Blockchain Technology Development: Sui Lutris's Innovative Solution

Blockchain technology has made significant progress since the birth of Bitcoin. With the emergence of new application scenarios such as gaming and NFTs, the industry is continuously exploring ways to enhance technical efficiency, especially in handling high loads 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. In addressing these issues, it is also necessary to maintain decentralization through the dynamic participation and reconfiguration of validating nodes.

One way to increase throughput is to adopt DAG-based consensus protocols, such as narwhale / Bullshark used by Sui. These protocols can handle a large number of transactions simultaneously, making them suitable for applications like games and NFTs. However, these protocols often lead to delays of several seconds, which can be costly in terms of time for ordinary transfers or gaming operations.

On the other hand, consensus-free protocols (such as FastPay) show great potential in reducing latency and scalability. These protocols do not require consensus, allowing for fast processing of transactions 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 complexity of the smart contracts that can be implemented, and dynamically adjusting the set of validators may pose challenges.

Although these methods have great potential, they are currently not widely used in production-level blockchains and remain mainly in the stage of academic discussion. Sui Lutris, as a protocol supporting Sui, innovatively combines DAG-based consensus and non-consensus methods, achieving dual advantages: sub-second latency and sustained throughput of thousands of transactions per second. At the same time, Sui retains the ability to execute complex contracts on shared objects, generate checkpoints, and reconfigure the validator set across cycles.

Sui Lutris adopts a unique approach by integrating the two aforementioned technologies. For asset operations owned by a single owner, the system employs a consistency broadcasting protocol among validators to achieve latency below consensus. In contrast, 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 a solution that balances efficiency and security when handling transactions in a replicated Byzantine environment.

The transaction lifecycle of Sui Lutris includes: the user creates and signs a transaction, sends it to verification nodes for checking and signing, the client collects responses from the majority of verification nodes to form a transaction certificate, and the certificate is sent again to all verification nodes for confirmation. For transactions involving only exclusive objects, they can be executed immediately without waiting for the consensus engine. All certificates are forwarded to a DAG-based consensus protocol, which ultimately outputs the total order of the certificates. Verification nodes execute transactions that include shared objects, and the client can collect responses from the majority of verification nodes to assemble an effect certificate as proof of transaction settlement.

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

1. Implement checkpoint protocol to generate a causal history of all transactions in the system for comprehensive auditing and efficient synchronization of nodes.
2. Support reconfiguration at the end of each cycle, allowing changes to the validator set and their voting rights.
3. Safely "unlock" erroneously locked assets at the end of the cycle to minimize potential damage caused by vulnerabilities.

Sui Lutris supports the Sui Blockchain and aims to manage a large number of user assets. Its complete technical report elaborates on how the security and activity protocols operate, as well as the security proofs with partially synchronous Byzantine participants in a standard distributed system model.