The world of blockchain technology is rapidly evolving, with new projects and innovations emerging every day. One of the most exciting developments in recent years is the Sui blockchain, a layer 1 blockchain created by Mysten Labs. In this article, we will explore what makes the Sui blockchain so innovative, how it differs from other layer 1 blockchains, and why we chose to build the Cosmocadia game on Sui.

What is Sui?

Sui is a decentralised proof-of-stake blockchain, with horizontally scalable throughput and storage. The blockchain is built by Mysten Labs, a company that delivers foundational Web3 infrastructure, and is founded by a highly experienced team of former Facebook pioneers.

Sui’s unique ability to scale horizontally sets it apart from other blockchains. This is achieved by enabling parallel agreement on causally independent transactions. What does this mean? In contrast to most blockchains, Sui organises data into independent objects rather than forming blocks in a row and executing them sequentially. This means that transactions can be executed in parallel on Sui, unlike traditional blockchains where transactions are handled on individual nodes. By handling transactions on the entire network, Sui is highly scalable, allowing it to handle a higher volume of transactions efficiently, even during peak usage times.

Strengths of the Sui Move language

Alongside building one of the fastest blockchains ever created, the Mysten Labs team also developed Sui Move, an open-source smart contract programming language based on Diem Move. Move’s primary focus is to enhance safety and security, while also simplifying the transition from Web2 to Web3. This is accomplished through its central feature: Move is designed to address the challenge of representing digital assets on the blockchain in a manner that reduces the risk of unexpected smart contract execution and eliminates many vulnerabilities in smart contracts entirely. Furthermore, the type system and data model of Sui Move are designed to support Sui’s parallel agreement, which significantly boosts the scalability of the blockchain. On top of that, Sui Move is designed to be interoperable with other blockchains and applications. This means that developers can use Sui Move to build applications that can interact with other blockchains and applications, which helps to create a more connected and interoperable ecosystem. By providing developers with a secure, scalable, and interoperable programming language, Sui Move can help to attract more developers to the Sui ecosystem and encourage the development of new and innovative applications on top of Sui layer 1.

Mutable assets, composability and dynamic NFTs

The current data models employed by existing blockchains are inadequate when it comes to representing asset ownership. These models are rigid, which poses a challenge for stateful applications like games and social networks that require flexibility to function effectively. Sui’s innovative technology makes it asset-centric. Sui treats on-chain assets as the primary focus of blockchain operations rather than accounts, which are typically used as the primary focus in traditional blockchain protocols. Each asset is associated with an address and has the ability to mutate, which means the properties of this asset can be modified. It’s also possible to make the asset unmutable and to have shared ownership over an asset via different addresses.

On Sui, assets are not only mutable, they are also composable objects. This allows assets to interact and compose. Assets integrate with each other, can own other assets and can create hierarchal structures.

Mutability and composability opens up many possibilities for blockchain products, such as the use dynamic NFTs. This type of NFT can change or be updated based on predefined rules and conditions. The term “dynamic” refers to the fact that the NFT’s metadata can be altered, creating a new version of the NFT with different characteristics. These changes can be initiated either by the NFT owner or by an external event or condition, such as a change in the price of an asset or the completion of a particular task.

Why are we building our game Sui?

In a nutshell, the main reasons to building the Cosmocadia game on Sui can be contributed to Sui being highly scalable, secure, extremely fast, and their innovative asset-centric smart contract technology.

First of all, Sui’s extremely high transaction speed is crucial for gaming applications since games require fast and seamless processing of transactions. The Sui blockchain’s scalability ensures it can cater to even the most demanding gaming applications, capable of handling millions of transactions per second. Moreover, unlike other blockchain networks that rely heavily on strong synchrony assumptions, Sui doesn’t prioritize such assumptions. Consequently, the Sui blockchain can maintain its security features even in unfavorable network conditions or during events such as network splits or denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

Sui’s asset-centric approach allows us to take our Web3 game to the next level by integrating composable and mutable objects in Cosmocadia. We can create richer gaming experience due since this opens up new possibilities that are not there on other chains. This becomes even more relevant for more complex games, such as Cosmocadia, a community-farming type game. In Cosmocadia, players build on their own piece of land, grow crops, trees, decorate their land or their own in-game avatars, and use various different items to build all this. The properties of all these assets change constantly. Trees grow, crops get farmed, and the avatar’s clothes get swapped. If you want to create this flexible and extensible environment while also granting true ownership to the players by having all in-game items on-chain, you need to build on Sui.

Finally, Sui’s asset-centric approach and horizontal scalability make it an ideal environment for game developers to build new, innovative games on. As a result, Sui places significant emphasis on nurturing a robust gaming ecosystem.

At our gaming studio, Lucky Kat Studios, we have the motto “game first, blockchain second.” Our main priority is to create high-quality, fun games and bring our players amazing gaming experiences. In line with this vision, Sui aims to build a gaming ecosystem where a fun gameplay experience is more important than tokenomics.

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About the Author: Roel Theuniszen

Roel is the Community manager at Lucky Kat Studios and is building the Community for Cosmocadia: A community-based farming game on the Sui blockchain.

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