Sui said its programmable offchain tunnels reached a peak throughput of 40,614,180 transactions per second during a live mainnet stress test at Basecamp in Singapore, breaking the project’s previous record of roughly 6.1 million TPS from July.
The details were published by Mysten Labs, the development team behind Sui, on its official blog. According to the post, the test ran on Sui mainnet with more than 10,000 offchain tunnels opened at the same time across application scenarios including payments, gaming and chat.
How Sui tunnels work
Sui tunnels are programmable offchain channels. Transactions are handled inside a tunnel first, then the final result is settled to the Sui blockchain when the channel closes. The design is meant to avoid using mainnet resources for every single transaction while keeping final confirmation onchain.
Sui co-founder and Mysten Labs Chief Product Officer Adeniyi Abiodun said, 「No market in the world needs 6 million transactions per second, let alone 40 million. Humans do not move that fast. AI agents can.」
In a separate statement posted from the official Sui Network X account, he said the tunnel design was built for a future where "tens of millions of AI agents transact simultaneously every day."
CertiK review is still underway
Crypto data analytics firm CertiK is serving as the independent auditor for the test and is currently reviewing the underlying data. A formal report is expected in the coming days, which means the 40.61 million TPS figure is still awaiting third-party verification.
At the same time, the test was conducted in a live mainnet environment rather than under simulation, a point the original report said makes the result more persuasive.
From about 6.1 million to 40.61 million TPS in three months
Sui reported roughly 6.1 million TPS in a similar stress test in July. Three months later, the same offchain tunnel architecture, running under the same mainnet environment, produced a peak of 40.61 million TPS.
The original report said this points to clear improvements in tunnel management, settlement logic or network latency optimization by the Sui team.
For comparison, the report put Ethereum mainnet at about 15 to 30 transactions per second and Bitcoin at roughly 8 to 12 transactions per second. It also stressed that Sui’s 40.61 million TPS figure was measured inside offchain tunnels, while final settlement still occurs on Sui mainnet.
Focus turns to AI agent transaction infrastructure
The report said the benchmark was not built around everyday human user activity, but around high-frequency interactions by AI agents. It linked that demand to the expansion of AI agent ecosystems, citing OpenAI’s ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok as examples of systems that may need low-latency, high-throughput transaction infrastructure for automated decision-making, cross-chain scheduling and real-time data exchange.
It also noted that other Layer 1 networks are pushing related scaling approaches. Zcash’s Tachyon plan targets 50,000 TPS, while StarkNet’s Quantum Leap upgrade lifted TPS by 50x. Based on the reported live test number, the article said Sui is currently ahead in the AI agent transaction infrastructure track.
The next key point is how CertiK defines and verifies "effective throughput" in its report, including whether the transactions inside the tunnels contained real data and logic or were only empty counting operations. If the report confirms transaction quality, the original article said Sui’s AI-focused positioning would carry more weight.