Mysten Labs Technology Prototype on Sui Provides First Proof of Elastic Blockchain Scaling

March 20, 2024 – Palo Alto, California

Pilotfish, a prototype Sui extension, was able to grow smart contract execution throughput in direct proportion to the number of machines used.

Mysten Labs, a team of leading distributed systems, programming languages and cryptography experts and originators of the Sui Network, today announced a landmark achievement in scaling blockchain capacity.

During testing and development in a Sui blockchain environment, Pilotfish, a prototype Sui extension, increased throughput by eight times when backed by eight machines, successfully illustrating the possibility of linear scaling.

Notably, the latency per transaction decreased as more machines were added during the test, proving the viability of linear horizontal scaling for low latency blockchain transactions for the first time ever on any blockchain.

This proof of concept was formally presented as an academic preprint titled, ‘Pilotfish – Distributed Transaction Execution for Lazy Blockchains,’ and initially shared on January 29, 2024, as an article on the open access archive arXiv.

Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias, one of the authors of the paper and a researcher at Mysten Labs, said,

“Pilotfish is a game-changer as the blockchain industry seeks to achieve the same dynamic capacity increase currently possible only with centralized server technologies.

“Pilotfish has the potential to push throughput well beyond what is currently at the forefront of high-performance blockchains, enabling transaction throughput levels no other blockchain existing today can achieve.”

Sui leads the industry in throughput by leveraging multiple cores for parallel transaction execution within individual validators.

Using this approach, within months following mainnet, Sui reached 65.8 million transaction executions in a single day – the most of any blockchain ever.

However, a single machine can only incorporate a finite number of cores, so throughput gains via this strategy are limited.

Moreover, the machines capable of accommodating large numbers of cores are expensive to buy and use.

The breakthrough solution that Pilotfish offers enables a single validator to employ multiple servers simultaneously.

This new technology not only makes elastic capacity possible, but its auto-scaling architecture – akin to centralized solutions like AWS or Heroku – allows the use of smaller, cheaper servers available on demand.

Nearly all other blockchains aiming to scale use some form…