Sui Memo

Overview

• Established in 2021 by former engineers from Facebook, Mysten Labs is dedicated to constructing essential infrastructure to boost the adoption of web3. The company is actively engaged in expediting consensus through Narwhal, enhancing the security of smart contract programming with Move, and creating more sophisticated on-chain assets with Sui.
• On Dec 06, 2021, Mysten Labs raised $36 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
• Sui offers scalability and unprecedented low latency for common use cases. Sui makes most transactions processable in parallel, which makes better use of processing resources, and offers the option to increase throughput with more resources. Sui forgoes consensus to instead use simpler and lower-latency primitives for common use cases, such as payment transactions and assets transfer. This is unprecedented in the blockchain world and enables several new latency sensitive distributed applications, ranging from gaming to retail payment at physical points of sale

Team

Mysten Labs employs ~35 employees who are skilled in different fields like software engineering, cryptography, and product management. The founding team has extensive experience in web3, programming languages, distributed systems, and cryptography. The team members have also gained business experience working for organizations like Apple, Facebook, and University College London.

• Evan Cheng, Co-Founder & CEO, has worked at Apple and Facebook
• Sam Blackshear, Co-Founder & CTO, created the Move programming language and worked at the University of Colorado, Facebook, and Novi Financial. Sam earned a Ph.D. in Programming Languages from the University of Colorado at Boulder
• Adeniyi Abiodun, Co-Founder & CPO, worked on Move, Diem, and Novi wallet as a Product Lead at Meta’s Novi Financial team
• George Danezis, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist, is a professor of security and privacy engineering at University College London with a Ph.D. in computer science from University of Cambridge. George has also worked at Facebook

Highlights

• Parallel agreement: a breakthrough in system design
  • Sui scales horizontally with no upper bound to meet application demand while maintaining extremely low operating costs per transaction. Its system design breakthrough eliminates a critical bottleneck in existing blockchains: the need to achieve global consensus on a total-ordered list of transactions
  • Sui takes a significant leap in scalability by enabling parallel agreement on causally independent transactions. Sui validators commit such transactions using Byzantine Consistent Broadcast, eliminating global consensus's overhead without sacrificing safety and liveness guarantees
  • With the help of Sui’s object-centric view and Move’s strong ownership types, Sui both agrees on and executes transactions on most objects in parallel, while a minority of transactions that affect shared state are ordered via Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus and executed in parallel
• Unparalleled scalability, immediate settlement o Users of existing blockchains pay a considerable tax as network usage increases due to limited throughput. In addition, high latency limits the responsiveness of applications. These factors contribute to the bad user experiences that are all too common in web3
  • Sui scales horizontally to meet the demands of applications. Network capacity grows in proportion to the increase in Sui validators' processing power by adding workers, resulting in low gas fees even during high network traffic. This scalability characteristic is in sharp contrast to other blockchains with rigid bottlenecks
• A safe smart contract language accessible to mainstream developers o Move smart contracts power Sui applications. Move is a programming language initially developed at Facebook for writing safe smart contracts. It is a platform-agnostic language that enables shared libraries, tooling, and developer communities across blockchains
  • Move's design prevents issues such as reentrancy vulnerabilities, poison tokens, and spoofed token approvals that attackers have leveraged to steal millions on other platforms. Its emphasis on safety and expressivity makes it easier for developers to transition from web2 to web3 without understanding the intricacies of the underlying infrastructure
• Ability to define rich and composable on-chain assets o Sui’s scalability is not limited to transaction processing. Storage is also low-cost and horizontally scalable. This enables developers to define complex assets with rich attributes that live directly on-chain instead of introducing layers of indirection into offchain storage to save on gas fees
  • Rich on-chain assets will enable new applications and economies based on utility without relying solely on artificial scarcity. Developers can implement dynamic NFTs that can be upgraded, bundled, and grouped in an application-specific manner, such as changes in avatars and customizable items based on gameplay. This capability delivers stronger ingame economies as NFT behavior gets fully reflected on-chain, making NFTs more valuable and delivering more engaging feedback loops

