What is Sui?

Sui is a smart contract platform developed by Mysten Labs. It is maintained by a permissionless set of validators playing a role similar to that played by validators or miners in other blockchain networks. Sui is a scalable blockchain infrastructure that scales in order to support a wide range of decentralised applications that are fast and low-cost. This means users can expect on-chain transactions with instant settlement speeds. 

Sui is coded in Rust and supports smart contracts that are written in the Move programming language in order to define assets that may have an owner. It is said that Move programs generally define operations on assets including custom creation rules, asset transfer, and also operations that mutate assets. The project has the backing of peer-reviewed works and years of open source development. 

Sui makes use of a Byzantine consistent broadcast protocol between authorities in order to ensure the safety of common operations on assets and to make it possible to achieve lower latency and improved scalability as compared to Byzantine agreement. Sui apparently only relies on Byzantine agreement for the safety of shared objects and governance operations as well as check-pointing which are not performed on the critical latency path. The execution of smart contracts is said to also be naturally parallelized whenever possible.

By using simpler and lower-latency primitives for use cases such as payment transactions and assets transfer, Sui forgoes consensus which is quite unprecedented in the blockchain space as this enables a number of new latency-sensitive distributed applications that range from gaming to retail payment at physical points of sale.

What Makes Sui Unique?

Sui has impressive ecosystem partners. 

Sui focuses on supporting light clients that can authenticate reads, in addition to full clients that may audit all transitions for integrity. This is meant to promote trust-minimised bridges to other blockchain networks. SUI which is the ecosystem token or native asset is utilised for platform operations through a number of use cases. 

SUI Token

Sui tokens will have a fixed supply capped at 10 billion tokens. A share of the total supply will be liquid at mainnet launch and the remaining tokens are vested over a period of years and also distributed as future stake reward subsidies. 

• Sui tokens will be used for gas fees and will be required to execute and store transactions.
• The tokens can also be used within an epoch as delegated stake on validators. SUI is awarded to participants of the proof-of-stake mechanism who help prevent spam and denial-of-service attacks.
• Used as a liquid asset for different applications including as a unit of account, a medium of exchange, or a store of value, etc. 
• It can even be used for more complex functionality such as those enabled by smart contracts, interoperability, and composability across the Sui ecosystem.
• SUI token will also be used for governance and on-chain voting on issues such as protocol upgrades.

Sui Storage Fund & Tokenomics 

Sui has a storage fund that is funded by past transactions and acts as a tool for shifting gas fees across different epochs to ensure that future validators are compensated for their storage costs by the past users who would have created the storage requirements in the first place. The storage fund is used for paying out only the returns on its capital but it is not used for distributing the principal. The storage fund creates valuable monetary dynamics since higher on-chain data requirements lead to a larger storage fund which reduces the amount of SUI tokens in circulation.

Sui Wallet 

To create a wallet, you need to download the Sui Wallet Chrome extension. 

You will need to set your password.

Once your wallet is created, you will be provided with a recovery phrase that you can use in case you need to back up your wallet or recover it on another device. Please ensure you save this phrase and keep it safe. Be aware that anyone with that backup or recovery phrase will be able to access your account. 

Once you have that secured, you can proceed to access your wallet. 

Since Sui currently operates in a devnet environment, users should be aware that this is mainly for experimentation and development. Because SUI tokens are not yet publicly available, you can claim test tokens via a faucet. 

As you can see above, I claimed the 50 million SUI tokens so I can explore applications within the ecosystem. All transactions can be tracked on the Sui explorer. 

I decided to check out some of the apps in the ecosystem and mint an NFT with some of the tokens I received. 

To mint an NFT I just tried Sui NFT mint. 

You will have the option to name and describe the NFT. Gas fee for minting the NFT was 10000 Sui.

And just like that I minted my NFT. 

The Team Behind Sui 

The Sui team consists of mainly former Meta (Facebook) employees who were involved in the Diem project. The project has a number of co-founders with impressive credentials, having been involved in advanced blockchain research and development for the aforementioned tech giant. They are said to have been responsible for delivering open source components including the programming language, execution engine and cryptography of the Diem network.

The team is focused on making sure developers have the tools necessary to build apps on Sui. 

There are a range of tools available for building gaming and financial apps such as tutorials, documentation, SDK, APIs, reference implementations and much more.