Intro to Sui

Object-centric Design

Sui uses objects as its basic unit of data storage rather than accounts, as happens on most other blockchains. Developers define, create, and manage these programmable objects that represent user-level assets. An object has distinct attributes, including ownership, whose values can be updated based on the governing logic of the smart contract that created it.

Although a smart contract creates an object, it does not store the object. Objects and their attributes are stored directly on-chain.

Owned objects vs shared objects

Most assets on Sui are owned by a single address, recorded as a data value for the object. These are referred to as “owned objects.” Transferring ownership simply requires a change of that value. Transactions that are independent of any other action being performed on the network, such as an asset transfer, are considered simple or “single-writer” transactions and can be processed without going through consensus.

Some assets have shared ownership, meaning multiple accounts must authenticate a transaction that changes data related to the object. These transactions are considered complex and must be validated through consensus.

Composable objects

Not only can a person own an object, but objects can own objects on Sui, allowing them to combine into a whole new asset, which is often referred to as composable assets.

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First of Its Kind Composable Transaction

Programmable Transaction Blocks are one of Sui’s most powerful core developer primitives. For conventional blockchains, the fundamental unit of execution is a transaction which is typically simplistic and close to the virtual machine (VM) execution. On Sui, the fundamental unit of execution is elevated to the level of a complex, composable sequence of transactions.

Unbounded Expressivity

Programmable Transaction Blocks are heterogeneous and can access any public on-chain Move function across all smart contracts. Within a single Programmable Transaction Block, typed outputs from earlier on-chain Move calls can be chained as typed inputs to later on-chain Move calls. These types can be arbitrary Sui objects that carry a rich set of attributes and properties. A single Programmable Transaction Block can extract a Player object from a smart contract wallet, use it to make a move in a Game, then send a Badge object won by the move to a multi-game TrophyCase, all without publishing any new smart contract code. There can be up to 1024 heterogeneous transactions in a single Programmable Transaction Block, making its compositionality nearly unbounded.

Atomic Guarantee

Chained transactions in a Programmable Transaction Block execute and fail atomically, meaning they can not be partially processed. This provides a convenient and intuitive programming model, as well as strong guarantees for payment or finance oriented applications.

Coin Management Simplified

Programmable Transaction Blocks leverage gas smashing to simplify coin management. Dust coins, remainder amounts of negligible value, are merged at the end of execution before transaction results are returned.

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Parallel Processing of Simple Transactions

Most blockchain transactions are simple transactions, such as asset transfers, peer-to-peer payments, and minting NFTs. As each simple transaction is independent, they do not need to be completed in any particular order. Rather, they can be processed in parallel.

Sui is designed to optimize for these common, simple transactions. On other blockchains, every transaction, no matter what it is, must enter into a total-ordered list and be verified and processed through global consensus. This typical design can create a bottleneck in the network, reducing the processing speed of individual transactions (latency) and the total number of transactions that can be processed at a time (throughput).

Sui uses an algorithm known as “Byzantine Consistent Broadcast” to reduce the bottleneck and maintain low latency and high throughput. A requestor or proxy can proactively talk to validators to facilitate processing without consensus, resulting in near-instant finality without diminished security. This enables parallel transaction submission and execution on a massive scale.

Narwhal and Bullshark Consensus Engine for Complex Transactions

Complex transactions must be sequenced and go through consensus to be finalized. On Sui, the consensus engine consists of two parts, Narwhal and Tusk. Narwhal is the holding pen for transactions (mempool) that ensures the data is available for processing by the validators. Tusk is the mechanism by which all transactions involving shared objects are ordered.Some assets have shared ownership, meaning multiple accounts must authenticate a transaction that changes data related to the object. These transactions are considered complex and must be validated through consensus.

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Horizontal Scalability

Sui scales horizontally to meet increased network demand on the network. Validators can add more computing power to increase their performance as needed, and reduce it when not needed. Even with high network traffic, Sui's tokenomics model is designed to keep gas fees low and stable. Validators are incentivized to add this capacity because they earn more gas fees instead of higher fees.