Technical Architecture

• High Performance
  • Sui forgoes consensus for most transactions while other blockchains always totally order them. Causally ordering transactions allows Sui to massively parallelize the execution of most transactions; this reduces latency and allows validators to take advantage of all their CPU cores
  • Sui pushes the complexity at the edges: the client is involved in several protocol steps. This minimizes the interactions between validators and keeps their code simpler and more efficient. Sui always gives the possibility to offload most of the client’s workload to a Sui Gateway service for better user experience. In contrast, traditional blockchains follow a fire-and-forget model where clients monitor the blockchain state to assess the success of their transaction submission
  • 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, the security of several traditional blockchains (including most proof-of-work based blockchains) need to wait for predefined timeouts before committing transactions o 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 (or even on a single CPU)
• Performance under faults: Sui runs a leaderless protocol to process common transactions (i.e., containing only owned objects). As a result, faulty validators do not impact performance in any significant way
  • For transactions involving shared objects, Sui employs a state-of-the-art consensus protocol requiring no view-change sub-protocol and thus experiences only slight performance degradations. In contrast, most leader-based blockchains experiencing even a single validator’s crash see their throughput fall and their latency increase (often by more than one order of magnitude)
• Security assumptions: Contrary to many traditional blockchains, Sui does not make strong synchrony assumptions on the network. This means that Sui maintains its security properties under bad network conditions (even excessively bad), network splits/partitions, or even powerful DoS attacks targeted on the validators
  • Sustained network attacks on synchronous blockchains (i.e., most proof-of-work based blockchains) can lead to double-spend of resources and deadlocks
• Efficient local read operations
  • Users interested in only a handful of objects and their history perform authenticated reads at a low granularity and low latency. Sui creates a narrow family tree of objects starting from the genesis allowing it to read only objects tied to the sender of the transaction. Users requiring a global view of the system (e.g., to audit the system) can take advantage of checkpoints to improve performance
  • In traditional blockchains, families are ordered with respect to each other to totally order transactions. This then requires querying a massive blob for the precise information needed. Disk I/O thus becomes a performance bottleneck, and some blockchains now require SSD drives on their validators as a result
• New approach to validate transactions
  • A lot of transactions do not have complex interdependencies with other, arbitrary parts of the state of the blockchain. Often financial users just want to send an asset to a recipient, and the only data required to gauge whether this simple transaction is admissible is a fresh view of the sender's account. Hence Sui takes the approach of only taking a lock - or "stopping the world" - for the relevant piece of data rather than the whole chain – in this case, the account of the sender, which can only send one transaction at a time
  • Sui further expands this approach to more involved transactions that may explicitly depend on multiple elements under their sender's control, using an object model and leveraging Move's strong ownership model. By requiring that dependencies be explicit, Sui applies a "multi-lane" approach to transaction validation, making sure those independent transaction flows can progress without impediment from the others
• A collaborative approach to transaction submission
  • Sui validates transactions individually, rather than batching them in the traditional blocks. The key advantage of this approach low latency; each successful transaction quickly obtains a certificate of finality that proves to anyone that the transaction will be processed by the Sui network
• A different approach to state: Because Sui focuses on managing specific objects rather than a single aggregate of state, it also reports on them in a unique way:
  • Every object in Sui has a unique version number
  • Every new version is created from a transaction that may involve several dependencies, themselves versioned objects
  • Therefore, a Sui validator – or any other validator with a copy of the state – can exhibit a causal history of an object, showing its history since genesis. Sui explicitly makes the bet that in most cases, the ordering of that causal history with the causal history of another object is irrelevant; and in the few cases where this information is relevant, Sui makes this relationship explicit in the data

Stats

• As of Jun 06, 2022, Mysten Labs has 17.4K followers on Twitter, and 546 followers on Medium and Sui has 14.5K members on Discord, and has 215 stars on Github
• Sui’s native asset is called SUI and the total supply of SUI is capped at 10,000,000,000
• As of Mar 19, 2022, an unoptimized single-worker Sui authority running on an 8-core M1 MacBook Pro can execute and commit 120,000 token transfer transactions per second (tps)
• Mysten Labs announced the release of Sui DevNet in May 2022