Breakthroughs in Blockchain Technology: Sui Lutris Protocol

Blockchain technology has made significant progress since the birth of Bitcoin. With the emergence of new applications such as games and NFTs, the blockchain community is continuously exploring ways to improve the efficiency of the technology, particularly in terms of handling high loads and achieving real-time latency. Current Layer 1 blockchains face two major challenges: first, the need to achieve high throughput while maintaining low latency, and second, ensuring the long-term stability of the consensus protocol. When addressing these issues, decentralization should also be maintained through the dynamic participation and reconfiguration of validation nodes.

One way to increase throughput is to adopt a DAG-based consensus protocol. These types of protocols allow the Blockchain to handle a large number of transactions simultaneously, making them very suitable for applications such as games and NFTs. However, DAG-based protocols often introduce a few seconds of latency, which can be a high time cost for regular transfers or gaming operations.

On the other hand, consensus-less protocols show great potential in reducing latency and scalability. These protocols can process transactions quickly without the need for consensus, and do not require sorting of independent transactions for parallel processing. However, they are only suitable for a limited set of simple Block operations, which restricts the achievable smart contract functionalities, and it is difficult to reconfigure a dynamically changing validator set.

Although these methods have potential, they have not yet been widely adopted in production-level Blockchain. Sui Lutris is a new type of protocol that combines the advantages of DAG-based consensus and non-consensus methods, achieving sub-second latency and sustained throughput of thousands of transactions per second. At the same time, Sui also retains the ability to execute complex contracts on shared objects, generate checkpoints, and reconfigure the validator set across periods.

Sui Lutris adopts a unique approach by combining the two aforementioned solutions. For asset operations owned by a single owner, the system uses a consistent broadcasting protocol among validators, achieving latency below consensus. For complex smart contracts on shared objects, Sui Lutris relies on consensus for processing. Additionally, it supports network maintenance operations, such as defining checkpoints and reconfiguring validators. This novel strategy provides a solution that balances efficiency and security when processing transactions in a replicated Byzantine environment.

In Sui Lutris, the lifecycle of a transaction is roughly as follows: users create and sign a transaction, which is sent to verification nodes for checking and signing. The client collects responses from the majority of verification nodes to form a transaction certificate, at which point the transaction is considered irreversible. The certificate is then sent back to all verification nodes for confirmation. For transactions involving only exclusive objects, they can be processed and executed immediately. All certificates are forwarded to a DAG-based consensus protocol, which ultimately outputs the total order of the certificates. Verification nodes execute transactions that contain shared objects, and the client can collect responses to form effect certificates as proof of transaction settlement.

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

1. Implement checkpoint protocol to generate the causal history of all transactions in the system for auditing and synchronization.

2. Support for reconfiguration at the end of each period, allowing changes in the validator set and their voting power.

3. Safely "unlock" erroneously locked assets at the end of the period to minimize the impact of potential vulnerabilities.

Sui Lutris supports the Sui Blockchain and is designed to manage a large number of assets for users. The complete technical report details how the security and activity protocols operate, as well as the security proofs with partially synchronous Byzantine participants in a standard distributed system model.