The Sui blockchain has achieved a monumental technical milestone, recording an astonishing 40.6 million transactions per second during a live stress test that simulated intense, high-frequency activity between autonomous artificial intelligence agents.
The demonstration, which took place on Wednesday at the Sui Basecamp conference in Singapore, saw Sui’s programmable offchain tunnels process transactions at a peak rate of 40,614,180 TPS. This performance shatters the network’s previous verified throughput record set just months prior in July, when a similar test achieved roughly 6.1 million TPS. The staggering leap in capacity highlights the rapid evolution of Sui’s scalability architecture and its deliberate preparation for a future dominated by automated digital systems.
The record-breaking transaction volume was handled offchain through Sui tunnels, which function as programmable channels that efficiently aggregate and settle data to the underlying Sui blockchain only when the channels are closed. During the live demonstration on the Sui mainnet, more than 10,000 individual tunnels were opened simultaneously. The simulated activity running through these channels was diverse, spanning real-time micro-payments, interactive gaming environments, and high-volume chat applications, all running concurrently without placing a heavy computational burden directly on the base layer.
According to the development team, these programmable tunnels are specifically engineered to manage high-frequency activity that would otherwise overwhelm traditional distributed ledger networks. By shifting the bulk of transactional interactions offchain while maintaining cryptographic finality upon settlement, the architecture allows for instantaneous execution speeds required by modern software applications—particularly interactions involving AI agents.
Adeniyi Abiodun, co-founder and chief product officer at Mysten Labs, the original contributor to the development of the Sui network, emphasized that the infrastructure is being intentionally designed to anticipate future technological paradigms rather than simply reacting to current market demands.
"Sui is built for the moment when millions of AI agents are transacting every day," Abiodun stated during the event. Highlighting the stark contrast between human and machine transaction speeds, he added, "No market in the world needs 6 million transactions per second, let alone 40 million: people just don’t move that fast. Agents do."
As the technology sector increasingly integrates autonomous software agents capable of negotiating, trading, and executing economic tasks on behalf of users, blockchain developers are racing to solve the throughput bottleneck. Traditional financial rails and standard layer-one blockchains alike struggle to accommodate the micro-transactions and lightning-fast execution loops demanded by autonomous agents. Sui’s latest demonstration suggests that offchain programmable tunnels could provide a viable blueprint for handling machine-to-machine economies at scale.
To ensure the credibility and verifiability of the stress test, independent blockchain security firm CertiK acted as an official auditor during the live demonstration. CertiK representatives monitored the live environment and are currently reviewing the extensive test data generated during the event. An independent audit report detailing the methodology, validation processes, and exact performance metrics is expected to be released in the coming days, providing cryptographic and analytical verification of the claimed 40.6 million TPS milestone.
