In 2022, when everyone is shouting that the era of web3 has come, the market also begins to expose the drawbacks that were originally based on web3, such as low throughput and high latency, and the platforms of smart contract languages ​​are not interoperable, etc. series of questions. In order to solve these existing pain points, many web3 solutions have begun to emerge in the industry. Mysten Labs, a Web3 infrastructure startup, has also proposed a new solution to this problem facing the current market.

Not long ago, Mysten Labs announced that the PoS blockchain network named Sui has now released its first test network, Sui DevNet. It is understood that DevNet allows validator clients operated by Mysten to send transactions and read requests through the CLI wallet, is also used to browse the DevNet transaction history in a public web browser, and can become a Discord channel for requesting test tokens, which can be used in the Pay gas on the test network.

After that, Mysten Labs will also make several improvements to Sui DevNet in the coming time. The goal of Sui Chain is to enable creators and developers to build experiences that satisfy the next billion users in the web3. Next, let us explore the value potential of the Sui chain together.

About Mysten Labs

In 2021, the likes of Evan Chang and Sam Blackshear have decided to leave the comfort of Novi Research (Meta’s advanced crypto R&D team) to build a company dedicated to rethinking web3 infrastructure from first principles. Because they've come to realize that it's impossible to work in crypto for long without being "red" by the amazing potential built for the groundbreaking web3 community. So they started a new journey at Mysten Labs.

Mysten Labs is focused on building the infrastructure to accelerate web3 adoption, accelerating consensus through Narwhal, more secure smart contract programming through Move, and working to create a platform for true autonomy in digital assets.

The success of the early crypto network has attracted a flood of enthusiastic investors. However, some fundamental limitations of the existing encryption infrastructure still prevent the widespread adoption of web3 in the market.

1. Scalability: Low throughput and high latency are common problems with existing chains. The result of limited capacity and high demand is high gas fees that limit the accessibility of existing applications. Other use cases that require a lot of on-chain computation or storage are simply not suitable to build on today’s infrastructure.

2. Programmability: Today’s smart contract languages ​​are not cross-platform. Popular languages ​​overfit the implementation details of the blockchains they are designed for, hindering interoperability and preventing communities from forming across platforms. Furthermore, smart contract languages ​​are not secure enough - language design errors expose such a large contract attack surface that multi-million dollar exploits are a regular occurrence. Existing languages ​​are serious barriers to mainstream adoption of digital assets and accessible smart contract development.

Mysten Labs was built to solve these problems by laying the foundation for a decentralized web stack suitable for mass adoption. At present, Mysten Labs has completed its first round of financing, a $36 million Series A financing led by a16z, with participants including Redpoint, Lightspeed, Coinbase Ventures, Electric Capital, Standard Crypto, NFX, Slow Ventures, Scribble Ventures, Samsung NEXT , Lux Capital, Bienville, Hack VC, Finality Capital, Elad Gil and many other funds and angel investors in the web3 space.

What is Sui chain?

The Sui blockchain is the first permissionless Layer 1 blockchain designed from the ground up to enable creators and developers to build experiences that satisfy the next billion users in the web3. Sui is horizontally scalable to support a wide range of application development at unmatched speed and low cost.

Sui Chain is horizontally scalable and can support a wide range of application development with extreme speed and low cost. Its system design breakthrough removes a key bottleneck in existing blockchains: the need for a global consensus on a total sorted list of transactions. This computation is wasteful given that most transactions do not compete with other transactions for the same resources.

Sui Chain takes a major leap in scalability by implementing a parallel protocol on causally independent transactions. Sui authorities use Byzantine consensus broadcasting to submit such transactions, eliminating the overhead of global consensus without sacrificing security and liveness guarantees.

Basic Features

1. Unparalleled scalability, instant settlement;
2. A secure smart contract language that mainstream developers can use;
3. Ability to define rich and composable on-chain assets;
4. Provide a better user experience for web3 applications.

Today, users of existing blockchains pay considerable taxes as network usage increases and throughput is limited. Additionally, high latency limits the responsiveness of applications. These factors contribute to the very common poor user experience in web3:

1. The game is slow and expensive;
2. Investors lose funds when they cannot liquidate undercollateralized loans in DeFi;
3. High-volume, low-value mass-market services such as micropayments and coupons are priced outside the network;
4. The floor price of the asset is artificially inflated due to high gasoline prices.

The Sui Chain scales horizontally to meet the needs of the application, by adding workers, the network capacity grows in proportion to the increase in the processing power of the Sui authorities, reducing gas fees even when network traffic is high. This scalability feature is in stark contrast to other blockchains with rigid bottlenecks.

core design

By design, Sui nodes can effectively and infinitely scale network throughput to meet the needs of builders and creators. As of March 19, an unoptimized simplex Sui node running on an 8-core M1 Macbook Pro can execute and submit 120,000 Token Transfer Transactions (TPS) per second. Throughput scales linearly with the number of cores, with the same machine processing 25,000 TPS in a single-core configuration.

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 properties that live directly on-chain, rather than introducing a layer of indirection in off-chain storage to save on gas. Moving properties on-chain unlocks the ability to implement application logic that uses these properties in smart contracts, increasing application composability and transparency.

