Sui Network just rolled out Mysticeti

What does it mean❓

🧐 TLDR

This is a significant upgrade for Sui, in short it introduces a new efficient way for the chain to process and agree on transactions, making Sui even quicker and snappier.

🧐What is Mysticeti

Mysticeti is unique consensus mechanism that reduces time required for transaction to be confirmed, giving a better smooth experience to users and more dapps to be built.

Before jumping into how Mysticeti improves it, lets look into what makes a chain "fast"

People often talk about TPS ( transaction per second ), but this is typically a over marketed term. TPS, Latency, Finality all matters

• ➡️TPS

  Measures the throughput of a blockchain; How many txn it can handle per second

  Higher TPS indicates a network's capacity to support a large number of users and transactions simultaneously.

• ➡️Latency

  The time taken from submitting a txn to its inclusion in a block

  (Sui uses checkpoints instead of block, but for my EVM bros I am going to refer as blocks from here)

  Lower latency means quicker transaction processing, improving user experience

• ➡️Finality

  The assurance that a transaction is irreversible and confirmed

  Faster finality increases trust and security, ensuring transactions cannot be altered once confirmed.

❓ How does Mysticeti improves it

• Mysticeti uses a DAG-based consensus mechanism, enhancing throughput and reducing latency.

• Key points of difference & benefits in DAG-based design

• 1️⃣ Leader-Based vs. DAG-Based Consensus:

  • 🔹Leader-Based (e.g., PBFT, Tendermint)

    • Relies on a single leader for each round to collect votes and broadcast results. Vulnerable to performance drops if the leader is slow or faulty.

    • Achieves consensus in 2-3 round-trip times (RTTs).

  • 🔹DAG-Based (Mysticeti):

    • Utilizes a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) where all validators continuously send transactions, creating interconnected blocks.

    • Eliminates reliance on a single leader, ensuring robust network utilization and higher resilience.

    • Achieves consensus in 1.5-2 RTTs, significantly reducing latency.

• 2️⃣ Uncertified DAGs and Commit Rule:

  • 🔹 Certified DAGs (Bullshark):

    • Requires each block to be certified before inclusion in the DAG, adding extra RTTs for certification

  • 🔹 Uncertified DAGs (Mysticeti):

    •  Instead of requiring a transactions to be circulated to garner signatures before then circulated again for certification, Mysticeti uses a universal commit rule, which allows transactions to have implicit certification.

    • If a block receives support from a sufficient number of validators and references previous blocks from those validators, it can be committed to the network.

• 3️⃣ Pipelining and Multileader:

  • 🔹 Pipelining:

    • Mysticeti introduces Threshold Clocks which ensure that transactions are committed in the correct order, optimizing the pipelining process. This mechanism enhances efficiency by maintaining continuous transaction flow and minimizing delays.

  • 🔹Multileader:

    • Mysticeti’s design includes mechanisms to handle leader failures more efficiently, ensuring quick recovery allowing transactions to continue processing without significant delays

• 4️⃣ Performance Metrics:

  • 🔹Latency Reduction:

    • Achieves a remarkable 390ms consensus latency in a mainnet-like environment

  • 🔹High Throughput:

    • Capable of processing hundreds of thousands of transactions per second

  • 🔹Improved End-to-End Latency:

    • Overall end-to-end latency observed at 650ms, with plans to optimize SDKs for even better performance

• 5️⃣ Simplified Consensus for Shared Objects:

  • 🔹Shared Object Transactions:

    • Traditional consensus methods required ordering before execution, adding to latency

  • 🔹Mysticeti Approach:

    • Optimizes consensus for shared objects by minimizing the critical path dependencies, ensuring faster transaction finality

    • 🐏 excited to see how the chain perform with this upgrade + new dapps that can be enabled because of the chain's speed & latency, knowing most of my community are EVM or SOL base still keen to push u guys to explore more of Sui ecosystem!

Additional resources

📍Eli5 of what is Mysticeti by @0xPain__

Great explaining on what is TPS & latency as well

https://x.com/0xPain__/status/1814359327131705639

📍More detail Mysticeti by @0xd34th ( <- great read btw )

https://x.com/0xd34th/status/1814728829144797217

📍Great video by @PerelmanDmitri from Sui Basecamp talking about Mysticeti