What Is Sui? Object Model, SUI Token and Staking Explained - CryptoTicker.io

Sui is a layer-1 blockchain that has been running on mainnet since May 3, 2023 and was developed by the US company Mysten Labs.

Its token is called SUI, and supply is capped at ten billion. What sets Sui apart from older networks is its data model: the blockchain does not store account balances but individual objects, each with its own ID, owner and version number.

Transactions that involve different objects can therefore be processed in parallel.

Object-centric Data Model

Most blockchains keep accounts with a key-value store. A transfer changes two balances, and every transaction has to know where it stands in sequence relative to all the others. Sui takes a different approach.

According to its technical documentation, every resource, every asset and every piece of data on the blockchain is an object.

Each object has four components: a globally unique identifier (ID), an owner, a version number that increases with every change, and metadata such as the digest of the last transaction that used the object.

A token balance, an NFT or an in-game item is thus a record of its own and not just a number in a large table.

The practical advantage is that when two users each move only their own objects, their transactions do not touch. The network does not have to weigh them against each other. A fixed order is only needed when several transactions access the same shared object.

Like parcels on separate belts, Sui transactions run in parallel as long as they involve different objects.

Consensus and Scalability

Sui uses a protocol called Mysticeti for consensus. It is built on a directed acyclic graph (DAG): several validators propose blocks at the same time, rather than only one taking its turn.

According to the Sui documentation, Mysticeti needs only three message rounds to commit a block.

A transaction becomes valid when validators with more than two thirds of the voting power approve it. This threshold makes the network Byzantine fault tolerant: it keeps working correctly as long as less than a third of the voting power fails or behaves maliciously.

Finality, the point after which a transaction can no longer be reversed, is reached as soon as a majority of validators has confirmed the result. Nobody has to wait for additional confirmations as on older networks.

The validators do not rotate constantly. Sui divides time into epochs of around 24 hours. Within an epoch, the validator set and their voting weights stay the same. At the boundary between two epochs, the protocol distributes staking rewards, sets the reference price for fees and admits new validators.

Scalability therefore comes not from a single trick but from the interplay of the object model, parallel execution and a consensus that processes many proposals at once.

Move Programming Language and Tokenomics

Sui uses its own version of the Move programming language, called Sui Move, tailored to the object model. In Move, an object is created as a data structure with a unique ID as its first field. Programs are published as packages and are immutable afterwards.

Move is considered safer and easier to audit than older languages like Solidity. At the same time, the number of experienced Move programmers is far smaller than that of Solidity developers, and programs cannot be ported from Ethereum without rework.

The SUI token has four functions. You use SUI to pay transaction fees, known as gas. You can delegate SUI to validators and so take part in proof of stake. SUI serves as a liquid means of payment and collateral in applications. And SUI entitles you to vote on the protocol, for example on upgrades.

Total supply is capped at 10,000,000,000 SUI. According to CoinGecko, around 4.14 billion SUI were in circulation in early November, or about 41 percent. The rest is released over several years on fixed schedules, for example to early employees, investors in the funding rounds, the community reserve and for staking subsidies.

There was no airdrop at launch. Mysten Labs says it decided this deliberately because free distributions attract scammers. Instead, interested buyers could acquire tokens before launch through a public sale programme.

Sui uses delegated proof of stake (DPoS): token holders delegate their SUI to validators who run the network. Validators lock the stake for one epoch at a time and earn rewards from fees and staking subsidies, which they pass on to delegators minus their commission.