A New Milestone in Blockchain Technology Evolution: The Innovative Solution of Sui Lutris

Blockchain technology has made significant progress since the advent of Bitcoin. With the emergence of new application scenarios such as gaming and NFTs, the industry is continuously exploring ways to enhance technical efficiency, particularly in high-load processing and real-time latency. Currently, L1 blockchains face two major challenges: first, achieving high throughput while maintaining low latency, and second, ensuring the long-term stability of consensus protocols. Additionally, decentralization must be maintained through the dynamic participation and reconfiguration of verification nodes.

One way to increase throughput is to adopt a DAG-based consensus protocol, such as the Narwhal/Bullshark used by Sui. These types of protocols can handle a large number of transactions simultaneously, making them very suitable for applications like games and NFTs. However, they often result in delays of a few seconds, which can be time-consuming for regular transfers or game operations.

On the other hand, consensus-free protocols like FastPay show great potential in reducing latency and increasing scalability. These protocols do not require consensus, allowing for fast transaction processing without the need for global ordering of independent transactions that are processed in parallel. However, they are only suitable for a limited set of simple Blockchain operations, which restricts the achievable smart contract functionality, and there are challenges in reconfiguring the dynamically changing validator set.

Despite the broad prospects of these methods, they have not yet been widely applied in production-level blockchains and are limited to presentations at academic conferences. Sui Lutris, as a protocol supporting Sui, innovatively combines DAG-based consensus and non-consensus methods, achieving the best of both worlds: sub-second latency and continuous throughput of thousands of transactions per second. At the same time, Sui also retains the ability to execute complex contracts on shared objects, generate checkpoints, and reconfigure the validator set across cycles.

Sui Lutris adopts a unique hybrid strategy. For operations on single-owner assets (owned objects), the system employs a consistency broadcast protocol among validators to achieve sub-consensus latency. For complex smart contracts running on shared objects, Sui Lutris relies solely on consensus processing. Additionally, it supports network maintenance operations, such as defining checkpoints and reconfiguring validators. This innovative strategy provides the optimal solution for transaction processing in a replicated Byzantine environment.

The transaction lifecycle of Sui Lutris includes the following steps:

1. Users create and sign transactions to modify their owned objects or mixed objects.
2. The transaction is sent to the Sui Lutris validation node for verification and signing.
3. The client collects the responses of most validating nodes to form a transaction certificate.
4. The certificate is sent back to all validation nodes for confirmation.
5. Transactions involving exclusive objects can be executed immediately without waiting for consensus (fast track).
6. All certificates are forwarded to the DAG-based consensus protocol.
7. The total order of consensus output certificates, verifying nodes execute transactions that include shared objects.
8. The client collects the responses from the validation nodes and assembles the effect certificate as proof of transaction settlement.
9. Submit a checkpoint for each consensus to drive the reconfiguration protocol.

In addition to the main trading process, Sui Lutris also provides multiple features to support production-level Blockchain:

1. Implement checkpoint protocol to generate a causal history of all transactions for complete auditing and synchronization.
2. Support for reconfiguration at the end of each epoch to ensure that all final transactions are included within a single epoch.
3. Safely "unlock" erroneously locked assets at the end of the epoch to minimize the impact of vulnerabilities.

Sui Lutris supports Sui, which is a blockchain that manages a large amount of user value. The technical report provides a detailed description of the operation of the security and activity protocols, as well as the security proofs with partially synchronous Byzantine participants in a standard distributed system model.