Sui Tunnels Smash 40 Million TPS in AI-Agent Stress Test

Sui’s programmable offchain tunnels hit a peak of 40,614,180 transactions per second in a live test on 7 October at Sui Basecamp in Singapore, according to the Sui Foundation.

The run beat the 20 million TPS target Sui had set for the event. Sui said the run also came in at more than six times the 6,086,766 TPS it recorded on 4 July, when the tunnels first ran in a public livestream.

The test took place on the Summit Stage at Marina Bay Sands, where Basecamp is being held alongside Token2049 Singapore. Mysten Labs chief product officer and co-founder Adeniyi Abiodun ran the test on stage. Its participants logged into an explorer built for the event, where users and AI agents opened more than 10,000 tunnels within seconds of each other.

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How Tunnels Settle Onchain

Sui describes tunnels as programmable offchain state and payment channels, similar to Lightning Network’s payment channels. Each tunnel needs two onchain transactions, one to open and one to close. Every closed tunnel is mutually cosigned and can be verified onchain, Sui said.

Activity in the test spanned chat, games and payments, all gasless and offchain. Those categories were the test’s focus, and Sui said builders can design their own tunnels for other uses.

“In an agentic economy, Sui doesn’t need to process every interaction. It needs to be the trust layer for all of them,” Abiodun said. He compared Sui to a court, and in that court, agents agree to the rules when they open a tunnel and reach a conclusion when they settle, and Sui steps in only when there is a dispute.

“No market in the world needs 6 million transactions per second, let alone 40 million: people just don’t move that fast. Agents do,” Abiodun said.

CertiK will examine the proofs, execution logs, journals and supporting evidence and publish a report in the coming days, Sui said. 

July’s livestream had a target of 1 million TPS, and Sui’s earlier benchmark was 297,000 TPS in a controlled environment. That July run had participants sign in with zkLogin and play blackjack and Quantum Poker against AI agents using a test token.

Sui’s mainnet stalled for nearly six hours in January, halting block production. The same network launched its USDsui stablecoin through Stripe-owned Bridge in November 2025.

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