Sui README
Welcome to Sui, a next-generation smart contract platform with high throughput, low latency, and an asset-oriented programming model powered by the Move programming language! Find everything you need within the Sui Developer Guides and supporting materials below. | ![]() |
Quick links
- To learn how to use Sui, take our end-to-end tutorial.
- To jump right into building smart contract applications on top of Sui, start at the Move Smart Contract Quick Start.
- To experiment with the Sui CLI client, check out Sui CLI client Quick Start.
- To understand what's possible by browsing Move code built on top of Sui, review the examples.
- To start coding against Sui's JSON-RPC APIs, start at JSON-RPC API Quick Start.
- To learn what distinguishes Sui from other blockchain systems, see How Sui Differs?.
- To go deep on how Sui works, read the Sui Smart Contract Platform white paper.
- To help Sui grow, follow Contributing to Sui.
- To connect with the Sui community, join our Discord.
Highlights
Sui offers:
- Unmatched scalability, instant settlement
- A safe smart contract language accessible to mainstream developers
- Ability to define rich and composable on-chain assets
- Better user experience for web3 apps
Sui is the only blockchain today that can scale with the growth of web3 while achieving industry-leading performance, cost, programmability, and usability. As we push towards mainnet launch, we will demonstrate capacity beyond the transaction processing capabilities of established systems โ traditional and blockchain alike. We see Sui as the first internet-scale programmable blockchain platform, a foundational layer for web3.
Architecture
flowchart LR
CC(CLI Client) --> ClientService
RC(Rest Client) --> ClientService
RPCC(RPC Client) --> ClientService
ClientService --> AuthorityAggregator
AuthorityAggregator --> AC1[AuthorityClient] & AC2[AuthorityClient]
subgraph Authority1
AS[AuthorityState]
end
subgraph Authority2
AS2[AuthorityState]
end
AC1 <==>|Network TCP| Authority1
AC2 <==>|Network TCP| Authority2
Overview
Sui is a smart contract platform maintained by a permissionless set of authorities that play a role similar to validators or miners in other blockchain systems.
Sui offers scalability and unprecedented low-latency for common use cases. Sui makes the vast majority of transactions processable in parallel, which makes better use of processing resources, and offers the option to increase throughput with more resources. Sui forgoes consensus to instead use simpler and lower-latency primitives for common use cases, such as payment transactions and assets transfer. This is unprecedented in the blockchain world and enables a number of new latency-sensitive distributed applications, ranging from gaming to retail payment at physical points of sale.
Sui is written in Rust and supports smart contracts written in the Move programming language to define assets that may have an owner. Move programs define operations on these assets including custom rules for their creation, the transfer of these assets to new owners, and operations that mutate assets.
Sui has a native token called SUI, with a fixed supply. The SUI token is used to pay for gas, and is also used as delegated stake on authorities within an epoch. The voting power of authorities within this epoch is a function of this delegated stake. Authorities are periodically reconfigured according to the stake delegated to them. In any epoch the set of authorities is Byzantine fault tolerant. At the end of the epoch, fees collected through all transactions processed are distributed to authorities according to their contribution to the operation of the system. Authorities can in turn share some of the fees as rewards to users that delegated stake to them.
Sui is backed by a number of state-of-the-art peer-reviewed works and years of open source development.