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 attributes that live directly on-chain instead of introducing layers of indirection into off-chain storage to save on gas fees.

Sui Move

Sui Move is the native programming language for Sui. It was designed to incorporate everything a blockchain developer would need to create performant, secure, feature-rich applications.

Sui Move is based on the Move language which was specifically designed to improve upon flaws in other smart contract programming languages. Move addresses two key issues in smart contract design: representation of digital assets and safe operations over them. Move has first-class abstractions of assets and access control that improve both the safety of smart contracts and the productivity of smart contract programmers. Sui Move builds on this achievement and adds language for blockchain-specific concepts such as accounts, transactions, time, and cryptography.

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Dynamic Fields

Dynamic fields allow greater flexibility for builders as they don’t only have to define fields as fixed types. These fields have arbitrary names and can be added and removed ad hoc. Dynamic fields also support heterogeneous types, making it possible to store un-like types within a certain object.

Randomness

Various applications, such as games, make use of randomly generated numbers. Truly random numbers are important to ensure fair outcomes for app users. Sui supports the League of Entropy’s drand beacon, which delivers unbiased random numbers.

Package Upgrades

Sui smart contracts are represented by immutable package objects consisting of a collection of Move modules. Because builders require the ability to update their code and pull changes from other developers, the Sui network provides a method of upgrading packages while still retaining their immutable properties.

Sponsored Transactions

To process a transaction on Sui, a user must pay a gas fee. However, many users new to blockchains are unfamiliar with this concept and it can be a barrier to completing their transaction. To remove the friction of asking the user to pay the fee, sponsored transactions, enabled through gas stations, let the application pay the fee itself, never needing to reveal its existence to the user.

Display Standard

The Sui Object Display standard is a template engine that allows for the on-chain management of how an object displays off-chain. Display makes it possible to leave an interface unchanged while updating connected objects, eliminating extra gas fees. Of course, the Display Object can be updated as well. For example, a game might allow an item such as a sword to be upgraded. In this case, the Display Object for the sword might change.

Kiosk Standard

Kiosk is a primitive for building open, zero-fee trading platforms with a high degree of customization over transfer policies. It allows creators to issue policies with objects that give them the power to enforce any constraint on trades they desire, including royalty policies when an object is sold.

Zero Knowledge Proofs

Sui supports zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) as part of its cryptographic model. ZKP allows one party in a two-party transaction to accept a statement from the other party as true without needing additional information about the other party’s veracity.

Advanced Cryptography

Sui uses a multitude of major cryptography advancements to ensure the utmost level of security on the chain. These include attributes that allow developers to implement policy based key management without complex cryptography, enable verifiable randomness APIs, and faster proof verification.

ZK Login

With native supports for the OpenID Connect standard, users can create on-chain accounts with their existing web2 services that supports OpenID Connect such as Google, GitHub, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and many other. This means users will be able to access Sui without the need of private keys or mnemonics streamlining user onboarding at scale.

Sui makes efficient use of ZKPs over OpenID payloads to protect user privacy

Specifics

The Sui economy has three main sets of participants:

users who submit transactions to the platform to create, change, or transfer digital assets or interact with applications built on Sui
SUI token holders who either stake their funds to validators in order to secure the network and participate in governance or use them to pay fees to interact with assets and applications on the chain
validators who manage transaction processing and execution

These participants interact with each other in a variety of ways across the network and that interplay informs the three core components of Sui’s tokenomics:

Sui’s Proof-of-Stake Mechanism ensures the incentives of SUI token holders are in line with Sui’s validators
Sui’s Gas Mechanism ensures the network charges low and stable gas fees to users no matter how much demand there is for activity on the network
Sui’s Storage Fund ensures data storage is priced accurately so data stored today doesn’t burden future users of the network

And the glue that holds the whole system together is the SUI token, Sui’s native asset.

SUI tokens serve four purposes on the network:

They can be staked to a validator in order to secure the network and earn stake rewards.
They can be used to pay gas fees to execute transactions and other operations.
They act as the native asset to facilitate on-chain transactions underpinning the whole Sui economy.
They give holders the right to participate in future governance.

