Sui Offchain Tunnels Peak at 40,614,180 TPS in Live Stress Test

40,614,180 TPS at Sui Basecamp

CertiK's audit desk now has a fresh stress-test dataset to verify after Sui's programmable offchain tunnels processed a peak of 40,614,180 transactions per second in a live demonstration staged Wednesday at Sui Basecamp in Singapore. The run, documented in the project's official test announcement, beat a similar July benchmark that registered roughly 6.1 million TPS, a record the network bills as the largest verified-throughput figure ever recorded on a public chain. The workhorses of the test were Sui tunnels, programmable channels that execute activity offchain and reconcile with mainnet only when they close. During the demonstration, operators opened more than 10,000 tunnels on the network itself, and the simulated traffic covered payments, games and chat applications. The design targets high-frequency machine activity, above all exchanges between AI agents, so the full volume never has to land one transaction at a time on an onchain node. Sui described the exercise as a stress test built to replicate the burst patterns of agent-to-agent commerce, the workload class its team expects to dominate future settlement demand. Basecamp is Sui's flagship gathering, and running the test live on mainnet during it was a deliberate choice, since every tunnel and its closing settlement sits in a public record third parties can inspect. Adeniyi Abiodun, Mysten Labs co-founder and its chief product officer, put that thesis plainly at the event: the chain is built for a market in which millions of AI agents transact daily, because no human market needs 6 million TPS, “let alone 40 million.” People, he argued, simply do not move at agent speed. Traders treated the milestone as no immediate catalyst: the Sui price slipped about 5.5% over the past 24 hours, and no post-test rebound had printed at the time of writing.

The distance between the two tests is the cleanest way to read the result. July's benchmark peaked near 6.1 million TPS; Wednesday's run multiplied that figure by roughly six and a half, and it did so during a live event rather than an internal lab exercise. Because the tunnels execute their activity offchain, the headline number measures the throughput of that programmable layer, with the base ledger absorbing settled state as each channel closes. Unlike cross-chain bridges, which move assets between separate networks, tunnels keep execution inside Sui's own offchain layer and post their final state back home. That distinction matters when weighing what the figure represents: capacity of the tunnel system, demonstrated on mainnet, not raw onchain execution load. The official claim is worded narrowly, as the highest verified throughput settled to a blockchain, not the fastest chain in raw terms. The traffic mix spanned payments, gaming and chat applications, the three categories the project has positioned as representative of agent-driven usage, with each opened tunnel running its activity before closing and settling on mainnet. The milestone arrives on a network that has spent the year stacking scale and utility claims, from a stretch in which it topped 6 billion transaction blocks, to a partnership with OpenAssets on an Open Tokenized Asset Standard and the Flap experiment that pushed tokenized stocks revenue into eight figures. CertiK's presence during the demonstration means the auditors observed the run rather than reconstructing it afterward, which shapes what its report can certify. Readers setting up a first position can follow our How to Use Sui walkthrough for the basics.

CertiK Report Still Pending

Our reading is that the 40.6 million figure is best treated as a capacity claim, not a demand number. Nothing organic on the network generates volume near that level today, and Abiodun's own remarks concede as much: human markets do not need even 6 million TPS. What the test could establish, once verified, is that the tunnel architecture clears agent-scale bursts while keeping final settlement on the base ledger. Scale claims have become a competitive currency across the altcoin sector, and capacity demonstrations routinely outrun their audited follow-up. Structurally, the design resembles a layer-3 execution shell anchored to a base chain, which places the burden of proof on the settlement data rather than the demo. That check is the action still open, and it sits with CertiK, whose report is due within days.