About

Sui is a Layer-1 blockchain built in Rust that uses a Delegated Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. It supports smart contracts written in Sui Move, a variant of the Move language, and enables staking of its native token, SUI, by validators and delegators.

History

Sui was founded in 2021 by Evan Cheng, Adeniyi Abiodun, Sam Blackshear, George Danezis, and Kostas Chalkias to continue the work performed while employed by Meta. In June 2019, Facebook, which later rebranded to Meta, announced its plans to build a permissioned blockchain and a digital wallet that would underlie a global payment network. Meta spearheaded an independent consortium called the Diem Association (originally the Libra Association) that was responsible for building the blockchain. Meta’s subsidiary Novi Finance (originally Calibra) was responsible for developing the digital wallet.

Neither product was successful. The Diem Association shut down due to regulatory hurdles and sold all its assets in January 2022. Meta ended the Novi project later that year due to calls from the United States Senate. Two separate blockchains emerged from the initial Diem and Novi research: Aptos and Sui. Mysten Labs, one of the centralized entities supporting Sui, was formed to build something new from research conducted during the Diem Association’s life.

The SUI token was deployed on April 12, 2023, and Sui’s mainnet was launched on May 3, 2023. Tokenholders can use the token to pay transaction fees, operate a validator, and delegate tokens to existing validators. In addition, Sui is live, and developers can freely build on the network. A commercially reasonable search did not discover a roadmap or any publicly available information regarding the future development of the network outside of the addition of a decentralized governance model. SUI is intended to serve as the governance token; however, the parameters and process of the future governance model remain unconfirmed.

Notable features released since the mainnet was launched include:

• July 12, 2023 - DeepBook, a central limit order book (CLOB) designed to service the entire Sui ecosystem was released, along with a DeepBook SDK to ease developers’ integration of this feature into future protocols. DeepBook is permissionless and accessible by any user on Sui.
• July 27, 2023 - SIP-6 was enacted, which enables liquid staking on Sui. Liquid staking is not provided by all validators and must be accessed through a third-party protocol, such as Volo.

Other notable efforts made by the project team include constant releases of new versions of the network. The latest of these is Protocol Version 35, which was implemented with Sui v1.17.3 on Feb. 1, 2024.