Sui Lutris: A high-performance blockchain protocol combining DAG consensus and non-consensus methods

Blockchain technology has made significant progress since the advent of Bitcoin. With the emergence of new application scenarios such as games and NFTs, the industry is continuously exploring ways to improve technical efficiency, particularly in handling high loads and achieving real-time latency. L1 blockchains face two major challenges: first, the need to achieve high throughput while maintaining low latency, and second, ensuring the long-term stability of consensus protocols. When addressing these challenges, it is also important to maintain decentralization through the dynamic participation and reconfiguration of validating nodes.

One way to achieve high throughput is to use a DAG-based consensus protocol. Such protocols allow the blockchain to handle a large number of transactions simultaneously, making them very suitable for application scenarios such as gaming and NFTs. However, DAG-based protocols often result in several seconds of latency, which can be a high time cost for regular transfers or gaming operations.

On the other hand, non-consensus protocols show great potential in reducing latency and improving scalability. These protocols eliminate the need for consensus, allowing for fast transaction processing without the need for total ordering of independent transactions in parallel processing. 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 have not yet been applied to production-level Blockchain. They primarily remain at the stage of publication in academic conferences and have not been widely adopted by the Blockchain community. Sui Lutris is an innovative protocol that combines DAG-based Consensus and non-consensus methods, aiming to achieve the best of both worlds: sub-second latency and sustained throughput of thousands of transactions per second. At the same time, Sui Lutris also maintains the ability to execute complex contracts on shared objects, generate checkpoints, and reconfigure the validator set across periods.

Sui Lutris adopts a unique approach that combines the above two methods. To ensure the security of operations on objects owned by a single owner with asset (, the system employs a consistent broadcasting protocol among validators, thus achieving latency below consensus. Sui Lutris relies solely on consensus to handle complex smart contracts running on shared objects, which can be altered by any user. In addition, Sui Lutris supports network maintenance operations, such as defining checkpoints and reconfiguring validators. This innovative strategy provides a solution that accommodates all parties when processing transactions in a replicated Byzantine environment.

The transaction lifecycle of Sui Lutris is as follows:

1. Users create and sign transactions to change the objects they own or mix objects.
2. Transactions are sent to each Sui Lutris validation node.
3. Verify that the Node performs validity and security checks, signs, and returns the signed transaction.
4. The client collects responses from the majority of validation nodes to form a transaction certificate.
5. The certificate is sent back to all verification nodes for confirmation.
6. If it involves exclusive objects, the transaction certificate can be executed immediately.
7. All certificates are forwarded to the DAG-based consensus protocol.
8. The total order of consensus output certificates; validating nodes execute transactions that include shared objects.
9. The client collects the responses from the verification nodes and assembles the effect certificate as proof of transaction settlement.
10. Submit a checkpoint for each consensus to drive the reconfiguration protocol.

In addition to the main trading process, Sui Lutris also offers multiple features to support production-level Blockchain:

1. Implement checkpoint protocol to generate a causal history of all transactions in the system for complete auditing and keeping nodes in sync.
2. Support reconfiguration at the end of each period, allowing changes in the validator set and voting rights.
3. Safely "unlock" erroneously locked assets at the end of the period to minimize the damage caused by the vulnerability.

Sui Lutris supports the management of blockchain with significant value. It provides a detailed description and proof of security and liveness protocols in the standard distributed system model. This innovative protocol is expected to drive breakthroughs in blockchain technology in terms of high performance and low latency.