No.033
Sui SUI
The parallel-sprint speedster that rolls countless objects all at once
๐ญ A water-droplet twin hatched from Diem's egg, born in the same nest (Move) as its sibling, Aptos
๐ฌ โAptos, you and I came out of the same egg. You like your accounts in neat rows. Fine. I'd rather scoop every object into my arms and bolt past the line. Same blood, opposite habits. Whoosh!๐จโ
- It's a Layer-1 (L1) smart-contract blockchain aiming for fast, cheap transactions.
- You can't tell its story without Aptos. The two are 'Move twins.' Both hatched from Meta's abandoned Diem project, both raised on the Move language, then they split.
- Where Aptos kept things account-based, Sui broke everything into 'objects' so unrelated transactions can run at the same time (in parallel).
๐ The Story
Meta, the company behind Facebook, once wanted to build its own money. The project was called Diem, and to power it the engineers invented a brand-new language for moving value safely. They named it Move. In 2022, Meta shut the whole thing down. The money never shipped. But the engineers, and the language they loved, walked out the door.
They didn't all walk in the same direction. One group founded Aptos Labs. Another founded Mysten Labs and built Sui. Same family tree, two new houses, close enough that people started calling them the Move twins, and rivals close enough to compare on every benchmark since.
The split was a difference of taste. Aptos kept tidy 'accounts' and a system called Block-STM. Sui went the other way: chop the world into 'objects,' and any objects that have nothing to do with each other can be handled at the very same moment, no queue. On May 3, 2023, Sui's mainnet opened for real. Game items, NFTs, tiny payments flowed in. The twins have been racing on parallel tracks ever since, each insisting its own design is the faster one.
๐ Stats
๐งฉ How it works
Most blockchains line transactions up in a single row and handle them one at a time. A long line gets slow, right? Sui thought about it differently. It sees every asset as a small ball called an 'object,' and balls that have nothing to do with each other get rolled at the same time, no line required. That's 'parallel processing.' So it can push through a lot of transactions quickly and cheaply. (The consensus method that keeps it speedy is called 'Mysticeti.')
๐ Light & Shadow
- Its object model lets unrelated transactions run in parallel. Where Aptos parallelizes by sorting accounts, Sui skips the queue entirely (handy for games, NFTs, and lots of small payments)
- The team carries real Diem pedigree. Sam Blackshear, who invented the Move language at Meta, is Sui's CTO , the language's own author shaping how Sui uses it
- Supply is capped at 10 billion. No endless minting
- The rivalry cuts both ways. Sui isn't only fighting Aptos; Solana and Ethereum already own the fast-L1 crowd it wants
- It's young. Mainnet opened in 2023, so it hasn't survived the years of battle-testing that Bitcoin and Ethereum have
- Being a sibling can hurt. When people line Sui up against Aptos and the numbers look close, "which twin actually wins?" becomes the whole conversation, and price swings with the verdict
๐งฌ Evolution Lineage
Sui and its sibling Aptos are the 'Move twins.' Both branched off after Meta's Diem project wound down in 2022, each inheriting the Diem-derived Move language and being born separately. Sui went object-centric with Sui Move (Mysten Labs), while Aptos went account-centric with Block-STM (Aptos Labs). They aren't a code hard fork, they're siblings that grew independent from the same bloodline.
๐งญ Meet other friends
โ FAQ
- What is Sui (SUI)?
- It's a Layer-1 (L1) smart-contract blockchain built for fast, cheap transactions. It speeds things up with 'parallel processing', handling unrelated transactions at the same time. It was built by Mysten Labs of Palo Alto, USA, and its mainnet launched on May 3, 2023.
- Why is it said to be fast?
- Sui treats assets as 'objects.' Transactions involving unrelated objects don't have to wait in line one by one, they can be processed at the same time (in parallel), so it can push through a lot of transactions quickly.
- How is it related to Aptos?
- They're the 'Move twins' that branched off after Meta's Diem project wound down in 2022. They use the same Move language, but Sui went object-centric with Sui Move, while Aptos went account-centric with Block-STM. They aren't a code hard fork, they're siblings born separately from the same bloodline.
- How many SUI exist?
- There's a fixed cap of 10 billion (10,000,000,000) tokens. No more are minted beyond that limit. It's a 'capped' supply like Bitcoin's fixed 21 million, the opposite of Dogecoin, which is minted endlessly.
โ ๏ธ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only.