Jan 20, 2026
| Updated Jan 20, 2026
| KEY TAKEAWAYS: |
| — Sui and Solana are both high-performing layer-1 blockchains designed for scalability, speed, and low transaction costs.
— Each blockchain uses a different approach to achieve high throughput and low transaction fees; Solana uses a unique combination of Proof of Stake and Proof of History consensus mechanisms, while Sui employs a delegated PoS model. — Sui processes transactions individually using an object-based approach, while Solana processes all transactions in a single, shared state, resulting in varying trade-offs for performance, security, and developer experience. |
Newer blockchains often emerge purporting to offer better user experiences, functionalities, and fewer limitations than their predecessors, all vying for the top spot. Ethereum, in particular, has faced (and continues to face) intense scrutiny due to its high transaction fees and relatively slow processing. This has led to its position as the predominant smart contract platform and hub for DeFi being increasingly challenged. This environment has spawned blockchains often hyped as potential “Ethereum Killers.”
Two platforms that are particularly prominent in the debate for the next-gen blockchain infrastructure are Sui and Solana. Despite their own shortcomings, such as potential concerns about centralization, both platforms address the limitations present in earlier blockchains, offering fast transaction speeds, low costs, and support for diverse decentralized applications (dApps).
Solana’s theoretical 65,000 transactions per second (TPS) and Sui’s 120,000 TPS already place them at the apex of transaction speed in the blockchain landscape. But the battle between these two contenders encompasses far more than just processing speed.
This guide compares Solana and Sui, beyond the mythologized “Ethereum Killer” framing, to examine their core differences in terms of consensus mechanisms, performance, programming languages, and recent updates.
Let’s dive in.
Solana Vs Sui: What Are They?
What is Solana?
Solana is a high-performing layer-1 blockchain, designed for scalability and speed. Launched in 2020 by Anatoly Yakovenko, the blockchain employs a hybrid consensus mechanism, a combination of proof-of-history (PoH) and proof-of-stake (PoS) models. This hybrid system allows it to achieve a high throughput without relying on sharding or layer-2 scaling solutions.
The Solana blockchain is designed to host high-frequency applications such as gaming, decentralized exchanges (DEXs), and consumer-facing apps that require instant finality and low costs.
What is Sui?
Sui is also a high-performing layer-1 blockchain, sharing the same goals of scalability, fast transactions, and low fees. It was launched in May 2023 by Masten Labs, created by ex-Meta engineers (from the Diem and Novi projects). Sui aims to optimize the performance of smart contracts and boost the scalability of dApps.
Since its launch, the Sui blockchain has attracted millions of users and developers, partly due to its intuitive experience that is similar to popular web2 applications. Its innovative design, for instance, gives users the option to create wallets using secret recovery phrases (SRP) or via seedless alternatives.
Both blockchains allow users to participate in staking to secure the network. In order to do this and to interact with dApps on either blockchain, you need a Sui wallet or a Solana wallet. Using a Ledger signer offers industry-leading hardware security, while integrating perfectly with Ledger Wallet™ for seamless digital asset management and ownership.
Two High-Performing Blockchains, Two Different Approaches
Both Solana and Sui were spawned from a shared frustration with the existing blockchain trilemma, yet their approaches to solving it vary vastly. Let’s dive into how they operate under the hood.
Consensus Mechanism and Architecture
Solana utilizes a unique blend of PoH and PoS models. The PoH consensus algorithm timestamps transactions, maintaining a consistent record of all transactions and events in a chronological order. It utilizes a Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) to create tamper-proof timestamps, thereby establishing an immutable record without requiring validators to constantly synchronize their time.
Its PoS algorithm, on the other hand, is responsible for validating transactions and maintaining overall network security. This approach lets Solana process transactions in parallel rather than sequentially, giving it significant speed, high throughput, and low transaction fees.
Sui, on the other hand, employs a delegated PoS (DPoS) consensus mechanism, which has a fixed set of validators responsible for processing transactions within a 24-hour cycle. Simply put, a validator set selected by SUI token holders through staking secures the network. Token holders typically delegate their SUI to validators, who then process transactions and receive a share of the transaction fees as rewards.
To achieve parallel transaction execution, Sui uses Mysticeti (formerly known as Narwhal and Bullshark) to orchestrate data availability and block finality. Narwhal facilitates data availability in mempools, while Bullshark, a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) engine, is responsible for transaction ordering and finality. This consensus approach optimizes for both high throughput and low network latency.
