"Sui: The Object-Centric Data Model Taking Blockchain to the Next Level"

Key Insight:

Sui is a Layer-1 smart contract platform, to increase network throughput is largely due to its distinct, object-centric data model.
Sui enables validators to execute about 300,000 transfers and simple transactions per second because simple transactions like peer-to-peer transfers and NFT bulk mints do not require consensus.
Sui throughput is expandable horizontally. As more processing power is added to each validator inside the current validator set, its network throughput increases.
The programming language used by Sui, called Sui Move, offers security features that guard against certain attacks and exploits.

What is Sui?

Sui is a monolithic-based high performance smart contract platform. monolithic blockchain, in particular, is a blockchain that manages all jobs and tasks on a single network. Sui has a block time of 2 to 3 seconds and may scale up to several hundred thousand TPS (transactions per second).

Modern businesses rely heavily on data, and effective data management is essential to their success. Sui is a cutting-edge technology that has developed as a potent data management solution in recent years. Sui makes use of object-centric data structures to process complicated data more quickly and effectively.

We'll go deep into Sui and examine how object-centric data structures are altering the game in this blog.

Dive further into Sui technology

Object-Centric Data Model

Sui uses an object-centric data model that sets it apart from other projects. Unlike projects like Ethereum, Solana, and Aptos that use accounts to track the state of the blockchain, accounts are where user balances are kept. Others, such as Bitcoin and Cardano, use unused transaction output (UTXO) to record the state of the blockchain — that is, the UTXO represents the amount of assets left after a transaction has been completed.

Sui integrates both approaches into a hybrid model, storing its history in objects with globally unique IDs. Objects also contain metadata that identifies various aspects of the item, such as ownership and transaction history. According to Sui's item-Centered Data Model, the global state is essentially a collection of all Sui objects.

All transactions in Sui take objects as input and return new or updated items as output. Each item holds the hash of the most recent transaction that produced it. Objects that are "live" are ones that can be used as input. As a result, by viewing all living items, the global condition can be ascertained.
For example:

In a customer management system, each customer will be stored in a unique object. This customer object contains all information and attributes of the customer including name, address, phone number, email, purchase history, etc.
In a product management system, each product is stored in a single object. This product object includes all product information and attributes including name, description, price, inventory quantity, etc.

As such, unique objects are used to explicitly and conveniently store information and properties of a particular object.

Source: Messari

Sui's object-centric data model enables it to scale simultaneous object interactions. Sui transactions are classified according to the item with which they were interacted. When many transactions are submitted at the same time, validators can process them in parallel on various machines as long as they are not interdependent. This approach also offers a unique scalability path, with capacity increasing when the network's validators add additional machines to their node.

Sui items are either owned (such as fungible tokens and NFTs) or shared (such as DEXs and auction contracts). Sui items, in particular, can have four different categories of ownership:

Objects owned by an address (NFTs or fungible tokens)
Objects owned by other objects (e.g., with gaming NFTs, a sword NFT could be owned by an avatar NFT)
Shared objects that anyone can read/write to (DEXs or auction contracts)
Immutable objects without an exclusive owner that are read-only (auctions frozen as immutable after the end of an auction)

Object-centric data structures are organized around objects, which contain all the information needed to process them. Each object can contain multiple attributes, such as name, age, or location. These attributes can be used to filter, sort, or group the data. Object-centric data structures are often used in databases, as they enable faster and more efficient processing of complex data.

The Advantages of Object-Centric Data Structures:

Object-centric data structures have several advantages over traditional data structures. They are more efficient, require less storage space, and can be processed more quickly. Additionally, they are easier to work with, as each object contains all the information needed to process it. This makes it easier to manage complex data and reduces the likelihood of errors.

Sui Move

Because the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) lacked native support for different digital assets, the ERC-20 standard was suggested to produce fungible assets. This resulted in the creation of Move, a programming language focused on creating digital assets, or "resources."

Mysten Labs designed Sui Move to combine Move with its object-centric data model. Sui Move protects against exploits such as double-spending and reentrancy with the Move bytecode validator, which ensures that bytecode follows Sui's type, memory, and resource safety constraints. This eliminates the need for smart contract authors to define specific safety rules, which is required in other blockchains that employ accounts to record ledger information.

Sui Move offers advantages over other blockchain languages, as evidenced by some of the most significant hacks in the Solana and Ethereum ecosystems caused by improper code implementation.

Consensus

Sui validators validate transactions individually rather than in batches, which reduces network latency. Transactions are classified as objects, and validators on their own machines can process them in parallel. Sui also lowers validator communication by redirecting it to users, who take the form of client gateway services run by the application being interacted with.

