Sui Incentivized Testnet

Details

Sui is ready to announce that Sui’s Incentivized Testnet will kick off in August. This stage is the next step towards launching a secure, performant, and decentralized blockchain network.

Sui team has been hard at work since the initial announcement:

1. Finalized the design and implementation of Sui Move, an improvement on the original Move instantiation in Diem optimized for ergonomic and highly parallelizable code
2. Open sourced Narwhal/Tusk consensus and integrated it with Sui to support shared object transactions
3. Released a public DevNet for early Sui builders and partners
4. Shipped the Sui Explorer that leverages Sui’s object-centric data model to display transactions and their effects in a human-readable fashion
5. Launched fullnodes to an enthusiastic response from the community, with more than 5,000 nodes running in 65 countries and 271 cities and counting!

Sui Testnet Roadmap

Sui’s testnet will steadily progress from the first multi-entity Sui network toward a decentralized mainnet operated by an evolving set of independent and distributed validators. The testnet will gradually introduce and stress-test the key features, mechanisms required for a decentralized, production-ready Sui network. The testnet aims to validate Sui designs, test the validator, full node, wallet, and developer toolchains, and build operational experience with a cohesive group of high-quality operators. Sui will graduate from Testnet to mainnet when the team will be fully confident in the security and performance of the software, have seen sustained operational excellence from the initial validators, and validate Sui developer experience via compelling Move-powered applications deployed on testnet.

Sui’s Testnet is organized as a series of consecutive “waves”:

Each wave consists of two challenges: a “sink” (an operational challenge) or a “swim” (a Move-based Sui developer challenge).

Here is what is known about the first three waves:

Network

• Sink: A multi-entity public Sui network will come together for the first time. This will test Sui distributed genesis ceremony, validator configuration, operational coordination, and basic network operations.
• Swim: The first opportunity for Sui developers to deploy on Testnet. Sui has big plans for this challenge that it will announce shortly; but for now there is only one cryptic hint: Capybaras!

Staking

• Sink: A Delegated Proof-of-Stake mechanism secures the Sui network through an array of network incentives aligning the interests of all Sui stakeholders. Any entity should be allowed to amass sufficient SUI tokens and participate as a validator in Sui’s DPoS mechanism. In this wave, Sui aims to test both the design and implementation of Sui’s key economic mechanisms.
• Swim: A challenge focused on building and deploying financial primitives, particularly staking derivatives and DeFi basics.

Updates

• Sink: Operating a stable and secure high-throughput network is no picnic. This wave will test Sui operators as they drill key network operations, such as validator set changes, software updates, and incident responsiveness.
• Swim: A challenge connected to the soon-to-be-announced Move workshop during Science of Blockchain week.

Incentives

Sui’s Testnet will feature a menu of incentives to encourage and reward meaningful participation during the Testnet waves. These incentives will be available to network operators, users, developers, and other community members according to clear and well-specified guidelines. Sui Incentivized Testnet will be a learning experience that will require hard work from both the Mysten Labs team and the Sui community for success. The goal is to make the most out of the Incentivized Testnet and ensure that Sui is battle-tested and ready for mainnet.

In addition, the Sui Foundation will come live during the early waves of Testnet and become a crucial investment partner for the Sui network. The Sui Foundation’s mandate entrusts it with the mission of disseminating Sui education, promoting and bolstering use cases, applications, ancillary infrastructure and services, leading to the network’s long-term success. The Sui Foundation will achieve these goals by distributing token grants and providing developer support for users and builders of the Sui network. 

Land ahoy!

This blog post introduces what will now be a series of articles on Sui’s Incentivized Testnet to be released on a regular cadence starting this week. In the following weeks, Sui will be providing additional information related to specific dates, milestones, and requirements related to the Incentivized Testnet waves.

Sui hopes this announcement serves the purpose of further rallying Sui’s early contributors, potential validators, developer teams, and other friends of Sui. A call to muster their fleets, unfsrc your sails and be prepared to ship, ship, ship and make Sui deliver on its promises.

As sailors might say, land ahoy! Mainnet is nigh, and Incentivized Testnet is a singular opportunity to harden Sui’s protocol, sharpen its code, and get Sui’s infrastructure cool and ready to catch those waves. Testnet is the last stage before Sui transitions into a fully-owned and fully-led community project. Be part of Sui today so that Sui can be yours tomorrow.

If you are in, please:

• Participate in Sui’s ongoing DevNet by running a Sui fullnode, learning Move and deploying Move smart contracts, minting NFTs, or browsing the Sui Explorer
• Post your questions and feedback on Sui’s Discord channel
• Listen to Sui weekly AMA sessions on Sui’s Twitter spaces
• Keep your eyes peeled for the upcoming post on the next steps for Sui’s Incentivized Testnet

About Sui

Sui is a smart contract platform maintained by a permissionless set of validators that play a role similar to validators or miners in other blockchain systems.

Sui offers scalability and unprecedented low-latency for simple use cases. Sui makes the vast majority of transactions processable in parallel, which makes better use of processing resources, and offers the option to increase throughput with more resources. Sui forgoes consensus to instead use simpler and lower-latency primitives for simple use cases, such as payment transactions and assets transfer. This is unprecedented in the blockchain world and enables a number of new latency-sensitive distributed applications, ranging from gaming to retail payment at physical points of sale.

Sui is written in Rust and supports smart contracts written in the Move programming language to define assets that may have an owner. Move programs define operations on these assets including custom rules for their creation, the transfer of these assets to new owners, and operations that mutate assets.

Sui has a native token called SUI, with a fixed supply. The SUI token is used to pay for gas, and is also used as delegated stake on validators within an epoch. The voting power of validators within this epoch is a function of this delegated stake. Validators are periodically reconfigured according to the stake delegated to them. In any epoch the set of validators is Byzantine fault tolerant. At the end of the epoch, fees collected through all transactions processed are distributed to validators according to their contribution to the operation of the system. Validators can in turn share some of the fees as rewards to users that delegated stake to them.

Sui is backed by a number of state-of-the-art peer-reviewed works and years of open source development.

Links

• Sui Website
• Sui Developer Portal
• Move Programming Language
• Sui Whitepaper
• Community forums
• Twitter
• Discord