Intro

The whole crypto community has been bullish on Sui blockchain recently. VanEck's crypto research team, in their Crypto Monthly Recap for September 2024, highlighted Sui as a project to .

They said:

“So-called “monolithic” blockchains, which bundle consensus, execution, and data availability layers into a single protocol stack, outperformed in September, especially Sui whose SUI token was up (+118%) to reach $5B market cap. Sui also saw strength in active addresses (+140%) and revenues (+48%) compared to August. The biggest driver of activity on Sui has been memecoin speculation and the introduction of native stablecoins like AUSD and USDC.

Sui is a project we closely watch due to its unique object-based architecture that supports higher throughput of transactions and lower latency than competitors like Solana and Ethereum. If we are to segment our investment theses on Layer-1 blockchains, we put Sui in the camp with Solana and Aptos as chains that are leveraging their high-performance characteristics to appeal to Web2 developers.”

What makes Sui special?

Let's look closer into Sui’s architectural key features:

• Object-Centric Design

• Parallel Transaction Processing

• Delegated PoS consensus mechanism

• Causal Order transactions

To understand why object-centric design is unique we need to look at how traditional blockchains are designed. Traditional blockchains use an account-based model.

It is similar to how banks track customer balances.

Sui takes a different approach here. Object-centric design means treating each piece of data as a unique object – think of it like a library where each book is a distinct item with its own properties, rather than just an entry in a database.

In Sui's object-centric model:

• Every asset, piece of data, or smart contract is a distinct object

• Each object has its own properties and can be managed independently

• Transactions can process multiple objects in parallel. This improves efficiency

Basically this design brings two main benefits:

1. More natural representation of real-world assets (like financial instruments, NFTs, game items)

2. Better performance through parallel processing (since transactions affecting different objects can happen simultaneously)

I highly recommend watching this video by Sam Blackshear, Co-Founder & CTO of Mysten Labs (which developed Sui) and creator of Move. He explains here how blockchain redefines ownership by turning digital objects into intelligent assets.

Again, first let’s look at traditional blockchains. Traditional blockchains process transactions one at a time, like cars moving through a single-lane road.

Sui allows multiple transactions to process simultaneously. Imagine a multi-lane highway where cars can travel independently in different lanes.

How does Sui archives this ? Two key elements here:

• The object-centric design we talked about earlier that allows unrelated transactions to process independently

• A "Byzantine Consistent Broadcast" algorithm that ensures security and consistency

This approach is making Sui very fast, that is particularly good for high-volume applications like payments for DeFi or gaming.

As we know, Bitcoin uses Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism, Ethereum uses traditional Proof-of-Stake, Sui implements a Delegated Proof-of-Stake system.

Proof-of-Stake and Delegated Proof-of-Stake - sound similar, don’t they?

In traditional Proof-of-Stake (PoS), anyone who has enough tokens can become a validator directly. In Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS), there's a limited number of validator slots, and validators must compete to get enough delegated stakes from other token holders to become one of these select validators.

Think of PoS like a direct democracy where anyone wealthy enough can participate in decision-making, while DPoS is like having a fixed number of seats in parliament, where representatives compete for votes (delegated stakes) from the community.

How does it work in a traditional blockchain ?
Traditional blockchains process all transactions in strict sequential order, even when they're completely unrelated. Sui takes a smarter approach by only enforcing sequential processing when transactions actually affect each other.

Think of it like a busy restaurant kitchen: multiple chefs can prepare different dishes simultaneously, but they only need to coordinate when they're using the same equipment. In Sui's terms:

• Transactions using different objects can process in parallel

• Only transactions using the same objects need to wait for each other

• This smart ordering dramatically improves network efficiency

Performance Metrics

When it comes to raw performance, Sui has impressive capabilities across all key metrics. Especially in a transaction per second. It can process up to 300,000 transactions per second (TPS), dramatically outperforming both Ethereum (15-30 TPS) and Solana (3,000-4,000 TPS).

Wrapping Up

Sui is currently operating on mainnet. The mainnet was launched on May 3, 2023. If you are a developer and would like to start building on Sui, I would highly recommend visiting this page, you can also start by checking the docs or kick start the development with end-to-end example projects here.