Sui Public Chain Core Distributed System Protocol Lutris Report Highlights

Mysten Labs recently updated the Sui Lutris white paper, confirming the following key points after several months of testing:

1. Sui can process 140,000 to 150,000 operations per second under the use of PTBs and 5K TPS, far exceeding the benchmark level of approximately 700 TPS during peak times on the mainnet.

2. Even in the case where some validation nodes stop running, Sui's final confirmation delay can still be kept under 0.5 seconds.

The white paper elaborates on the operational mechanism of Sui, the security proofs, and how external testers can reproduce relevant data in their own validation.

After the launch of the Sui mainnet, applications such as games and NFTs quickly went on-chain. Mysten Labs subsequently released a technical report on Lutris, a distributed system that supports Sui. Lutris aims to achieve high throughput and long-term stability for Sui while maintaining low latency.

Blockchain technology has developed for over a decade since the birth of Bitcoin, with emerging applications such as games and NFTs continuously emerging. The industry has been exploring methods to enhance blockchain efficiency, particularly in high-load processing and real-time latency.

Currently, L1 blockchains face two major challenges: achieving high throughput under low latency conditions and ensuring long-term stability of the consensus protocol. These challenges can be addressed through the dynamic participation and configuration of validating nodes.

One effective way to achieve high throughput is to adopt a DAG-based consensus protocol, such as Narwhal/Bullshark used by Sui. These types of protocols can handle a large number of transactions simultaneously, making them suitable for application scenarios such as gaming and NFTs. However, DAG-based protocols may lead to delays of several seconds, significantly impacting certain common operations.

On the other hand, non-consensus protocols show great potential in reducing latency and enhancing scalability, as demonstrated by early research on the FastPay prototype. These protocols enable fast transaction processing by eliminating the need for consensus, allowing independent transactions to be processed in parallel without coordination. However, they are only suitable for a limited category of simple blockchain operations, which restricts the expressiveness of smart contracts, and there are challenges in dynamically adjusting the set of validating nodes.

Although both protocols have potential, they have not yet been widely adopted in production-level blockchains. Sui Lutris, as the core protocol supporting the Sui network, combines the advantages of DAG-based consensus and non-consensus methods, achieving sub-second latency and sustained throughput of thousands of transactions per second. At the same time, Sui retains the capability to execute complex contracts on shared objects, generate checkpoints, and reconfigure the set of validating nodes across cycles.

Sui Lutris adopts a unique approach that combines the above two technologies. For operations involving single-owner assets (unique objects), the system uses a consistency broadcasting protocol among validation nodes to achieve latency below consensus. For complex smart contracts on shared objects, Sui Lutris relies on consensus processing. Additionally, it supports network maintenance operations, such as defining checkpoints and reconfiguring validation nodes. This innovative strategy provides a solution that balances efficiency and functionality in a replicated Byzantine environment.

The transaction lifecycle of Sui Lutris includes the following steps:

1. The user creates and signs the transaction
2. The verification node performs security checks and signs.
3. The client collects the responses from the validation nodes to form the transaction certificate.
4. The certificate is sent back to the verification node for confirmation.
5. Consensus Engine Processes Certificates
6. The client collects the responses from the verification nodes as proof of transaction settlement.
7. Create checkpoints for each consensus submission

In addition to the basic trading process, Sui Lutris also offers multiple features to support product-level blockchain operations:

• Checkpoint protocol records all transaction history
• Support reconfiguration at the end of each cycle.
• Safely "unlock" assets that were mistakenly locked at the end of the period.

As the infrastructure of Sui, Sui Lutris provides more details about the security and activity protocols in the complete technical report, as well as the security proofs of partial synchronization with Byzantine participants in the standard distributed system model.