Sui Sets the Standard for Blockchain Speed with New Mainnet Consensus Mechanism

Sui, the pioneering Layer 1 blockchain known for industry-leading performance and infinite horizontal scaling, today announced the successful deployment of Mysticeti on Sui Mainnet after a successful run on Testnet. This innovative protocol cuts consensus latency to an astonishing 390 milliseconds, establishing Sui as the fastest consensus layer in the industry.

Developed from extensive research into Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanisms, Mysticeti represents a significant advancement from Narwhal-Bullshark, the consensus algorithms launched with Sui Mainnet over a year ago. Mysticeti achieves unprecedented transaction speeds, extending Sui's impressive low latency performance across all transaction types on the network.

Sui's object-oriented architecture allows the network to process transactions differently based on the characteristics of the transaction and the objects involved. Transactions on Sui involving only “owned objects,” such as peer-to-peer transfers, bypass the need for consensus, following a fast-path execution that completes in a shorter time. Now, with Mysticeti, transactions involving shared objects, such as those in marketplaces or collaborative game assets, are processed using an optimized version of BFT consensus that results in lower latencies nearly akin to those of owned object transactions. Mysticeti minimizes cross-validator communication and fully utilizes network bandwidth to maintain high throughput.

Live on Testnet for the past three months, Mysticeti’s remarkable results – including an 80% reduction in latency – generated significant buzz within Sui’s developer community and a broad desire to see the update pushed to Mainnet. With the update now live, the Sui Network can handle tens of thousands of transactions per second with end-to-end latencies well below one second.

“Mysticeti's successful deployment is a testament to the collaboration between research and engineering, and the validator community that has integrated this new consensus mechanism,” said Dmitri Perelman, Head of Engineering at Mysten Labs. “Mysticeti is a next-generation consensus protocol that sets a new standard for blockchain transaction speeds and puts Sui at the forefront of our industry.”

Kevin Nelson, Co-Founder & CTO of Aftermath Finance, which created a leading DeFi protocol on the network said, “Mysticeti's shift to minimizing latency for the general case—shared object transactions—marks a significant advancement across many sectors on Sui, particularly within the Sui DeFi ecosystem. The rollout to Mainnet has already begun to show tangible results, with noticeable latency reductions across our entire product suite. At Aftermath, we are excited to leverage Mysticeti's full capabilities to deliver more efficient, lower latency products to market.”

Rabeel Jawaid, Co-founder of leading derivatives exchange Bluefin said, “On-chain settlement latency just dropped significantly on Bluefin with the Mysticeti upgrade! P50 consensus latency currently is just under 400ms and E2E client latency when measured via a fullnode is under 1s for P50, which as far as I know is the fastest in Web3 right now - especially at scale with parallelization. With this upgrade, the trading experience on Bluefin has already become more seamless for retail, and our institutional partners have started to scale their flow and liquidity on the platform.”

Bonkman, the pseudonymous Founder of Hop, a DEX aggregator on Sui said, “Hop allows users to interface with Sui DeFi. This makes it dependent on Sui's consensus mechanism and before Mysticeti swaps took roughly 2-3 seconds. Now, nearly every single swap takes less than 1 second to execute and reach finality. In all of web3, there has never been a better DeFi experience that is present today on Hop via Mysticeti.”