One SUI Coin Will Soon Equal a Billion MIST

Today we're excited to introduce MIST, the smallest unit of a SUI Coin. This new SUI division allows greater flexibility for SUI transactions. This introduction means that a Coin<SUI> with value of 1 equals 1 MIST, and 1 MIST equals 10^-9 of a SUI. In other words, 1 SUI equals 1 billion MIST. A fun fact is that flip(10 mist) = mist 10 ~= Mysten!

Blockchain coins commonly offer different denominations, such as Ethereum’s WEI and Solana’s lamport. The introduction of MIST will offer better support for micropayments, including very low gas fees. Further, utilizing MIST will mitigate the insufficient gas problems caused by coin dusts (meaning coins with very low balance like 10^-8 SUI).

The SUI coin balance in Move or Sui protocol used to be interpreted as SUI directly. For example, a SUI coin with a balance of 100 used to be interpreted as 100 SUI. With the MIST update, the value will be interpreted as 100 MIST or 10^-7 SUI.

You will see the new SUI and MIST value display logic in Sui Wallet and Sui Explorer very soon.

Key Changes

Our team worked on several areas to implement this change:

• On SDKs, we added functions to convert coin values between SUI and MIST
• On Sui Wallet and Sui Explorer, we will soon update displayed values to illustrate that they are divided by 10^9 and in the format of decimal numbers instead of big integers. The wallet transfer flow will change accordingly.
• On faucet, the allocated gas number will increase to 50,000,000, or 0.05 SUI.
• There will be no change on Move or Sui protocol.

We also recommend that dApp developers adapt the new value rendering, as we will do in Sui Wallet and Explorer. To be more specific:

• When rendering SUI coin balance, update the unit to MIST; Or divide the value by 10*9 and render SUI in a decimal number format.
• For actions around SUI coin, users will be able to input decimal numbers. Sui will translate that value to MISTs before using the value to communicate with Sui protocol like RPC and Move functions.

In addition to adding support for denominations of SUI token, the team is also working to support denominations of other custom fungible tokens in a scalable way – stay tuned!