Sui

Evan Cheng, Sam Blackshear, Adeniyi Abiodun, Kostas Chalkias and George Danezis co-founded Mysten Labs. Cheng and Blackshear had served on Libra’s founding team, and Blackshear created Move; when Sui work began in late 2021, the group kept Move’s resource safety but rejected the assumptions of a permissioned settlement system.

Their complaint was specific. Diem-style storage made assets live under accounts and had been designed before programmable NFTs and open-ended applications became the target. Mysten Labs rebuilt the embedding around objects, trying to make ownership and scarcity visible to both developers and the execution engine.

Every Sui object carries an identity, version and ownership state. A transaction declares which objects it reads or changes. If two operations touch different owned objects, the network can process them independently; if they compete for a shared object, their order must still be agreed.

That distinction became Sui’s pitch for payments, games and markets: parallel work where independence is knowable, consensus where conflict is real. Programmable Transaction Blocks can combine typed calls atomically, but neither composition nor Move’s verifier guarantees that an application’s prices, access rules or dependencies are economically correct.

Sui Mainnet opened on May 3, 2023 after testnet waves and a permanent testnet. The native module had already fixed the outer boundary: system address `0x0` created 10 billion SUI with nine decimals in epoch 0, froze metadata and destroyed the reusable supply authority.

Fixed supply did not mean fixed circulation. More than half of all SUI belonged to a Community Reserve managed by Sui Foundation, for delegation, grants, research and validator subsidies. About 5% circulated at launch. The Foundation calls the release chart proposed and ties it to ecosystem needs, so release timing remains an allocation decision rather than an immutable onchain vesting promise.

Mysticeti reached mainnet in July 2024, using an uncertified DAG design to reduce latency while retaining ordered commits for shared work.

In November 2025 Mysten engineers presented Mysticeti v2 as an enhancement, not a replacement. It moved transaction validation into consensus and added Transaction Driver. Faster finality came from changing the route through the validator stack; object execution and consensus remained related but separate layers.

On November 21, 2024, a congestion-control assertion sent every validator into a crash loop for about two and a half hours. On January 14, 2026, validators computed conflicting consensus commits; checkpoint certification stopped for about six hours while reads stayed at the last certified state. The network halted rather than certify a fork, and a patched replay resumed progress without rollback.

May 28 and 29 brought three more halts. Two followed address-balance gas-charging defects, including a known low-probability risk accepted in an interim recovery fix; the third exposed lost randomness state during an epoch restart. No committed transaction was reported reverted, but the sequence showed that parallel execution cannot help when every validator runs the same failing release.

After Cetus was exploited in May 2025, validators froze assets in two attacker accounts. Sui Foundation facilitated a vote on a protocol change allowing two pre-specified recovery transactions without attacker signatures. The update reported approval by validators representing 90.9% of the counted stake, excluding the Foundation’s stake. It described transfer to a 4-of-6 trust multisig with keys held by Cetus, the Foundation and OtterSec as the next step; that update alone does not confirm completed transfers.

The code-limited rescue was narrower than an open administrator key, yet it changed the practical meaning of ownership. SUI holders influenced the decision through validator delegation, not a direct ballot for every wallet. Their token pays gas, secures validators and participates in governance; reviewed documents do not turn it into equity, a redemption promise or a claim on Foundation or Mysten revenue.