Sui Sets New Standard for Blockchain Transaction Speeds

Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands, May 21st, 2024, Chainwire

Set to hit Mainnet this summer, Sui’s new Mysticeti protocol cuts consensus latency down to 390 ms.

Sui, the pioneering Layer 1 blockchain that offers industry-leading performance and infinite horizontal scaling, today announced the successful deployment of Mysticeti, its latest consensus protocol, on Sui Testnet. This significant breakthrough reduces consensus time on Sui’s public Testnet by 80 percent at 390 milliseconds while maintaining the protocol’s industry-leading throughput. This impressive demonstration confirms that Sui is the fastest consensus layer in the industry.

Developed from deep research into Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanisms, Mysticeti represents a significant advancement from Narwhal-Bullshark, the consensus algorithms Sui launched into its Mainnet a year ago, achieving unprecedented transaction speeds and reducing CPU requirements for validators. This enhancement extends Sui's impressive low latency performance to all transaction types across the network.

Sui’s uniquely object-oriented architecture enables the network to process transactions differently based on the characteristics of the transaction and the objects involved. On Sui, transactions involving only “owned objects”, such as peer-to-peer transfers, do not require consensus. Instead, they follow a fast-path execution that can be completed in a shorter time. In contrast, transactions involving the same shared object, for example, transactions involving marketplaces, auctions or collaborative game assets, do require consensus. In the past, that meant more processing latencies. Mysticeti changes that, by processing shared object transactions using an optimized version of BFT consensus. The Mysticeti design involves minimal cross-validator communication and fully takes advantage of network bandwidth in order to maintain high throughput.

“Mysticeti represents a major leap forward, not just for Sui but for blockchain technology as a whole,” said George Danezis, Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Mysten Labs which originated the Sui Network and pioneer of global research on BFT consensus. “It reduces consensus latency to what we understand to be its lower limits while retaining the benefits of high capacity and low computation cost. It also allows transaction processing faster than consensus within the same protocol, a feature unique to Sui. Mysticeti is yet another instance of Sui pushing the boundaries of what blockchain technology can achieve.”

Results on Testnet have been remarkable, demonstrating the capability to commit transactions with an 80% reduction in latency compared to Narwhal. The enhancement implemented by Mysticeti significantly decreases complexity and optimizes resource use, allowing the Sui network to handle tens of thousands of transactions per second with latencies well below one second.

These advancements are critical as Sui continues to cement its position at the pinnacle of blockchain speed and scale, and provide a seamless experience for developers and users at scale.

“Mysticeti's launch is the result of a successful collaboration between research, engineering, and our validator community,” said Dmitri Perelman, Head of Engineering at Mysten Labs. “The lessons we learned from building and tuning previous-generation consensus in production provided the context and inspiration for the researchers to come up with the new protocol. After the first Mysticeti prototype demonstrated undeniable performance superiority, the engineering team was fully onboard and the next-gen consensus implementation is being rolled out to Mainnet with the support of validators in a matter of months.”

Kevin Nelson, Co-Founder of Aftermath Finance said, “With Mysticeti, Mysten has proven that the DAG-based structure can surpass state-of-the-art performance in both consensus throughput and, importantly, latency. At Aftermath, we are excited to see Mysticeti roll out on testnet and even more excited for when it will touch the hands of our users with its release on Mainnet. Moreover, we are looking forward to taking advantage of Mysticeti's new design to provide a better end-to-end experience on Aftermath.”

Greg Siourounis, Sui Foundation Managing Director added, “Low latency and fast transaction speeds have always been fundamental to Sui's value as a top choice for builders, and with Mysticeti, the developer experience gets even better. This breakthrough once again showcases an ongoing and relentless focus on innovation, unlocking new possibilities for the types and quality of decentralized applications that can be built on Sui.”

The key innovations of Mysticeti are detailed in the newly published paper, "Mysticeti: Low-Latency DAG Consensus with Fast Commit Path," which shows the scalability of this new technology and is available for review.