Sui's object-centric data model enables wallets or transaction-executing programs to display the transaction signing request to the user in a way that demonstrates the downstream repercussions of the signed transaction. All transactions necessitate client contact, and whether they go via Sui's ordering and consensus mechanism is determined by whether the transaction's object is shared or non-shared.

Source: Messari

Complex Transactions (Shared Objects)

Sui's Narwhal and Bullshark protocols handle the ordering and consensus of complex transactions involving shared objects.

These transactions go through five steps involving broadcasting, voting, certificate production and sequencing through Narwhal and Bullshark, and effects certification for finality.

Validators respond with votes based on their stake, and the user collects a Byzantine-resistant majority of these votes to produce a transaction certificate. Validators then agree on the ordering of the transaction data, and the user collects an effects certificate as proof of the state change.

Simple Transactions (Non-Shared Objects)

Simple transactions don't need to be sequenced through Bullshark and Narwhal because they solely involve non-shared objects. In other words, step 4 of the transaction processing pipeline outlined above can be skipped by simple transactions.

Both straightforward and complex transactions can be handled by Sui's design. Simple transactions with no shared objects do not need consensus and can be carried out concurrently with the aid of a lightweight algorithm. In Sui's data model, transactions can be grouped by objects and processed in parallel thanks to causal ordering.

DPoS

Sui uses Delegated Proof-of-Stake to choose validators for each epoch according on their stake. All honest validators are compensated with gas costs and temporary unlocking subsidies proportional to their staked SUI, which defines the validator's voting power.

Sui pays all honest validators equally, in contrast to other systems that only reward validators for the transactions they handle. Delegators only receive computational gas fees and inflationary subsidies in exchange for their work, and they also give validators they stake with commissions.

Gas Fees

Gas fees on Sui consist of two components: computation and storage.

Computational Gas Fees

Sui uses a gas-pricing mechanism to determine the computational gas fees for transactions, with validators setting a minimum gas price per transaction for the current epoch. The reference gas price is determined as the 2/3's percentile price by stake, and users are allowed to tip above this price for a higher priority of their transactions. Validators are incentivized to keep prices low, but the validator market ultimately determines the gas prices. The computational gas price is the sum of the reference price and the tip.

Storage Gas Fees and the Storage Fund

Sui rewards validators (but not delegators) with storage fund rewards based on the size of the storage fund at the beginning of an epoch. The storage fund is used to finance data storage on the network and receives storage gas fees and a portion of the network's staking rewards. Staking rewards from the storage fund are immediately redistributed to validators. The storage fund also creates temporary deflationary pressure on the SUI token when there is high demand for storage, causing fees to increase and take more SUI out of circulation.

Source: Messari

Horizontal Scalability

Sui's architecture, data model, and approach to transaction processing don't require global consensus on a total ordered list of transactions.
Transactions are grouped based on objects and distributed among validators and validator machines, which increases scalability.
Sui can handle a high number of transactions per second with half-second finality, making it potentially more viable than protocols with a fixed upper bound on throughput.
Sui serves as a storage protocol, allowing users to publish complex assets onto the chain, including NFTs, and scaling storage capacity in the same way as transaction processing.

Tokenomics (Docs)

Sui’s native token, SUI, will be used for network security (validator and delegator staking), to pay for gas fees, and as a claim on future governance. The Sui Mainnet launch is scheduled to take place on May 3, 2023, and the maximum SUI supply is set to 10 billion. The Sui Foundation has announced the distribution of SUI tokens but has yet to specify the liquidity/vesting schedules. The Sui Foundation has yet to share more details regarding governance.

Source: Messari

Roadmap

The Sui Mainnet launch is scheduled to take place on May 3, 2023. Mysten Labs told Messari that, in the second half of 2023, it will focus its development efforts on implementing key features on Sui that will encompass scalability, tokenomics, and Sui Move.

Conclusion

Sui is a new Layer 1 blockchain that aims to provide new use cases and agile experiences. It works with an object-centric data model and scales simple transactions bypassing consensus, while allowing arbitrary data values to be stored.

Sui also has features like sponsored transactions, PTB for large-scale block production, and permissions similar to those in Android for transaction signing. It is hoped that when the project launches the Mainnet, all of its associated features will function as intended and offer a strong platform for guiding consumers toward blockchain applications for widespread adoption. The project is invested by large and reputable funds, experienced staff, they have brought unique ideas. We hope that the project will bring the expected value

REF:

https://messari.io/report/diving-into-sui?referrer=all-research

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