Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands, July 6th, 2026, FinanceWire
Autonomous AI agents battling across games, payments, and chat pushed Sui’s programmable tunnels to a peak of 6,086,766 TPS
Sui, where money moves as freely as messages, processed the highest number of transactions per second ever performed on its network on Saturday, July 4, 2026. The milestone was hit live during a public experiment open to anyone and witnessed by thousands during a livestream.
Made possible through “programmable tunnels,” which are offchain payment and state channels that settle to Sui mainnet when closed, the experiment invited users to log into an explorer built specifically for the event, using nothing more than an email address. Once connected, participants watched AI agents battle head-to-head across games, payments, and chat, all contributing transaction volume in real time toward a single goal: pushing Sui mainnet past 1 million transactions per second (TPS).
The network exceeded that target several times over. At approximately 12:30 PM ET, Sui mainnet reached a peak of 6,086,766 TPS: more than six times the experiment’s 1 million TPS goal, and roughly 20 times higher than Sui’s previous maximum-TPS benchmark of 297,000 TPS, set in a controlled testing environment.
Diving Into the Details
The demo was led by Chief Cryptographer Kostas Chalkias, co-founder of Mysten Labs and a contributor to Sui, alongside Daniel Lam, a lead engineer on Mysten’s dedicated Sui hacker team. Participants signed in with zkLogin, the Sui primitive that makes it possible for users to log in with an existing account, such as Google, instead of a traditional crypto wallet, and received a test token, MTPS, to use in the experiment. As gas was sponsored throughout, users needed no prior SUI holdings to take part.
From there, users and AI agents opened programmable, Lightning Network-style offchain channels, or “tunnels,” with one another to play games such as blackjack and “Quantum Poker,” draw together on a shared canvas, chat, and transact, all gaslessly and offchain, with activity settling back to Sui mainnet when each channel closed. Every closed channel was mutually cosigned and independently verifiable onchain, allowing the experiment to combine high throughput with cryptographic proof that no transaction was tampered with.
“We proved that programmable tunnels aren’t just about payments,” said Kostas Chalkias, Chief Cryptographer and Co-Founder at Mysten Labs. “This is agent-to-agent commerce, competitive gaming, and prediction markets running gaslessly at massive scale. A company’s trading agent could play chess or poker against another company’s agent millions of times without touching the base chain. Consider real-world utility: you could lock funds offchain so someone without internet access, in an earthquake or a blackout, can still pay for groceries the moment they’re near a signal again. Right now there are only four or five proven product-market fits in crypto: stablecoins, DeFi, payments, prediction markets. I think programmable tunnels just opened the door to a fifth.”
What’s Next
Mysten Labs and the Sui hacker team plan to build on the experiment with additional capabilities, including confidential transfers via Nautilus, tunnels supporting more than two participants, and agent-to-agent prediction markets.
About Sui
Sui, where money moves as freely as messages, is a next-generation Layer 1 blockchain built for scalable finance and global payments. Founded by the core team behind Meta’s stablecoin initiative and powered by an object-centric model, Sui makes assets, permissions, and user data programmable and ownable. Sui’s primitives offer builders everything they need to create high-performance payments and financial applications, including instant agentic payments. Users can learn more at sui.io.
Contact
Sui Foundation
media@sui.io