Sui is the first permissionless Layer 1 blockchain designed from the ground up to enable creators and developers to build experiences that cater to the next billion users in web3. Sui is horizontally scalable to support a wide range of application development with unrivaled speed at low cost.

Parallel agreement - a breakthrough in system design

Sui scales horizontally with no upper bound to meet application demand while maintaining extremely low operating costs per transaction. Its system design breakthrough eliminates a critical bottleneck in existing blockchains: the need to achieve global consensus on a total-ordered list of transactions. This computation is wasteful given most transactions are not contending for the same resource against other transactions.

Sui takes a significant leap in scalability by enabling parallel agreement on causally independent transactions. Sui authorities commit such transactions using Byzantine consistent broadcast, eliminating global consensus's overhead without sacrificing safety and liveness guarantees.

This breakthrough is only possible with Sui's novel data model. Thanks to its object-centric view and Move’s strong ownership types, dependencies are explicitly encoded. As a result, Sui both agrees on and executes transactions on most objects in parallel, while a minority of transactions that affect shared state are ordered via Byzantine fault tolerant consensus and executed in parallel.

Highlights

1. Permissionless: Sui is the first permissionless Layer 1 blockchain designed from the ground up to enable creators and developers to build experiences that cater to the next billion users in web3. It is also aiming to become the first internet-scale programmable blockchain platform, a foundational layer for web3.
2. Horizontally Scalable: Sui is horizontally scalable to support a wide range of application development with unrivaled speed at low cost and latency, without breaking atomic composability. Sui can take advantage of more machines per validator to increase its performance. Traditional blockchains are often designed to run on a single machine per validator.
3. Causal Ordering: Sui takes a significant leap in scalability by enabling parallel agreement on causally independent transactions and making most transactions processable in parallel. This better utilizes processing resources and offers the option to increase throughput by adding more resources. Sui forgoes consensus to instead use simpler and lower-latency primitives for simple use cases, such as payment transactions and assets transfer. This is unprecedented in the blockchain world and enables a number of new latency-sensitive distributed applications ranging from gaming to retail payment at physical points of sale.
4. Better User Experience: Sui clients are able to offload their workload to a Sui Gateway service for better user experience. In contrast, traditional blockchains follow a fire-and-forget model where clients monitor the blockchain state to assess the success of their transaction submission.
5. No System Timeouts: Sui operates at network speed without waiting for system timeouts between protocol steps. This significantly reduces latency when the network is good and not under attack. In contrast, most other traditional and proof-of-work blockchains need to wait for predefined timeouts before committing transactions.
6. Low Latency: Latency is proportional to the amount of contention a transaction creates – resulting in very low latency for common transactions like payments and transfers.
7. Asset-oriented data model: Sui ****allows for composable and secure programmability via its asset-oriented data model.
8. Third-party replication: Third parties can cheaply and accessibly replicate via sparse nodes.