Sui recorded a peak of 40,614,180 transactions per second during a live stress test at its Basecamp conference in Singapore, more than doubling a 20 million TPS target and surpassing a previous 6.09 million result from July. The headline figure measures transactions executed inside Sui’s off-chain tunnels rather than transactions processed directly by Sui mainnet.
According to the Sui Foundation’s official October 7 announcement, more than 10,000 tunnels were opened during the demonstration across applications involving payments, games and chat. The tunnels use Sui mainnet as the settlement and verification layer while allowing high-frequency interactions to occur off-chain without paying gas for every action.
Sui Tunnels Separate Execution From Mainnet Settlement
Sui tunnels are programmable state and payment channels that resemble Lightning-style channels in one important respect: participants interact outside the blockchain and later settle the resulting state on-chain. Each tunnel is opened and closed through mainnet transactions, while intermediate actions remain off-chain. Sui therefore does not need to process 40 million individual mainnet transactions each second for the tunnel system to support that rate of interaction.
The architecture also differs from a simple payment channel because tunnels can execute programmable logic beyond transfers. Sui says closed tunnels are mutually co-signed and can be independently verified on-chain, allowing the blockchain to provide a settlement and dispute-resolution boundary around much faster off-chain execution. The benchmark demonstrates the capacity of this layered architecture, not a new 40 million TPS ceiling for Sui’s base-layer consensus.
That distinction is particularly relevant for AI commerce, where autonomous agents could generate volumes of micro-interactions that would be impractical to settle individually on a blockchain. Solana is pursuing a related model through payment channels for autonomous AI agents, which exceeded 1 million payments per second in testing by keeping individual payment authorizations off-chain before settlement. Both designs separate high-frequency machine activity from the number of transactions ultimately committed to the underlying blockchain.
CertiK Review and Agent Payments Remain Key Tests
Mysten Labs co-founder and Chief Product Officer Adeniyi Abiodun led the Basecamp demonstration, while Sui said CertiK participated as an independent auditor. However, the Foundation’s announcement also states that CertiK would subsequently examine proofs, execution logs, journals and supporting evidence before publishing a report. The 40.6 million TPS result is therefore a Sui-reported live benchmark with independent review underway, rather than a completed public CertiK certification at this stage.
The stress test fits into a wider payments stack being built around Sui. The network already supports gasless transfers for selected stablecoins, while Circle’s CCTP V2 recently went live on Sui for native USDC transfers. Sui’s Payment Kit separately provides on-chain primitives for transfers, receipts and payment registries. Those components provide payment infrastructure, but their availability does not by itself demonstrate large-scale adoption by autonomous agents.
Sui is also preparing Hashi, its Bitcoin-finance infrastructure, for a phased mainnet rollout later in October with more than $500 million in announced capital commitments. Those commitments should not be confused with capital already deposited or deployed on mainnet, since Hashi had not yet completed its production rollout when the Basecamp throughput test occurred.
The Basecamp result is nevertheless a substantial increase over Sui’s July tunnel benchmark of 6,086,766 TPS. What it establishes is that Sui’s off-chain channel architecture can generate extremely high measured interaction rates while anchoring opening and closing state to mainnet. Whether that capacity becomes relevant to production AI commerce will depend on real agent activity, settlement volume and sustained usage rather than the peak benchmark alone.
Liam Foster follows crypto markets from France, with a close eye on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Layer 1 assets, derivatives, sentiment and smart money flows. His coverage looks past the daily price move to understand what is happening underneath: liquidity, leverage, positioning and the behavior of larger players.
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