Sui Will Charge 1 SUI to Publish or Upgrade a Package Starting With Protocol Version 143

Once protocol version 143 goes live, developers would pay a fee each time they publish a new app's code on Sui or update code that is already on the network. The charge would be 1 SUI, plus a small extra amount based on the code being published. Everyday users would not pay it. Sending tokens, swapping, minting, or using an app that is already on the network would not trigger this charge.

Mysten Labs merged the change into Sui's code at 8:43 p.m. PT on November 13, in a pull request titled "Enable the publish and upgrade charge." It is not live on mainnet, testnet, or devnet. No mainnet date has been set, and the code can still change before a release.

MystenLabs/sui pull request #28637

What developers would pay

Each Publish or Upgrade command in a transaction would be charged 1 SUI as a fixed amount, 0.01 SUI per module, and 0.01 SUI per dependency. A simple one-module package that depends on the standard std and sui libraries would pay 1.03 SUI. If a transaction includes more than one Publish or Upgrade command, each command would be charged.

The amount is fixed in MIST — 1 SUI equals 1 billion MIST — and does not move with the gas price. It is taken before the first command in the transaction runs, and it is reported in computation_cost. The gas budget must cover the charge. Ordinary execution and storage gas would still apply on top of it.

The charge was added earlier behind a flag and left disabled. This pull request turns it on for protocol version 143.

What builders should watch for

The pull request flags three effects:

• If a dependency is listed twice, it is accepted and charged twice.
• If the gas budget is below the charge, the transaction can still be signed. It then runs out of gas before execution, and the whole budget is lost.
• The charge is owed even if the Publish or Upgrade command never runs, for example when an earlier command in the same transaction aborts.

Not live yet

Protocol version 143 is not active on any public network. The latest testnet and devnet releases are both v1.84.0. The latest mainnet release is v1.83.1. None of those releases includes this change, and Mysten Labs has not published a mainnet date for protocol version 143.

The same protocol version also moves Sui to execution version 5.