A New Chapter in Blockchain Technology: The Perfect Combination of High Performance and Low Latency

Blockchain technology has made significant progress since the birth of Bitcoin. With the emergence of new application scenarios such as gaming and NFTs, the blockchain community is constantly exploring ways to improve technological efficiency, particularly in handling high loads and achieving real-time latency. 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 challenges, it is also necessary to maintain decentralization through the dynamic participation and reconfiguration of validation nodes.

One way to increase throughput is to adopt a DAG-based consensus protocol. Such protocols can handle a large number of transactions simultaneously, making them very suitable for applications such as games and NFTs. However, DAG-based protocols often result in several seconds of latency, which can be a high time cost for ordinary transfers or game operations.

On the other hand, non-consensus protocols show great potential in reducing latency and scalability. These protocols eliminate the need for consensus, allowing for rapid transaction processing without requiring global ordering of independent transactions that are processed in parallel. However, they are limited to a class of constrained simple Blockchain operations, which restricts the achievable smart contract functionality, and reconfiguring a dynamically changing set of validators can be challenging.

Although these methods have potential, they are currently mainly at the academic research stage and have not been widely applied in production-grade Blockchains. Sui Lutris, as a protocol supporting Sui, combines DAG-based consensus with non-consensus methods, achieving the best of both worlds: sub-second latency and a continuous throughput of thousands of transactions per second. At the same time, Sui also maintains the ability to express complex contracts on shared objects, generate checkpoints, and reconfigure the validator set across periods.

Sui Lutris adopts a unique approach that combines the two aforementioned schemes. For asset operations owned by a single owner, the system employs a consistent broadcasting protocol among validators to achieve latency below consensus. For complex smart contracts running on shared objects, Sui Lutris relies solely on consensus for processing. Additionally, Sui Lutris supports network maintenance operations, such as defining checkpoints and reconfiguring validators. This innovative strategy provides a solution that balances performance and security when handling transactions in a replicated Byzantine environment.

The transaction lifecycle of Sui Lutris includes the following steps:

1. Users create and sign transactions to change the objects they own or mix objects.
2. The transaction is sent to the Sui Lutris validation node for verification and signing.
3. The client collects responses from most validation nodes to form a transaction certificate.
4. The certificate is sent back to all verification nodes for confirmation.
5. If the transaction only involves exclusive objects, it can be processed immediately (fast path).
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. Form checkpoints for each consensus submission to drive the reconfiguration protocol.

In addition to the main trading process, Sui Lutris also offers other features that support production-grade Blockchain:

1. Implement checkpoint protocol to generate the causal history of all transactions in the system.
2. Support reconfiguration at the end of each period, allowing for changes in the validator set and their voting power.
3. Securely "unlock" incorrectly locked assets at the end of the epoch, minimizing the impact of potential vulnerabilities.

Sui Lutris provides powerful technical support for the Sui Blockchain, enabling it to securely manage a large number of user assets. The protocol offers security proofs within the standard distributed system model, ensuring reliable operation in a partially synchronous Byzantine environment.

By combining high performance and low latency, Sui Lutris opens up new possibilities for Blockchain technology and lays a solid foundation for future large-scale applications.