Unveiling SUI: The Next Ethereum Killer?

Sui: The Next Ethereum Killer?

What’s Sui Blockchain?

Sui’s gotten a lot of attention lately. So, what exactly is Sui and how does it differ from many other existing Layer 1 blockchains?

It’s intended to provide scalability and low latency for simple use cases such as payments. This is achieved by processing transactions in parallel. Sui's consensus algorithm uses the new Narwhal and Bullshark protocols that enable parallel computing thus rendering Sui highly scalable.PoS algorithms with staking and delegation capabilities ensure the operation and security of the Sui network.

The Sui platform is written in Rust and supports smart contracts written in a Rust-based programming language called Move. Move was originally developed by Facebook to develop his Diem blockchain (previously known as Libra) but has now been abandoned due to regulatory opposition.

Architecture

At its core, Sui is a distributed ledger that stores a collection of programmable objects, each with a globally unique identity. Each object is owned by a single address and each address can have any number of objects.

The validators on the Sui network approve and execute transactions in parallel using Byzantine Consistent Broadcasting.

At a high level, the Sui blockchain achieves great speed and scalability by optimizing simple transactions. This is achieved by making each transaction idempotent. In other words, a transaction retains its final state no matter how many times it is repeated. This is especially important in blockchain and payment systems to protect against duplicate transactions, for example, a recipient receiving a payment twice.

Sui assumes all transactions are operations between users or assets and optimizes accordingly. There are two types of assets:

1) Owned Objects: only their respective owners can modify them.
2) Shared Objects:can be modified by more than one user.

Suiuses Narwhal and Tusk DAG-based mempools and efficient BFT consensus to handle more complex shared object transactions.

The drawback of this dual-protocol system is that one side relies on Byzantine Consistent Broadcasts to handle simple transactions and the other handles shared object transactions, forcing development teams to maintain a much larger code base. It is a must. Additionally, transactions involving shared objects take longer to reach finality (2-3 seconds) due to the overhead required before the clients in the Sui network undergo the consensus protocol.

a technical overview of the Sui architecture, see the Sui documentation.

Move

Move is based on the popular and supported Rust programming language and was originally developed by Facebook for the Diem blockchain. Unlike Solidity, which has security and verifiability issues, Move is specifically designed to represent digital assets and perform secure operations on them.

This means that digital assets cannot be duplicated, each can only be owned by one of him and can only be issued once.

Sui's primary reason for its high performance is its Move data model, which allows transactions to be executed and committed in parallel. This is not possible with his EVM data model, as assets are stored in dynamically indexable maps.

Simply put, the Move programming language allows Sui to achieve that goal. It's about scaling out and delivering industry-leading speed at a low cost.

Security

Sui is designed to provide a suite of security guarantees for asset owners on the network. These include:

• An owned asset can only be used by its owner. Authorization is done via a private signature key held by the asset owner.
• Shared assets can be operated on by everyone. Additional access control logic can be implemented via smart contract.
• Transactions can only be operated on assets according to predefined rules set by the smart contract creator.
• Once a transaction is finalized, changes to the assets or new assets created will be persisted and available for further processing.
• Although the Sui network operates through a protocol between a set of independent validators, all security properties are preserved even if a small subset of validators do not follow the protocol.
• All operations on the Sui blockchain are transparent, and can be audited to ensure processes are accurately carried out.
• Validators are determined by users through the delegation of $SUI tokens.

Tokenomics

The $SUI token is a native asset of the network and is used to pay gas fees and reward Proof of Stake (PoS) participants.

$SUI has a total supply of 10 billion tokens. At the time of writing, there is no detailed token distribution plan other than a portion of $SUI will be liquidated at mainnet launch and the rest will be vested and/or distributed as a staking incentive.

Sui Wallet

On July 15, 2022, Sui announced and released the Sui Wallet, which is open-sourced. At present, the wallet allows users to create an address, view and manage assets (tokens or NFTs), and interact with dApps on the Sui devnet.

Final Thoughts

The Sui team took the cliché “bear markets are for building” seriously. They built Sui on the new smart contract programming language, which is usually a hurdle to adoption and traction, while Move is based on the Rust programming language. As such, there should be minimal friction for potential developers to start building with Sui.

Sui's architecture makes it an ideal platform for DeFi, gaming, and payment protocols as these protocols typically handle simple transactions. These simple transactions can be executed in near real time and are not bounded by the underlying block time. Additionally, the network can scale out as needed, keeping transaction costs low.