The total supply of SUI is capped at 10 billion tokens.

Within each epoch, a fixed set of validators are responsible for operating the network. This set is chosen based on the amount of SUI tokens staked to the validator. With Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS), Sui allows for the broadest possible participation of token holders in network operations. Importantly, by using staked SUI token amounts as a proxy for voting power, the right degree of “skin in the game” is established—those who care most about the network’s future get a larger voice in its current operations.

Most SUI token holders will not have the funds, ability, or desire to run a validator but want to participate in securing the network. To do so, they “back” a validator they believe to be a good actor by delegating their tokens to that validator’s stake. These delegated tokens help the validator reach the minimum amount needed to be part of the active set of validators for the epoch. The tokens are locked for the epoch, meaning they can’t be transferred or sold.

In exchange for operating and securing the network, the validator receives staking rewards in the form of SUI tokens. The rewards are distributed to all token holders who delegated to that validator’s stake, minus a small commission fee paid to the manager of the validator.

Sui’s gas pricing mechanism achieves several important outcomes:

delivering users with low, predictable transaction fees
incentivizing validators to optimize their transaction processing operations;
preventing spam and denial of service attacks.

Sui can deliver predictable transaction fees because validators agree via survey on a network-wide reference price at the start of each epoch. Validators each state the minimum price they would be willing to take to process a transaction. These prices are ordered by the protocol and a reference price is selected at which a quorum of validators necessary to run the network are willing to promptly process transactions.

Validators are incentivized to propose credible prices since the network uses the Tallying Rule to determine which validators are processing transactions at the current gas price. Validators evaluate one another’s performance during the epoch, establishing a multiplier for the stake rewards of other validators. If a validator is slow or non-performant, then the Tallying Rule can be used to slash that validator’s rewards. The Tallying Rule’s thus creates a community-enforced mechanism for encouraging validators to honor the reference gas price.

Unlike gas fees, storage fees are set through governance proposals to stay on par with the cost of off-chain data storage. As the costs of off-chain storage declines over time, governance proposals will update Sui’s on-chain storage fees to reflect the new target price.

A blockchain network is not static. The validators who write transactions to the chain today may not be the same as those who will store the data in the future. Because the amount of data grows over time, if users only paid the fees needed at the time of a transaction, future users would pay disproportionately high fees, discouraging use of the network.

To solve this problem, Sui’s Storage Fund redistributes past transaction fees to future validators. Users pay upfront for processing and storage and the storage fees are deposited in the Storage Fund. These funds are considered when distributing stake rewards and are used to adjust the share of rewards distributed to validators. If storage requirements are high, validators receive additional stake rewards to cover additional costs, and vice versa when requirements are low. This ensures that validators are adequately compensated for their costs of holding data in storage.

Sui’s storage model also has a “delete option” by which users can obtain a storage fee rebate when they delete previously stored on-chain data. It is expected that users will delete data whenever storage no longer makes financial sense, preventing unending growth of storage needs. Sui thus offers the best of both worlds: the ability for users to store on-chain data while incorporating a market mechanism ensuring that only data that is worth storing is actually kept on Sui.

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A Note on Governance

Eventually, protocol upgrades and other Sui governance changes will be passed through on-chain voting proposals. The SUI token will give any token holder the ability to participate in this process by staking to a validator. In that way, the future decisions of the network are controlled by the decentralized community.

Intro to Sui

Object-centric Design

Owned objects vs shared objects

Composable objects

First of Its Kind Composable Transaction

Unbounded Expressivity

Atomic Guarantee

Coin Management Simplified

Parallel Processing of Simple Transactions

Narwhal and Bullshark Consensus Engine for Complex Transactions

Horizontal Scalability

Sui Move

Sui Economy’s Participants

The SUI Token

Sui’s Use of Delegated Proof-of-Stake

Sui’s Gas Pricing Mechanism

Sui’s Storage Fund

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