Moreover, the platform categorizes transactions into two types: simple and complex types.
- Simple transactions – The transactions involving objects owned by a single address can entirely bypass consensus, achieving near-instant finality.
- Complex transactions – For complex transactions (shared objects), rather than batching transactions into blocks like regular PoS or PoW networks, Sui validators validate them individually. Each transaction then receives a certificate of finality upon completion.
Data Model
Another difference between these two blockchains is how they structure and manage data. Solana, for instance, employs an account-based model centered around wallets and account balances. In this system, it maintains a global state where each account stores its balance and associated data.
As such, whenever a transaction occurs, it modifies the state of one or more accounts. Thus, developers must explicitly declare the accounts that a transaction will read from or write to, allowing the runtime to determine which transactions to execute in parallel.
However, transactions affecting the same account must execute sequentially. This might cause network congestion, especially when multiple operations target popular accounts, such as large liquidity pools.
In contrast, Sui structures its entire state around objects, their ownership, and their lifecycle. Every Sui asset exists as an independent object with its own unique identifier and ownership information.
Unlike Solana, which organizes state around accounts, Sui tracks individual objects that can be owned by addresses, shared among multiple users, or made immutable. This approach necessitates different parallelization, where transactions involving different objects can execute simultaneously without any coordination since they modify entirely separate parts of the state.
Scalability
Solana scales through vertical optimizations. Rather than splitting workloads across several layers or rollups, Solana pursues a single high-performance global chain.
Moreover, it relies on powerful validator hardware, meaning that the network requires validators to operate high-performance computing resources. This hardware-intensive approach allows individual validators to process vast transaction volumes, facilitating thousands of transactions per second. The trade-off? A high entry barrier for validators and potentially increased centralization risk.
Sui’s object-centric architecture, on the other hand, allows it to achieve horizontal scalability. Because transactions involving different objects are completely independent, Sui can process them in parallel without coordination between validators. Therefore, as transaction volume grows, the network can theoretically scale by adding more validators to handle distinct subsets of objects rather than requiring each validator to process every transaction.
The object model enables Sui to bypass consensus entirely for simple transfers, creating a scaling pathway that doesn’t rely solely on validator hardware improvements. While Sui validators still require efficient hardware, the focus on parallel execution through data independence provides a radically different scaling trajectory than Solana’s high-powered hardware approach.
Programming Language
The Solana ecosystem utilizes Rust, a programming language renowned for its performance and memory safety, for creating complex smart contracts and dApps with very low latency. With Rust widely adopted outside blockchain development, Solana can tap into a broader developer pool, albeit with a learning curve.
Sui leverages the Sui Move language, an object-centric variant of the Move programming language, which was designed to enhance asset safety and integrity. The language’s design eliminates common security risks, such as reentrancy attacks and other smart contract risks. Moreover, it ensures that assets cannot be mistakenly duplicated or destroyed.
The Move language itself is based on Rust, meaning that developers in the Solana ecosystem can transition to Sui with relative ease. However, the language’s blockchain-specific design means it lacks some features familiar to Rust developers.
Transaction Speed and Performance
Designed to overcome the scalability limitations of earlier blockchains, Solana’s hybrid architecture allows it to handle a theoretical 65,000 TPS. It regularly achieves around 4,000 TPS in real-world scenarios, which still makes it one of the fastest blockchain networks around. It currently achieves average block times of 0.4 seconds and reaches complete block finality in approximately 12.8 seconds.
Sui’s processing speed under ideal conditions is almost twice as much as Solana’s. Its parallel execution engine allows it to handle a theoretical maximum of 120,000 TPS, with testnet demonstrating peaks near 297,000 TPS. However, its actual TPS is much lower, with its real-world max TPS reaching approximately 1000 TPS at the time of writing. That being said, it realizes a near-instant finality for simple transactions and roughly 480 milliseconds for complex transactions.
Network stability presents another factor to consider when evaluating their individual performances and reliability. Solana, for example, has experienced several notable outages since its inception. In contrast, Sui’s newer network hasn’t faced the same scale of testing, though it has demonstrated resilience during periods of increased activity.
Network Fees
Transaction costs present another disparity between the Sui and Solana networks. Both chains typically maintain remarkably low transaction fees, often in fractions of a cent per transaction. The consistent low-cost structure contrasts with other layer-1 chains like Ethereum, where fees can rise to several dollars during high congestion periods. This makes them particularly well-suited for applications that rely on frequent transactions, such as gaming, microtransactions, and high-frequency DeFi operations.