Abundance of on-chain assets will support new utility-based applications and economies, rather than relying solely on artificial scarcity. Developers can implement dynamic NFTs that can be upgraded, bundled, and grouped in application-specific ways, such as changes to avatars and customizable items based on gameplay. With NFT behavior fully reflected on-chain, this ability provides a stronger in-game economy, making NFTs more valuable and providing a more engaging feedback loop.
The configuration used for this experiment is that each client submits a batch of 100 transactions (i.e., transfers to 100 different recipients), with one signature. This configuration captures the expected usage pattern of a highly scalable blockchain, such as a hosted wallet or game server operating at scale that might need to submit hundreds or thousands of on-chain transactions per second. With a batch size of 1, a license running on the same machine can handle 20,000 TPS for 8 cores, and the throughput exhibits the same linear increase as more cores are added.

Mobile smart contracts power the Sui application. Move is a programming language originally developed at Facebook to write secure smart contracts. It is a platform-agnostic language that supports the sharing of libraries, tools, and developer communities across blockchains. Move is designed to prevent attackers from exploiting these vulnerabilities to steal millions of dollars on other platforms with issues such as reentrancy, poisoned tokens, and deceptive token approvals. Its emphasis on security and expressiveness makes it easier for developers to transition from web2 to web3 without having to understand the complexities of the underlying infrastructure.

Dependencies are explicitly encoded due to its object-centric view and Move's strong ownership type. Thus, Sui both agrees and executes transactions in parallel on the majority of objects, while the minority of transactions affecting shared state are ordered by Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus and executed in parallel.

Sui strives to be the most accessible smart contract platform, enabling developers to create great user experiences in web3. To usher in the next billion users, Sui will provide developers with a variety of tools to harness the power of the Sui chain. The Sui Development Kit (SDK) will enable developers to build without boundaries. Sui chain token economic model

Recently, Mysten Labs publicly stated that the token of the public chain project Sui is SUI, and its total supply is 10 billion pieces, some of which will be circulated when the mainnet is launched, and the remaining SUI will be unlocked or distributed in incentive activities in the next few years. . The main uses of SUI include participating in PoS staking, paying gas fees, supporting the Sui economic system, and participating in on-chain voting.

Three main groups of players

1. Users submit transactions to the Sui platform to create, mutate and transfer digital assets, or to interact with more complex applications supported by smart contracts, interoperability and composability;

2. SUI token holders can choose to delegate their tokens to validators and participate in the proof-of-stake mechanism. SUI owners also have the right to participate in the governance of Sui;
3. Validators manage transaction processing and execution on the Sui platform.

Five core components

1. SUI tokens are the native assets of the Sui platform;

2. All network operations charge gas fees to reward participants in the proof-of-stake mechanism to prevent spam and denial-of-service attacks;

3. Sui's storage fund is used to transfer equity rewards over time and compensate future validators for the storage cost of on-chain data previously stored;

4. The Proof-of-Stake mechanism is used to select, incentivize and reward Sui platform operators (i.e. validators and SUI delegators) for their honest behavior.

5. On-chain voting is used for governance and protocol upgrades;

Sui's economic model

The Sui platform relies on delegated proof-of-stake to determine the set of validators that process transactions. In each epoch, operations are handled by a fixed set of validators, each with a specific amount of stake delegated by SUI token holders. Delegating SUI means that SUI tokens are locked for the entire epoch and receive a partial stake reward when the epoch closes. SUI token holders are free to cancel SUI or change their delegated validators when the epoch changes.

The validator's share of the total stake is relevant because it determines each validator's share of voting power in processing transactions. This design is very powerful because it allows Sui to parallelize transactions for non-shared objects. Thus, each validator can scale itself horizontally and increase its transaction throughput by adding more computing power. This provides efficient unit economics, as both throughput and cost scale linearly with network activity on independent data.

Sui's "multi-channel" design is in stark contrast to traditional blockchain designs that rely on total ordering - where each transaction is ordered relative to each other, or even completely independent transactions. Stake rewards are distributed at the end of each epoch once validators have agreed on all transactions processed throughout the epoch. Importantly, since storage funds are taken into account when calculating the total stake for an epoch, as long as Sui's on-chain data storage requirements are high, validators will receive more staking rewards relative to SUI delegators.

Protocol upgrades to the Sui Chain and other Sui governance changes are delivered through on-chain voting proposals, and Sui's economic model is tailored to run smoothly in sync with Sui's engineering design. Sui's gas price mechanism and storage fund are closely related to Sui's ability to parallel transactions, scale horizontally, and store any amount of on-chain data.

Probe into the follow-up development

In the next phase of Sui's development roadmap, the main purpose of Sui will be to enable developers to define and build:

1. On-chain DeFi and TradFi primitives: Real-time, low-latency on-chain transactions;

2. Rewards and Loyalty Programs: Deploy large-scale airdrops to benefit millions of people through low-cost transactions;

3. Complex game and business logic: transparently implement on-chain logic, expand asset functions, and provide value beyond pure scarcity;

4. Asset tokenization services: enable large-scale and seamless execution of ownership of everything from property deeds to collectibles to medical and educational records;

5. Decentralized Social Media Networks: Empower creator-owned media, posts, likes, and networks with privacy and interoperability.

Sui Chain is a blockchain that can scale as web3 grows, while achieving industry-leading performance, cost, programmability and usability. For Mysten Labs, the development of the Sui chain is only the first step. It is not a derivative or incremental improvement of the Diem network. If it goes live, it will represent a step-by-step advancement in blockchain technology to meet the needs of the next generation of crypto users and developers. Let us look forward to the early launch of Sui.