Sui sets a new standard for blockchain transaction speeds

adminMay 21, 2024

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

Sui’s new Mysticeti protocol, scheduled to launch on mainnet this summer, reduces consensus latency to 390ms.

Sui, a pioneering layer 1 blockchain offering industry-leading performance and infinite horizontal scaling, today announced the successful deployment of its latest consensus protocol, Mysticeti, on the Sui Testnet. This important innovation reduces consensus time by 80% to 390 milliseconds on Sui’s public testnet while maintaining the protocol’s industry-leading throughput. This impressive demonstration confirms Sui as the fastest consensus layer in the industry.

Developed through in-depth research into the Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanism, Mysticeti is a significant advance on Narwhal-Bullshark, the consensus algorithm Sui launched on the mainnet a year ago, achieving unprecedented transaction speeds and validator Reduced CPU requirements. This enhancement extends Sui’s impressive low-latency performance to all transaction types across the network.

Sui’s unique object-oriented architecture allows the network to process transactions differently depending on the nature of the transaction and the objects involved. In Sui, transactions involving only “owned objects”, such as peer-to-peer transfers, do not require consensus. Instead, follow a fast path run that can be completed in less time. In contrast, transactions involving the same shared objects (e.g., transactions involving marketplaces, auctions, or collaborative game assets) require consensus. In the past, this meant longer processing delays. Mysticeti changes this by processing shared object transactions using an optimized version of BFT consensus. Mysticeti design includes minimal cross-validator communication and makes full use of network bandwidth to maintain high throughput.

“Mysticeti represents a huge leap forward not only for Sui, but for blockchain technology as a whole,” said George Danezis, co-founder and chief scientist at Mysten Labs, which created the Sui network, and a pioneer in global research on BFT consensus. “We reduce consensus latency to a lower bound while maintaining the benefits of high capacity and low computational cost. It also enables faster-than-consensus transaction processing within the same protocol, a unique feature of Sui. Mysticeti is another example of Sui pushing the limits of what blockchain technology can achieve.”

The results from the testnet were amazing, demonstrating the ability to commit transactions with an 80% reduction in latency compared to Narwhal. The enhancements implemented by Mysticeti significantly reduce complexity and optimize resource usage, allowing the Sui network to process tens of thousands of transactions per second with sub-second latency.

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

“The launch of Mysticeti is the result of a successful collaboration between the research, engineering and verifier communities,” said Dmitri Perelman, Head of Engineering at Mysten Labs. “Lessons learned from building and adapting previous generations of consensus in production provided context and inspiration for researchers to come up with new protocols. “After the first Mysticeti prototype demonstrated undeniable performance excellence, the engineering team became fully engaged, and within a few months, the next-generation consensus implementation is being launched on mainnet with the support of validators.”

Kevin Nelson, co-founder of Aftermath Finance, said: “With Mysticeti, Mysten has demonstrated that DAG-based architectures can outperform the state-of-the-art in both consensus throughput and significant latency. At Aftermath, we are excited to see Mysticeti released on testnet. And we are even more excited to see when Mysticeti will be launched on the mainnet and reach the hands of users. Additionally, we look forward to leveraging Mysticeti’s new design to deliver a better end-to-end experience at Aftermath.”

Greg Siourounis, Sui Foundation Executive Director, added: “Low latency and fast transaction speeds have always been fundamental to the value of Sui as a top choice for builders, and using Mysticeti will further enhance the developer experience. “This breakthrough once again demonstrates our continued and relentless focus on innovation and opens up new possibilities for the types and quality of decentralized applications that can be built on Sui.”

Mysticeti’s key innovations are detailed in the newly published paper “Mysticeti: Low-latency DAG consensus via fast commit path”, which demonstrates the scalability of this new technology and is available for review.