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Sui Frequently Asked Questions |
This page contains answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs) about Sui and Mysten Labs. Ask more in Discord, see where we are headed in our roadmap, and find full details in our white paper.
Use these online resources:
- Sui Website: https://sui.io/
- Sui Developer Portal: https://docs.sui.io/
- Sui Smart Contract White Paper: https://sui.io/whitepaper
- SDK reference: Sui JSON-RPC
Sui offers ease of development, a developer interface, fast transaction speeds, a sane object model, and better security. Sui calls the consensus protocol only for transactions affecting objects owned by multiple accounts. This means simple transactions complete almost immediately.
See these resources on the Sui Developer Portal for the complete story on why we built Sui:
There is no technical relationship between Diem and Sui except that both use Move.
All five co-founders (as well as several Mysten employees) worked on the Diem system and are very familiar with both its good qualities and its limitations. Diem was designed to handle light payments traffic between a small number (10s-100s) of custodial wallets. There were eventual visions of evolving it into a more scalable system that is capable of handling more general-purpose smart contracts; however, the original architecture was not designed to support this and has not evolved significantly.
When we started Mysten, we had the option to build on top of Diem but chose not to because of these limitations. We believe blockchain tech has evolved a lot since Diem came out in 2019, and we have many ideas about how to design a system that is more scalable and programmer-friendly from the ground up. That is why we built Sui.
There is no relationship between Sui/Mysten and Aptos. The similarity is that they both use Move; but Sui has a different object model. The research behind the block STM paper was all done at Facebook. Subsequently, some of the authors joined Mysten and some joined Aptos. The paper carries the current affiliations of the authors.
We will have a public token for the Sui mainnet. But it is not available right now and there is no timeline as of yet. Anyone who claims otherwise (offering tokens, whitelists, pre-sale, etc.) is running a scam.
Yes, the token name will be SUI.
We have launched our Sui DevNet in May 2022. A testnet is coming in a few months.
See our roadmap:
https://github.com/MystenLabs/sui/blob/main/ROADMAP.md#roadmap
No. More information is forthcoming.
Join our Discord and follow our Twitter for the latest updates and announcements.
For developers:
- Install Sui.
- Spin up a local node.
- Join the Move and Sui developer channels in Discord.
- Start building!
We have a number of examples and demos available for viewing at: https://docs.sui.io/explore
We are seeking partners that can contribute to the ecosystem primarily in development by building apps with the SDK now so they can be ready to launch when the network goes live. If interested, please apply using the Sui Partnerships Form.
Start in Discord.
See the mystenlabs.com website for company details.
Wait until the community managers are on board. The managers will plan for growing and engaging the community. Stay tuned in Discord.
I'm looking for someone from the Mysten Crew to speak at an event - is there someone I can DM/email?
Ask in Discord.
Not currently. Packages are immutable objects, and this property is relied upon in several places.
Section four in the Sui Smart Contract Platform white paper is the best reference for node architecture.
We now have a public Sui DevNet with nodes operated by Mysten Labs. Soon we will have a TestNet that allow others to operate Sui nodes, but both are on our roadmap. Right now, you can run a local, non-networked Sui node for development. Check out our Wallet documentation to get started. You can interact with the local node via either the Wallet CLI or RPC API.
What does a local node do and what are the hardware requirements to run it? How is it different from a testnet node?
A local node allows you to start building software using Move for Sui, and can be run on commodity hardware. A testnet node will be part of a live network of validators.
No. Sui heavily leverages the Move's asset-centric data model for its novel parallel execution and commitment scheme. This is simply not possible with the EVM data model. Because assets are represented as entries in dynamically indexable maps, it is not possible to statically determine which assets a transaction will touch.
To be blunt: even if we preferred the EVM/Solidity to Move, we could not use them in Sui without sacrificing the performance breakthroughs that make Sui unique. And of course, we think there are many reasons why Move is a safer and more developer-friendly language than the EVM.
See Why move? for more details on this. In addition, see the Move Problem Statement for why we think that - despite being the most popular smart contract language of today - EVM is holding back the crypto space.
Finally, the EVM developer community is very small--approximately 4,000 programmers according to this study. Compare this to (e.g.) the >20M registered iOS developers. Thus, the practical path to scaling the smart contract dev community is to bring folks in from the broader population, not to pull them from the tiny pool of existing Solidity developers. We think Move is much safer and much more approachable for mainstream programmers than the EVM.
Sui tackles scaling at the base layer rather than via L2s. We think this approach leads to a more user and developer-friendly system than adding additional complexity on top of an already-complex base layer that doesn't scale.
No. Move is designed to be a cross-platform language that can be used anywhere you need safe smart contracts. There are some more details on how this works + the chains Move runs in the Awesome Move documentation.