Sui Tunnels Hit 40 Million TPS in Live Basecamp Test

Sui set a new throughput mark on October 7. During a live test on the Summit Stage at Sui Basecamp in Singapore, Sui tunnels processed 40,614,180 transactions per second, with the results settled to Sui mainnet. CertiK's independent analysis later put the final peak at 40,682,328 TPS.

The number clears the 20 million TPS target the team set going into the event, and it is well beyond the network's July 4 record of just over 6 million.

What tunnels are

The figure needs context. It was not produced by Sui's base layer processing 40 million onchain transactions a second. It came from Sui tunnels, an offchain channel design introduced during the July 4 livestream.

Sui compares tunnels to the Lightning Network's payment channels. Participants transact offchain, and when a tunnel closes, its final state settles to mainnet. Each closed tunnel is cosigned by both sides and can be verified onchain. The difference from Lightning, according to Sui, is that tunnels are programmable, so they can carry more than payments.

During the test, users and AI agents opened more than ten thousand tunnels through an explorer built for the event. Activity covered chat, games and payments, all gasless and offchain until settlement.

Why Sui ran it

Sui pitched the test as proof that the network can handle the volume expected from AI agents and machine-to-machine commerce, where software makes many small, frequent transactions. Sui says it ships the primitives so builders can design tunnels for their own use cases.

Coverage of the test has been measured. TokenPost described the result as 40.6 million offchain interactions per second and noted that the announcements had not yet produced a sustained move in the SUI price.

The bigger picture

The record lands alongside steady growth on the base layer. Onchain explorer Suiscan currently shows more than 6.2 billion transaction blocks and about 249 million total accounts on the network. Separately, BSC News reported on October 13 that Sui had passed 5 billion total transactions. Explorers count transactions in different ways, so the two figures are not directly comparable.

For builders, the question now is how quickly tunnels move from a staged demo to production apps.