Solana’s fee structure consists of the base fee and the prioritization fee.
- Base fee – Every Solana transaction pays a base fee of 0.000005 SOL per transaction signature, half of which is burned and the other half paid to the validator that processed the transaction.
- Priority fee – This is an optional fee you pay to increase the chances of the validator processing your transaction. Priority fees often remain below 0.01 even during peak network activities.
Sui, on the other hand, implements a dual-fee model that separates computation costs (called gas) from storage costs. Users pay execution fees based on the computational resources that their transaction consumes, meaning that resource-intensive transactions charge more. Sui charges storage fees upfront for any data the transaction writes to the blockchain. It maintains these costs under $0.02 even during peak network activities.
What’s more, users receive a partial refund of the original storage fee when they delete previously stored data through a mechanism called storage rebate. This means that in transactions where the rebate exceeds the execution cost, the network may end up paying you to clean up the blockchain state.
Future Prospects and Potential
Solana’s primary challenge involves maintaining its edge while addressing persistent concerns about network stability and validator diversity. Solana’s most recent update, the Firedancer validator client by Jump Crypto, launched on the mainnet on December 12, 2025, expanding the diversity of Solana’s validator software. This upgrade aims to improve network performance and reduce reliance on a single implementation, reducing the risk of a single software bug halting the entire network.
The upcoming Alpenglow upgrade, set for early 2026 mainnet deployment, will potentially improve Solana’s transaction finality times and network resilience. The upgrade will replace Solana’s PoH and Tower BFT components with Votor (a voting protocol that moves consensus activities off-chain) and Rotor (an optimized data propagation layer). Its core objective is to reduce the block finality from the current 12.8 seconds to an average of 100 – 150 milliseconds.
The network is also expanding its integrations with traditional finance through Solana ETFs, some of which have already been approved in the US. This could potentially expand its institutional adoption.
Sui, on the other hand, launched Mysticeti v2 in November 2025. The update integrates transaction validation directly into the consensus process, streamlining finalization and eliminating redundancy. It aims to significantly improve transaction processing speed, reduce latency, and lower operational overhead.
Sui also plans to integrate protocol-level privacy by default, making transaction details confidential using zk-proofs. In other words, the transaction details will be visible only to the involved parties. This privacy-by-default update addresses quantum computing risks and regulatory compliance requirements while maintaining high throughput.
Other upcoming Sui upgrades include:
- DeepBook upgrades – Updates to Sui’s native DEX, DeepBook, aim to introduce margin trading and a referral income model, further improving liquidity and trader incentives.
- USDsui stablecoin – Sui also aims to launch a native, fully collateralized stablecoin to stabilize its economy. A key feature in this update is the elimination of gas fees for stablecoin transfers.
- Sui Stack platform – A transition from L1 blockchain to a unified developer platform that allows institutions to deploy compliant onchain applications.
Sui vs Solana Comparison
| Feature | Solana | Sui |
| Launch Year | 2020 | 2023 |
| Consensus Mechanism | PoH + PoS | DPoS (Narwhal + Bullshark) |
| Transaction Speed | 65,000 TPS (theoretical) | 120,000+ TPS (theoretical) |
| Block Time | 0.4 seconds | 0.07 seconds |
| Programming Language | Rust (primary), C, C++, TypeScript | Sui Move |
| Data Model | Account-based | Object-based |
| Scalability | Vertical scalability via cluster nodes and high hardware requirements | Horizontal scalability using object-centric data models |
| Developer Activity | 10,752+ developers | 1,411+ developers |
| Architecture | Monolithic (single layer) | Monolithic (single layer) |
Final Thoughts: The New Era of High-Speed Blockchains
Sui and Solana represent distinct approaches to blockchain scalability. Solana offers a battle-tested platform with deep liquidity and an established ecosystem, while Sui brings innovative architecture through its object-centric model and Move language. Rather than declaring a winner, the comparison reveals complementary strengths serving different use cases within the blockchain industry.
Regardless of which network you choose, security remains essential. Therefore, whether holding SUI, SOL, or assets across multiple chains, a Ledger signer paired with Ledger Wallet is the most seamless and secure option for experiencing true digital ownership while interacting with these high-performance networks.
