What Is Sui? The Ultimate Guide to the Sui Ecosystem

Sui is a layer-1 blockchain optimizing for low-latency blockchain transfers. Its focus on instant transaction finality and high-speed transaction throughput make Sui a suitable platform for on-chain use cases like games, finance, and other real-time applications. Sui’s smart contracts are written in Move, a Rust-based programming language that prioritizes fast and secure transaction executions.
Sui’s “horizontal scaling” is achieved through a process called “transaction parallelization,” allowing “parallel agreement” across different, independent types of transactions. Thanks to the organization of data as independent objects, transactions that are independent of one another are validated by Sui nodes via byzantine fault-tolerant proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.

How Does Sui Work?

Sui differs from other blockchains by executing different consensus and transaction processing mechanism. Traditional blockchain validators sequentially add transactions to the blockchain, thus adding new records to the chain sequentially and limiting the scalability of a blockchain to increase the speed of the said incremental additions (vertical scaling).

Sui takes a different approach. Since many transactions naturally are not causally related to each other, Sui does away with having each transaction validated by all nodes in the network. Instead, it takes a look only at the relevant piece of data instead of validating the entire chain. In order to accomplish this efficiently, Sui uses an object-centric model, where the chain data storage is not centered around accounts but around objects. This novel type of data storage allows Sui nodes to validate uncorrelated transaction flows independently and individually, instead of having to order all transactions like in the traditional blockchain model.

The transaction broadcasting and validation on Sui looks as follows:

1. The sender broadcasts a transaction to all validators.
2. Validators check the transaction for validity and send their weighted votes based on their stake.
3. The sender collects a Byzantine-resistant majority and broadcasts the result as a certificate to validators.

This presumably allows Sui to reach transaction speeds of over 100,000 transactions per second. Furthermore, in the object model of ownership employed by Sui, there are three different types of ownership of an asset:
Owned by an address (e.g. coins, or NFTs)
Owned by another object (an NFT that is part of another NFT)
Shared (e.g. AMM pools)
Transactions with shared objects are ordered, but transactions involving owned objects can be executed at a near-instant speed in so-called “single writer apps.” This means that Sui can target verticals such as NFTs, gaming, messaging services, social networks, and decentralized identity platforms that heavily leverage single-writer apps and build them with web3 properties at web2 speed of execution.

How To Use the Sui Wallet?

You can install the Sui Wallet browser extension with a few simple steps:

1. Head to the Sui Wallet browser extension and download the wallet by clicking “Add to Chrome” and then “Add Extension.”
2. Open the extension in the browser and click “Get Started” and then “Create a New Wallet.”
3. Enter a password for the wallet (the password applies to this installation only and not the global password).
4. Enter the password again and accept the Terms of Service.
5. Click “Create Wallet.”
6. Store the recovery phrase and click “Done”.
7. Click “Open Sui Wallet.”