Sui Establishes a New Benchmark for Blockchain Speed with Innovative Mainnet Consensus Mechanism

Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands, August 6th, 2024

Sui has announced the successful implementation of its new Mysticeti protocol on the Sui Mainnet, following a productive testing phase on Testnet. This innovative protocol has significantly reduced consensus latency to an impressive 390 milliseconds, reinforcing Sui’s status as a leader in blockchain technology and developer tools.

Built upon thorough research into Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanisms, Mysticeti marks a notable progression from the Narwhal-Bullshark consensus algorithms that were introduced with Sui Mainnet over a year ago. The Mysticeti protocol enables unprecedented transaction speeds, further enhancing Sui’s already exceptional low latency capabilities across various transaction types.

Thanks to Sui’s object-oriented architecture, transactions can be processed differently based on their characteristics and the objects involved. For instance, transactions that involve only “owned objects,” such as direct transfers between users, can skip the consensus process entirely, leading to quicker execution. With Mysticeti, transactions concerning shared objects—like those found in marketplaces or collaborative gaming—are now processed using an optimized version of BFT consensus, resulting in latencies closely resembling those of owned object transactions. The new protocol reduces cross-validator communication and maximizes network bandwidth, allowing for high throughput.

Having been live on Testnet for three months, Mysticeti delivered remarkable results, including an 80% decrease in latency. This development sparked immense interest within the Sui developer community, culminating in a strong desire to transition the update to Mainnet. Now active, the Sui Network is capable of managing tens of thousands of transactions per second with end-to-end latencies consistently under one second.

“Mysticeti’s deployment showcases the synergy between research and engineering, along with the support of the validator community that has integrated this groundbreaking consensus mechanism,” stated Dmitri Perelman, Head of Engineering at Mysten Labs. “This next-generation consensus protocol defines new benchmarks for transaction speeds in blockchain, positioning Sui at the cutting edge of our industry.”

Kevin Nelson, Co-Founder & CTO of Aftermath Finance, which developed a prominent DeFi protocol on Sui, remarked, “The Mysticeti protocol’s focus on reducing latency for shared object transactions is a watershed moment for multiple sectors on Sui, especially within the DeFi ecosystem. Early results post-Mainnet launch indicate significant latency improvements across our entire suite of products. At Aftermath, we are eager to fully utilize Mysticeti’s capabilities to enhance our offerings.”

Rabeel Jawaid, Co-founder of the derivatives exchange Bluefin, shared, “With the Mysticeti upgrade, on-chain settlement latency on Bluefin has drastically reduced! Currently, our P50 consensus latency is just under 400ms, and end-to-end client latency measured via a full node is below one second. This is, to my knowledge, the fastest performance in Web3, especially with large-scale parallelization. The upgrade has already fostered a smoother trading experience for our retail clients while enabling our institutional partners to expand their activity and liquidity on the platform.”

Bonkman, the anonymous Founder of Hop—a DEX aggregator on Sui—added, "Hop facilitates user interactions within Sui’s DeFi ecosystem, making it reliant on Sui’s consensus mechanism. Previously, swaps took about 2-3 seconds; now, nearly every swap is completed in less than 1 second, achieving finality much quicker. There has never been a comparable DeFi experience in Web3 as we see today on Hop, thanks to Mysticeti."

For further inquiries, please contact the Sui Foundation at the provided email address.