Sui (SUI)

Sui is a L1 blockchain built with Move, wanting to focus on NFTs and GameFi

Basics

• Based in:
• Started in / Announced on: Mysten Labs launched in September 2021.
• Testnet release: "Sui is currently running a public devnet and is launching its incentivized testnet next month." (11-7-2022)
• Mainnet release: scheduled (24-3-2023) for Q2 2023, launched on 3-5-2023.
• Not to be confused with Sei

History

• Building and extending on years of research at Meta (Facebook). From this twitter thread by Figment (11-7-2022):

"The business was founded by @EvanWeb3, @EmanAbio, @b1ackd0g, @GDanezis, @kostascrypto – all of whom were formerly building Novi or Diem at Meta."

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].

Token

Launch

• From Decrypt (3-5-2023):

"The platform’s native asset, the SUI token, has been in the midst of an initial coin offering, or ICO, since April 20. It will end on May 3, when the mainnet goes live. Investors have been purchasing IOU versions of the token, albeit from four smaller exchanges: BitForex, DigiFinex, HotBit and SuperEx. After the token launches, it will be listed on OKX, Kucoin, Bybit, and Binance."

Token Allocation

• From this twitter thread by Figment (11-7-2022):

"The SUI token has a 10B total supply. It’s set to be distributed between the founding team, investors, a public sale, the Sui foundation, and future emissions. The exact initial token distribution will be released in the coming weeks."

Utility

• From this twitter thread by Figment (11-7-2022):

"Sui’s token serves 4 roles: 1. Staking / Security 2. Transaction fees 3. Governance 4. Unit of Account / Medium of Exchange"

Technology

• Whitepaper or docs can be found [insert here].
• Code can be viewed here.
• Consensus mechanism: designated Proof-of-Stake (dPoS) (3-5-2023)
• Algorithm:
• Virtual Machine:
• Programming language used: Move, "Sui uses a minor variation of Move to improve network performance and ease the developer experience. This intuitive programming is perfect for dynamic NFTs and crypto games that constantly mix and modify digital objects." (17-7-2022)

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS): "Early results running Sui on a MacBook pro were able to process over 120K token transfers per second." (11-7-2022)
• Latency: "Its consensus algorithms focus on minimizing the communication that’s needed between validators to process transactions. This leads to simple transfers being validated nearly immediately, while complex transactions are executed within 2-3 seconds."

How it works

• From this Sui & Aptos comparison thread (26-7-2022):

"Sui uses a DAG-based mempool (Narwhal) + Tusk consensus algo. The DAG is then exploited at the execution layer for parallelization (cool!). In contrast with Avalanche (Snowman++) which doesn't unlock the full power of the DAG for parallelization yet."

• From this twitter thread by Figment (11-7-2022):

"Key to Sui's performance is transaction parallelization. In most blockchains, transactions must be ordered and placed into a block to be executed sequentially. Sequential execution unnecessarily restricts throughput on these chains – most transactions are independent. Because Sui requires that dependencies of transactions be explicitly stated, it’s able to process them in parallel. In the minority of cases where transactions are intertwined, Sui still allows them to be ordered and executed sequentially. This is done by using 2 different paths to consensus:

1. Byzantine Consistent Broadcast for independent transactions
2. BFT consensus for dependent transactions.

While storage on most blockchains is centered around accounts, Sui’s storage is designed around objects. Each object is owned by an address and is mutable by default, but can be made immutable or shared between multiple addresses. Sui’s Move smart contracts can receive these objects as inputs, manipulate them, and return objects as outputs. This is a fundamentally different smart contract programming paradigm than Solidity or Rust.

Whenever a user submits data on-chain, they must pay both gas fees and fees to Sui’s “storage fund”.  This fund covers the real-world cost for validators to store the user’s data. As the network matures and the cost of storage increases, validators are paid out through the storage fund. Additionally, once a user no longer needs to store that data, they can delete it and receive a rebate from the storage fund."

Fees

• From this twitter thread by Figment (11-7-2022):

"Sui runs in epochs. Every epoch (24 hours), the validator set changes. At that time, the new epoch’s validators vote on a reference gas price for the entire epoch. he protocol then provides a number of incentives to validators to keep transaction fees close to the reference price throughout the entire epoch. By providing more stable gas prices, transactions submitted to Sui are processed at more predictable speeds. Because the network’s throughput scales linearly with more workers, validators can add more workers proportionally to increases in network demand. This keeps prices close to the reference price."

