” and then “Create a New Wallet.”
3. Enter a password for the wallet (the password applies to this installation only and not the global password).
4. Enter the password again and accept the Terms of Service.
5. Click “Create Wallet.”
6. Store the recovery phrase and click “Done”.
7. Click “Open Sui Wallet.”
The Best DEX on Sui
Ocean DEX
Ocean DEX is a hybrid central limit order book (CLOB) and automated market maker (AMM) decentralized exchange. A CLOB is a trade-execution system that matches all bids and offers in real-time, based on time and price. It allows users to trade against each other, and commonly used in the equities market. An AMM is more commonly found in DeFi, where traders trade against a liquidity pool, and price are quoted using a mathematical formula. Traders can also provide liquidity to the pool, effectively becoming a market maker.
It is an official partner of Sui, as are the following projects on this list, which have been screened for credibility by Sui's partnerships and engineering team. However, as of the time of writing, Ocean DEX has no official website or social media profiles.
The Best Bridges on Sui
Axelar
Axelar Network is a proof-of-stake web3 protocol for secure cross-chain communication. With Axelar, users can interact with any asset or application on different IBC chains and Sui Network with one click.
Wormhole
Wormhole is a popular interoperability protocol that allows transferring value and information across 18 different blockchains. It will integrate Sui with other major blockchains like Ethereum and Solana.
The Best DApps on Sui
Ethos Wallet
Ethos is a web3 wallet for Sui. It is a self-custodial wallet that works with a simple email registration and allows developers to integrate the API in a few seconds, allowing a smooth first experience for users.
SuiNS
Sui Name Service (SuiNS) is the identity service on Sui, analogous to Ethereum Name Service on Ethereum. It converts human-readable addresses into the alphanumeric codes used to identify wallet addresses.
Web3 Gaming on Sui
Netmarble F&C
Netmarble is a gaming developer with several games released on mobile and desktop. Among its most popular titles are Seven Knights 2, an RPG, A3: Still Alive, an MMORPG, and Merge Fantasy Island, a casual fantasy game.
Lucky Kat Studios
Lucky Kat Studios is a Dutch metaverse game studio developing web3 games, where players can own in-game assets and be part of the metaverse. This mobile-first development studio has built several games with multi-million downloads, such as Magic Finder and Road Crash.
Gameplay Galaxy
Gameplay Galaxy is an extreme sports game ecosystem building Trial Extreme, an extreme sports game. Being the first web3-powered extreme sports game, it will feature special characters, vehicles, and skills-based competitive sports games arenas.
Gaggle Studios
Gaggle Studios is a social gaming development studio building online escape room games. Up to six different players can engage in differently-themed escape room games that last between one to two hours and can be played both on mobile or on a desktop PC.
Talofa Games
Talofa Gams is building Run Legends, a fitness battle game with a move-to-earn spin, where players have to move to win. Players will engage in real-time walking or running battles and upgrade and earn rewards as they move.
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