Sui, an innovative Layer 1 blockchain that provides industry-leading performance and unlimited horizontal expansion, announced today on its official Twitter that its latest consensus protocol Mysticeti has been successfully deployed to the testnet. This major breakthrough reduced the consensus time of the Sui testnet by 80% to 390 milliseconds while maintaining the industry-leading throughput of the protocol. This impressive demonstration proves that Sui is the fastest consensus layer in the industry.
Mysticeti was developed based on in-depth research on the Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanism. It has significantly improved over the Narwhal-Bullshark consensus algorithm launched when the Sui mainnet was launched a year ago, achieving unprecedented transaction speeds and reducing Verify the node's CPU requirements. This improvement extends Sui’s exceptional low-latency performance to all transaction types on the network.
Sui's unique object-oriented architecture enables the network to process transactions differently depending on the characteristics of the transaction and the objects involved. On Sui, transactions involving only "exclusive objects" (such as peer-to-peer transfers) do not require consensus, and they follow a fast path that can be completed in a shorter time. Transactions involving the same shared objects (for example, transactions involving markets, auctions, or collaborative game assets) require consensus. In the past, this meant more processing delays, but now Mysticeti has changed this by using an optimized version of BFT consensus to process shared object transactions. Mysticeti is designed to minimize communication between verification nodes and make full use of network bandwidth to maintain high throughput.
"Mysticeti is not only a major leap forward for Sui, but also a major advancement for blockchain technology as a whole," said George Danezis, founder of Sui Network and a pioneer in global BFT consensus research, as well as co-founder and chief scientist of Mysten Labs. "It reduces consensus latency to what we believe is the minimum, while retaining the advantages of high capacity and low computational cost. It also allows for faster-than-consensus transaction processing within the same protocol, a feature unique to Sui. Mysticeti is an example of Sui once again pushing the limits of blockchain technology."
Mysticeti’s results on the testnet have been dramatic, with an 80% reduction in transaction submission latency compared to Narwhal. Mysticeti enhancements significantly reduce complexity and optimize resource usage, allowing the Sui network to process tens of thousands of transactions per second with less than a second of latency.
These advancements are critical for Sui as it continues to solidify its position at the top of blockchain speed and scale, and provide a seamless experience for developers and users at scale.
“The launch of Mysticeti is the result of a successful collaboration between research, engineering, and our validator community,” said Dmitri Perelman, Head of Engineering at Mysten Labs. “What we learned from building and tweaking the previous generation consensus for production provided the context and inspiration for researchers proposing a new protocol. After the first Mysticeti prototype demonstrated undeniable performance benefits, the engineering team fully supported the next generation consensus implementation, which will be rolled out to mainnet with the support of validators in a few months.”
Kevin Nelson, co-founder of Aftermath Finance, said: "Mysten proves that DAG-based structures can surpass state-of-the-art performance in consensus throughput and latency. We are excited about the launch of Mysticeti on the testnet and look forward to reaching users when it is released on the mainnet. In addition, we look forward to leveraging Mysticeti's new design to provide a better end-to-end experience on Aftermath."
Greg Siourounis, head of the Sui Foundation, added: “Low latency and fast transaction speeds have always been fundamental values of Sui as the platform of choice for developers, and now Mysticeti makes the developer experience even better. This breakthrough once again demonstrates our continued and relentless focus on innovation, opening up new possibilities for the type and quality of decentralized applications that can be built on Sui.”
Mysticeti’s key innovations are documented in detail in the newly released paper “Mysticeti: Low-Latency DAG Consensus with Fast Commit Path”, which demonstrates the scalability of this new technology and is available for review.
About Sui Network
Sui is a L1 public chain designed and built from the ground up based on first principles, aiming to provide creators and developers with a development platform capable of supporting the next billion users in Web3. Applications on Sui are based on the Move smart contract language and are horizontally scalable, allowing developers to support a wide range of application development quickly and at low cost.