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].

Competition

• Layer 1 blockchains and Aptos in particular. Solana as well.
• From Decrypt (3-5-2023):

"Although Move was not initially designed with NFTs in mind, Sui Move is looking to change that by implementing certain NFT-specific functions. Unlike another popular language, like Rust—which is used by Solana and focuses on “accounts”—Sui is centered around “objects.” That has made it possible for objects on Sui to be owned by a single user or “shared,” which can then be modified by users as long as they follow certain smart contract functionalities."

• From Delphi Digital (8-9-2022):

"Both Aptos and Sui aim at maximising the throughput of the network at every node, similar to Solana but with a very different technical approach. One of the core ideas of the design seeks to optimise the mempool dissemination layer by distributing a DAG of transactions and guaranteeing availability.

Both share the potential ability to scale beyond individual validator performance, via internal sharding of a validator and homogeneous state sharding. Internal sharding means that a validator won’t need to scale vertically, increasing its specs to match that of the network, but it can spawn other machines behind a load balancer and shard the state as if it were a single node. This is essentially addressing a concern with Solana that validator specs will bottleneck performance and elegantly achieve scalability."

• From this Sui & Aptos comparison thread (26-7-2022):

"Sui's version of Move has introduced some modifications, the most visible being the ownership API. It is more clean and it exposes the blockchain design more clearly IMO. But the libraries feel a little bit less developed than Aptos'. Aptos uses BlockSTM, which is an evolution of the high-performance HotStuff algorithm, and introduces parallelization by dynamically detecting dependencies and scheduling execution tasks (taking its inspiration from Software Transactional Memory). It's hard to tell which one will perform better in practice, but my bet is with Sui. Aptos has done already a very good job at optimizing their current design, whereas Sui seems to have more room. The two-paths of byzantine agreement give Sui an edge as well.

Sui tackles [state bloat] via efficient sharding of the store, focusing on horizontally scaling the resources. Aptos on the other hand puts more emphasis on supporting heterogeneous validators (contrained CPU and/or constrained storage). I like Sui's take on this.

They are both at a similar stage of development, with Aptos a bit ahead. It took me longer to set up the system than actually coding (I also happen to use NixOS). Learning the language and the environment involves some trial-and-error. Deploying to devnet is somewhat cumbersome in both as well. Fortunately, the unit test libraries are quite usable. The worst part has definitely been the obscure compiler errors, and devnet error responses that make no sense. These can be real time sinks."

Pros and Cons

Cons

• Mysten Labs had investment from bankrupt Alameda Research/FTX. This could mean fall-out risk since this equity will likely be sold due to bankruptcy. Mysten Labs turned out to have sold ~100M in equity to FTX Ventures (8-12-2022). There was also a $1,01M Sui Token Warrant towards FTX Ventures.

Team, Funding and Partners

Team

• Full team can be found [here].
• Mysten Labs (1-8-2022). From this twitter thread by Figment (11-7-2022): "The business was founded by @EvanWeb3, @EmanAbio, @b1ackd0g, @GDanezis, @kostascrypto – all of whom were formerly building Novi or Diem at Meta."
• Evan Cheng; CEO
• Sam Blackshear, Mysten’s co-founder and CTO
• Chief product officer Adeniyi Abiodun and chief scientist George Danezis.

Funding

• Mysten Labs turned out to have sold ~100M in equity to FTX Ventures (8-12-2022). There was also a $1,01M Sui Token Warrant towards FTX Ventures. "It looks like a third of Sui’s$300 million in Q3 funding may have been received within the 90-day clawback date [of FTX's bankrupty]." (12-2022)
• From The Defiant (9-9-2022):

"It has raised $300 million in a Series B funding round that values the company in excess of $2B. The round was led by FTX Ventures with participation from Binance Labs, Coinbase Ventures, a16z crypto, Jump Crypto, Circle Ventures, and other VCs."

All except Binance also invested in competitor Aptos. Making both real VC darlings.

Last December 2021, Mysten Labs raised $36 million Series A funding, led by a16z.

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