Analysis of the Core Distributed System Protocol of the Sui Public Chain

Mysten Labs updated the Sui Lutris white paper on August 18, confirming the following key performance indicators after several months of testing:

• With PTBs and 5K TPS, Sui can handle 140k to 150k operations per second, far exceeding the peak performance of the mainnet (about 700 TPS).
• Even if some validator nodes stop running, Sui's finality delay can still be maintained below 0.5 seconds.

The white paper details the operational mechanism of Sui, its security proofs, and how external testers can reproduce the relevant data in their own verification tests.

After the launch of the Sui mainnet, applications such as games and NFTs quickly went on-chain. The Sui Lutris technical report recently released by Mysten Labs introduces the distributed system that supports Sui, enabling it to maintain low latency under conditions of high throughput and long-term stability.

Since the birth of Bitcoin, blockchain technology has made significant progress, with emerging applications continuously appearing. The industry is constantly exploring ways to enhance blockchain efficiency, with particular attention to high-load processing and real-time latency optimization.

Currently, L1 blockchains face two major challenges: achieving high throughput while maintaining low latency, and ensuring long-term stability of the consensus protocol. These challenges can be addressed through the dynamic participation and configuration of validating nodes.

One effective way to achieve high throughput is to adopt DAG-based consensus protocols, such as Narwhal/Bullshark used by Sui. These types of protocols support a large number of transactions executed in parallel, making them very suitable for application scenarios like games and NFTs. However, DAG-based protocols may lead to delays of several seconds, which can significantly impact certain operations.

On the other hand, non-consensus protocols show great potential in reducing latency and enhancing scalability, such as the early prototype FastPay. These protocols achieve rapid transaction processing by eliminating the consensus step. However, they are only suitable for a limited category of simple blockchain operations, which restricts the expressiveness of smart contracts and makes it difficult to cope with the dynamic changes of the validating node set.

Although both protocols have their advantages, they have not yet been widely adopted in product-level blockchains. Sui Lutris, as the core protocol supporting the Sui network, innovatively combines DAG-based consensus and non-consensus methods, achieving sub-second latency and sustained throughput of thousands of transactions per second, while retaining the ability to express complex contracts, generate checkpoints, and validate node sets across cycles.

Sui Lutris adopts a unique hybrid approach: for operations on assets with a single owner (unique objects), the system uses a consistent broadcasting protocol among validation nodes to achieve consensus-lower latency; for complex smart contracts on shared objects, consensus processing is relied upon. In addition, Sui Lutris also supports network maintenance operations, such as defining checkpoints and reconfiguring validation nodes.

The transaction lifecycle of Sui Lutris includes the following steps:

1. The user creates and signs the transaction
2. The validator node performs validity checks and signatures.
3. The client collects the responses from the verification nodes to form a transaction certificate.
4. The certificate is sent back to the verification node for confirmation.
5. Consensus Engine Processes Certificates
6. The client collects the responses from the verification nodes as proof of transaction settlement.
7. Create checkpoints and drive the reconfiguration protocol.

In addition to the main trading process, Sui Lutris also offers multiple features to support product-level blockchain operations, including checkpoint protocol, periodic reconfiguration support, and a secure "unlock" mechanism for mistakenly locked assets.

As the infrastructure of Sui, Sui Lutris provides detailed descriptions and proofs of the security and liveness protocols in the standard distributed system model. The complete technical report offers more details that help to gain a deeper understanding of how this innovative system works.