Exploring the New Frontier of Blockchain Technology: Sui Lutris Protocol

Blockchain technology has made significant progress since the birth of Bitcoin. With the emergence of new application scenarios such as games and NFTs, the blockchain community continuously seeks ways to improve technical efficiency, especially in handling high loads and providing real-time responses. L1 blockchains face two main challenges: first, achieving high throughput while maintaining low latency, and second, ensuring the long-term stability of the consensus protocol. In addressing these challenges, it is also necessary to maintain decentralization through the dynamic participation and reconfiguration of validating nodes.

One way to increase throughput is to use DAG-based consensus protocols, such as narwhale / Bullshark. These protocols allow the Blockchain to process a large number of transactions simultaneously, making them very suitable for applications like games and NFTs. However, these protocols can lead to delays of several seconds, which can be costly for ordinary transfers or game operations.

On the other hand, consensus-free protocols (such as FastPay) show great potential in reducing latency and scalability. These protocols eliminate the need for consensus, allowing for rapid processing of transactions without the need for global ordering of independent transactions processed in parallel. However, they are only suitable for a limited set of simple Blockchain operations, which restricts the complexity of executable smart contracts and makes it difficult to cope with the dynamic changes of the validator set.

Although these methods have potential, they currently remain primarily at the academic discussion stage and have not been widely applied in production-grade Blockchains. Sui Lutris is an innovative 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 capability to execute complex contracts on shared objects, generate checkpoints, and reconfigure the validator set across cycles.

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

In Sui Lutris, the lifecycle of a transaction includes the following steps: the user creates and signs the transaction, verification nodes perform checks and sign, the client collects responses from the verification nodes to form a transaction certificate, and the certificate is sent back to the verification nodes for confirmation. For transactions that only involve exclusive objects, they can be processed immediately; other transactions are processed through a DAG-based consensus protocol. Ultimately, the consensus output certificate's overall order allows verification nodes to execute transactions that include shared objects and form checkpoints to drive the reconfiguration protocol.

In addition to the main trading process, Sui Lutris also provides several features to support the operation of production-level Blockchain:

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

2. Support reconfiguration at the end of each period, allowing changes to the validator set and their voting rights.

3. Securely "unlock" erroneously locked assets at the end of the period, minimizing damage caused by potential vulnerabilities.

Sui Lutris provides robust technical support for the Sui Blockchain, enabling it to securely and efficiently manage a large number of user assets. The protocol offers security proofs within the standard distributed system model, pointing the way for the future development of Blockchain technology.