Can the new public chain Sui developed by the original Meta team become the biggest dark horse killer in Web3?

Author: Chole, Chain Teahouse

The early success in the crypto space attracted a large number of enthusiastic investors. However, the existing infrastructure of projects still hinders the widespread adoption of the web3 market.

In 2021, Evan Chang, Sam Blackshear, and others decided to leave the comfortable environment of Novi Research (Meta's senior crypto R&D team) to establish a company dedicated to web3 infrastructure. During their time at Meta, they gradually realized that to build new applications for pioneering web3 that differ from past projects, they needed to step out of their original field and work in the crypto space. Thus, they embarked on a new journey with Mysten Labs.

Mysten Labs has foundational experience in building and developing high-throughput architectures, which makes its operational model significantly different from other projects. It aims to execute a series of tasks in parallel across a complete project pipeline at different stages, including: research, development, productization, and growth. It will fully utilize the necessary scientific rigor and engineering precision to create a reliable system that ensures effective operation in adversarial environments.

The founders of Mysten Labs stated that last year they decided to leave the comfortable environment of Meta to establish Mysten Labs, following the principle of rethinking web3 infrastructure. Sui is our first step, and it is a significant one.

1: Project Overview

The new public chain Sui has no upper limit on horizontal scalability to meet the demands of any application while ensuring that the operational cost of each transaction remains low. The system design of Sui breaks through the key bottleneck of existing blockchains: the need for a globally agreed-upon total ordering of transactions, which is somewhat wasteful since most transactions do not compete for the same resources.

Sui achieves significant leaps in scalability through a protocol that allows independent transactions to be processed in parallel. Currently, the official implementation uses Byzantine consensus broadcasting to submit such transactions, eliminating unnecessary costs of global consensus without sacrificing any guarantees of safety and liveness. Currently, only Sui's data model can achieve this breakthrough, as its object-centric view and the powerful ownership types of Move explicitly encode dependencies, allowing Sui to agree on and execute transactions in parallel on most objects.

The development team believes that Sui is the only technology today that can scale with the growth of web3 while achieving industry-leading performance, cost, programmability, and usability in blockchain. In the coming months, it will drive the launch of the mainnet, showcasing transaction processing capabilities that surpass traditional systems and blockchain systems.

Sui is the first internet-scale programmable blockchain platform and serves as the foundational layer for web3.

2: Application Scenarios

Sui Nodes:

In the past, many chains faced common issues of low throughput and high latency, resulting in high gas fees that limited the accessibility of existing applications and made it unsuitable for projects requiring significant on-chain computation or storage to be built on today's infrastructure.

Sui's high performance allows an unoptimized single-threaded Sui node on an 8-core M1 Macbook Pro to execute and submit 120,000 token transfer transactions per second (TPS). Throughput is linearly related to the number of cores, with the same machine handling 25,000 TPS in a single-core configuration. The key to this performance lies in transaction parallelization.

In many blockchains, transactions must be ordered and placed into blocks for sequential execution, which overly restricts the throughput of these chains. Since most transactions are independent, Sui improves the dependency relationships and processes them in parallel, even in cases where a few transactions are interwoven, Sui can still sort and execute them sequentially.

This means that because independent transactions can be verified in parallel, Sui can linearly increase throughput by adding more devices to each validating node, thereby enhancing scalability.

Move Virtual Machine and Move Programming Language:

Sui uses the Move virtual machine and Move programming language to implement smart contracts. Today's smart contracts are not cross-platform; many popular languages are overly tailored to the details of the blockchains they were designed for, significantly hindering interoperability and creating difficulties in forming cross-platform communities. Additionally, smart contract languages expose many large-scale contract attacks due to design flaws, increasing various insecurities. Millions of dollars in vulnerabilities are frequently exploited by hackers, making it clear that existing languages are the biggest barriers to mainstream adoption of digital assets and accessible smart contracts.

"Move is memory-safe like Rust but performs better than other smart contract languages." Sui has made a small modification to Move to improve network performance and simplify the developer experience. While most blockchains' storage is account-centric, Sui's storage is designed around objects.

In simple terms, each object is owned by an address, which is mutable by default but can also be set to immutable or shared among multiple addresses. Sui's Move smart contracts can accept these object inputs, operate on them, and return them as outputs.

This represents a completely different programming paradigm for smart contracts compared to Solid or Rust, and this intuitive programming style is well-suited for dynamic NFTs and the ever-evolving digital mechanisms of the crypto space.

Participant Application Scenarios:

1. Validators manage transaction processing and execution on the Sui platform.
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 Sui governance.
3. Users submit transactions to the Sui platform to create, mutate, and transfer digital assets or interact with more complex applications supported by smart contracts, interoperability, and composability.

Novel Design of the Gas Market:

Sui operates in epochs, with the set of validating nodes changing every epoch (24 hours). New epoch validating nodes vote based on the reference gas fees of the epoch. Due to significant fluctuations in the network and market, most blockchains are affected by gas cost volatility. To keep gas fees low and predictable, the protocol provides incentives to encourage validating nodes to maintain transaction fees close to the reference price throughout the epoch, allowing users to execute transactions at a more predictable speed by providing more stable gas fees, thus creating a more optimized user experience.

Moreover, Sui also addresses the issue of state bloat. Whenever users submit data on-chain, they must also pay gas fees and other costs to Sui's "storage fund." This fund is used to pay the real costs of validating nodes storing user data. As the network matures and storage costs rise, validating nodes will be compensated from the storage fund.

3: Token Model

The Sui Token is SUI, with a total supply of 10 billion. In the future, it will be allocated to the founding team, investors, public sales, the Sui Foundation, and releases. The token distribution timeline will be announced in the coming weeks.

4: Team Introduction

The founders include CEO Evan Cheng, CTO and former Novi chief engineer Adeniyi Abiodun, former Novi research and development director Sam Blackshear, former Novi product lead George Danezis, and Kostas Kryptos, all of whom participated in the Novi and Diem projects at Meta. These scientists and engineers are key figures behind many innovations at Meta, including the Move programming language and the Narwhal/Tusk memory pool and BFT consensus currently being implemented on other blockchains.

5: Investment Institutions

Mysten Labs raised at least $200 million in Series B funding at a valuation of $2 billion, led by FTX Ventures, with the project team having secured $140 million in this round. Previously, Mysten Labs announced the completion of a $36 million Series A funding round in December 2021, led by a16z, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, NFX, Slow Ventures, Scribble Ventures, Samsung NEXT, Lux Capital, and others.

6: Community Situation

Twitter:
https://twitter.com/mysten_labs
3.1k followers

Discord:
https://discord.com/invite/sui
28,254 followers

Medium:
https://medium.com/mysten-labs
764 followers

7: Chain Teahouse Review

The founding team members of Mysten Labs spent three years at Novi Research (Meta's senior crypto R&D team), continuously promoting and developing blockchain technology capabilities, and participated in many important projects, such as the Diem blockchain and the Move programming language.

With the growth of web3, the Sui chain expands while achieving industry-leading performance, cost, programmability, and usability. For Mysten Labs, the development of the Sui chain is just the first step; if it successfully launches in the future, it will represent another advancement in blockchain technology.