Sui Sets Record for Highest Verified Throughput Settled to a Blockchain: 40 Million Transactions

In a staged stress test on October 7, Sui’s core team, led by Mysten Labs co‑founder and CPO Adeniyi Abiodun, opened more than ten thousand off‑chain channels—dubbed “tunnels”—that collectively settled 40,614,180 transactions per second on the Sui mainnet. Each tunnel required only an opening and a closing transaction, allowing the bulk of activity to occur off‑chain while still delivering cryptographic proof on‑chain. The experiment was audited by CertiK, which will release a detailed verification report, and was broadcast from the Summit Stage at Sui Basecamp in Marina Bay Sands alongside Token2049 Singapore.

The achievement positions Sui against other high‑throughput projects such as Solana, Aptos, and the Lightning Network, but with a distinct twist: Sui tunnels are programmable, not limited to simple payments. By treating the blockchain as a “court” that intervenes only to resolve disputes, Sui aims to become the trust layer for autonomous software agents that could generate massive micro‑transactions. This approach aligns with a broader industry push to support AI‑native economies, where billions of agents might transact without human latency, and reflects Mysten Labs’ heritage from Meta’s former stablecoin team, which emphasized object‑centric design for composability.

While the headline‑grabbing 40 million TPS figure demonstrates technical feasibility, several practical hurdles remain. Real‑world demand for such extreme throughput is still speculative, and the reliance on off‑chain tunnels raises questions about latency, network coordination, and potential attack vectors on the channel closure process. The forthcoming CertiK audit will be critical to validate the claimed security guarantees. Moreover, developers must adopt the new primitives and build compatible applications, a non‑trivial migration path that will determine whether Sui can translate laboratory speed into market share.