About Sui
Sui is a smart contract platform maintained by a permissionless set of validators that play a role similar to validators or miners in other blockchain systems.
Sui offers scalability and unprecedented low-latency for simple use cases. Sui makes 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.
Sui is written in Rust and supports smart contracts written in Sui Move—a powerful asset-centric adaptation of Move for the Sui blockchain—to define assets that may have an owner. Sui Move programs define operations on these assets, including: custom rules for their creation, the transfer of these assets to new owners, and operations that mutate assets.
Sui tokens and validators
Sui has a native token called SUI, with a fixed supply. The SUI token is used to pay for gas, and users can stake their SUI tokens with validators in a Delegated Proof-of-Stake model within an epoch. The voting power of validators within this epoch is a function of the amount of SUI in their staking pool, including both validator and user SUI tokens. In any epoch, the set of validators is Byzantine fault tolerant. At the end of the epoch, fees collected through all transactions processed are distributed to validators according to their contribution to the operation of the network. Validators can in turn share some of the fees as rewards to users that stake their SUI with them.
Sui is backed by a number of state-of-the-art peer-reviewed works and years of open source development.
Transactions
A transaction in Sui is a change to the blockchain. This may be a simple transaction affecting only single-owner, single-address objects, such as minting an NFT or transferring an NFT or a different token. These simple transactions may bypass the consensus protocol in Sui.
More complex transactions affecting objects that are shared or owned by multiple addresses, such as asset management and other DeFi use cases, go through the Narwhal and Bullshark DAG-based mempool and efficient Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus.
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