Recently, the SUI public chain has also faced the dilemma of temporarily stopping block production. After experiencing a two-and-a-half-hour block stoppage, SUI officials also issued a report on this incident. However, the high-performance public chain, SUI, which is the mainstay, has experienced a halt in block production, which reminds people of Solana in previous years. Compared with the two, although they are significantly different in programming languages and architectures, they are both high-performance public chains, but are also criticized for not being Decentralization enough.

Why did a congestion control code trigger a collapse of all validators?

The report pointed out that on November 21, 2024, SUI Mainnet experienced a complete shutdown from approximately 1:15 to 3:45 AM Pacific Time. All validators entered a crash loop, causing the entire network to be unable to process any transactions. This incident highlights the need for high stability while improving performance in high-performance public chains to be highly followed.

According to the official statement, the reason for the shutdown is a "assert!" in the congestion control code of the Sui network. Triggered the crash of validators. Specifically, a network crash occurs when both of the following conditions are met:

TotalGasBudgetWithCap mode enabled for congestion control.

Received a transaction containing the following features: a mutable shared object as input, with no MoveCall instructions.

When such transactions enter the network, all validators collapse simultaneously, causing the network to come to a standstill.

What is traffic control?

The object-oriented architecture of the SUI Mainnet allows for parallel processing of a large number of transactions, which is how it achieves high performance. However, if multiple transactions need to be written to the same shared object, they still need to be executed sequentially, and the processing speed of such transactions is limited. To avoid congestion caused by shared objects, SUI introduces a congestion control mechanism to limit the transaction rate of individual shared objects. The author adds: Previously, in an offline study group cooperation with XueDAO, the SUI Foundation mentioned that their logic is to execute transactions with causal relationships together.

Recently, SUI upgraded its congestion control system and introduced the TotalGasBudgetWithCap mode to more accurately assess transaction complexity. However, a vulnerability that caused this incident was found in the code of this mode. The SUI team quickly took action after discovering the issue and released Mainnet v1.37.4 and Testnet v1.38.1 updates through code fix (PR #20365). The validators community has demonstrated a high level of responsiveness, with network recovery taking only 15 minutes from the release of the fix.

Protocol: The halting of SUI's block production is completely different from Solana

The halt of SUI's block production inevitably reminds people of Solana and even this year's TON. Kyrie, the CGO of Typus, the Decentralized Finance protocol on SUI, shared the team's views on this on Twitter. He pointed out directly that this is completely different from the halt of block production on Solana. The problem with Solana is that network congestion caused system crashes, which requires large-scale architectural improvements to solve and also means that Solana's problem is difficult to solve fundamentally in the short term. This time, SUI has a clear technical problem that does not affect the system's underlying architecture.

Kyrie said that the crash was caused by a numerical overflow in calculating Transaction Cost. In simple terms, it's like when the display of a calculator doesn't have enough digits, and the number is too large, it will reset to zero and recalculate. In this situation, the system falls into an infinite loop, eventually causing the entire network to freeze.

When the calculated value of the system exceeds the range that can be stored, the original design was to calculate incorrectly when exceeding the range, resulting in the system repeatedly computing. After the PR #20365 fix, the correct calculation upper limit is set to avoid this situation. He also pointed out that the key to this incident is: the problem occurred in the program logic of Transaction Cost calculation, not in Sui's Consensus Mechanism or system architecture design. This also explains why the fix can be so fast and direct.

Franklin Templeton and SUI announced a partnership

Just before the deadline, a message came in. The Sui Foundation announced a partnership with Franklin Templeton the day after they stopped block production. In the statement, Franklin Templeton mentioned three protocols and infrastructures: Deepbook, Karrier One, and ika. However, based on Franklin Templeton's operations on the blockchain, we may expect the combination of Sui, an object-oriented, security-focused public chain, with RWA.

This article SUI stopped producing blocks for the first time after going online: developers said there was no problem, and the next day Franklin Templeton announced a partnership. First appeared on Chain News ABMedia.