Sui and Teranode Show Two Paths to High-Throughput Settlement

Blockchain throughput tests involving Sui and the BSV Association’s Teranode architecture are highlighting two different approaches to handling machine-to-machine payments: moving activity off-chain before settlement or expanding the capacity of the underlying node and ledger system.

A Sui demonstration in Singapore on Oct. 7, 2026, reached 40,614,180 transactions per second through programmable off-chain state and payment channels known as Sui tunnels. The result exceeded a 20 million TPS target and a previous 6,086,766 TPS result recorded July 4, 2026.

The activity covered chat, games and payments. More than 10,000 tunnels opened during the demonstration, with each tunnel requiring one opening transaction and one closing transaction before settling on Sui mainnet. The activity took place off-chain and without gas fees.

The figure measures activity inside the tunnels, not 40,614,180 independent transactions processed every second by Sui validators. The test’s 40.6 million TPS result was previously covered in earlier coverage of Sui’s off-chain tunnel test.

In a two-week test spanning six cloud regions, Teranode maintained a rate of 1 million transactions per second without losing any transactions. The architecture used Amazon Web Services infrastructure, including Amazon EC2, Amazon EKS, Amazon FSx for Lustre, Amazon S3 and Amazon RDS.

The Teranode result was a benchmark, not a full production implementation. It represented a sharp increase from the 13,614 TPS peak previously supported by BSV’s SVNode software, but it does not show that BSV mainnet sustained 1 million TPS under normal public-network conditions.

The comparison therefore concerns architecture rather than a direct race between equivalent blockchain networks. Sui’s design allows large volumes of interactions to occur away from the base layer before settlement. Teranode targets higher capacity for the node and ledger infrastructure itself.

That distinction matters as payment systems built for artificial-intelligence agents may need to handle many small automated interactions. The central design question is whether each interaction must be recorded directly on a base blockchain or whether groups of interactions can run through channels and settle later.

Adeniyi Abiodun, chief product officer and co-founder of Mysten Labs, said, “In an agentic economy, Sui doesn't need to process every interaction. It needs to be the trust layer for all of them.”

Abiodun added, “Sui is built for the moment when millions of AI agents are transacting every day.”

Siggi Óskarsson, chief technology officer of the BSV Association, said, “A lot of the blockchain stuff is based on assumptions.”

The two tests leave the same question for developers and infrastructure operators: whether machine-scale payments will depend primarily on faster base-layer processing or on systems that execute activity elsewhere and record settlement events on-chain.