Pilotfish, a prototype Sui extension, was able to grow smart contract execution throughput in direct proportion to the number of machines used.
Sui leads the industry in throughput by leveraging multiple cores for parallel transaction execution within individual validators. Using this approach, within months following mainnet, Sui reached 65.8 million transaction executions in a single day—the most of any blockchain ever. However, a single machine can only incorporate a finite number of cores, so throughput gains via this strategy are limited.
Alberto Sonnino, a research scientist at Mysten Labs, said, “Until now the only option to increase a validator’s capacity has been to upgrade to a more powerful machine. Pilotfish removes that constraint, making possible horizontal scaling by simply adding servers and without delaying execution. With Pilotfish, the question is no longer whether a level of throughput is possible, only how many servers it will require.