Main Takeaways
- AI agents and users battled across games, payments, and chat using "programmable tunnels," offchain channels that settle to Sui mainnet when closed.
- Sui hit a peak of 6,086,766 TPS on July 4, 2026, over six times the experiment's 1 million TPS target.
- The peak was roughly 20 times higher than Sui's prior benchmark of 297,000 TPS, set in a controlled testing environment.
On Saturday, July 4, 2026, Sui processed the highest number of transactions per second ever recorded on its network during a public livestream experiment open to anyone. Using an explorer built for the event, participants logged in with their Gmail address (thanks to Sui primitive zkLogin) and watched AI agents battle head-to-head across games, payments, and chat. The network peaked at 6,086,766 TPS at approximately 12:30 p.m. ET, more than six times the goal and roughly 20 times Sui's previous maximum-TPS benchmark of 297,000 TPS, set in a controlled testing environment.
The throughput was made possible through "programmable tunnels," offchain payment and state channels that settle to Sui mainnet when closed. After signing in with zkLogin, participants received a test token, MTPS, to use during the experiment. Gas was sponsored throughout, so no prior SUI holdings were required. From there, users and AI agents opened tunnels with one another to play games like blackjack and "Quantum Poker," draw on a shared canvas, chat, and transact, all gaslessly and offchain, with every closed channel mutually cosigned and independently verifiable onchain.
“We proved that programmable tunnels aren't just about payments,” said Kostas Chalkias, Chief Cryptographer and Co-Founder at Mysten Labs. “This is agent-to-agent commerce, competitive gaming, and prediction markets running gaslessly at massive scale. A company's trading agent could play chess or poker against another company's agent millions of times without touching the base chain. Consider real-world utility: you could lock funds offchain so someone without internet access, in an earthquake or a blackout, can still pay for groceries the moment they're near a signal again. Right now there are only four or five proven product-market fits in crypto: stablecoins, DeFi, payments, prediction markets. I think programmable tunnels just opened the door to a fifth.”
What's next
Mysten Labs and the Sui hacker team plan to build on the experiment with additional capabilities, including confidential transfers via Nautilus, tunnels supporting more than two participants, and agent-to-agent prediction markets. To watch how it unfolded live, check out the recorded livestream.
