CertiK has independently verified Sui’s latest programmable-tunnel stress test, recalculating a peak throughput of 40,682,328 transactions per second during the October 7 demonstration at Sui Basecamp in Singapore. The figure measures offchain activity inside Sui Tunnels rather than transactions executed directly by Sui mainnet, making the settlement architecture as important as the headline throughput number.
The result updates the 40,614,180 TPS initially reported in Sui’s official announcement. In its October 14 verification, CertiK also calculated sustained tunnel throughput of 40,339,143.65 TPS over the strongest 60-second period. The audited dataset contained more than 15.24 billion committed tunnel transactions across 7,680 tunnels.
40 Million TPS Happened Offchain
Sui Tunnels allow participants to establish programmable channels on Sui, perform large numbers of interactions away from the blockchain and later commit an agreed final state back to mainnet. That means an application can process payments, game actions, messages or other state changes without requiring validators to execute every intermediate interaction individually.
Opening and closing a tunnel touch Sui mainnet, while the high-frequency activity between those events occurs offchain. CertiK explicitly states that its 40.68 million TPS measurement is not a benchmark of Sui’s onchain transaction capacity.
That distinction sharpens the interpretation of the original 40.6 million TPS demonstration. Sui’s initial account said more than 10,000 tunnels were opened on mainnet within seconds during the broader event. CertiK subsequently verified a defined campaign dataset covering 7,680 tunnels, rather than simply adopting the event’s headline figures.
The architecture also differs materially from Sui’s conventional Layer 1 performance testing. Earlier distributed-validator benchmarks reached as high as 297,000 TPS under controlled workloads, while Sui now emphasizes commands per second for some onchain performance measurements because a Programmable Transaction Block can contain multiple operations. Neither metric is directly comparable with the 40.68 million offchain tunnel TPS result.
AI Agents Drive the Benchmark Narrative
The Basecamp test used payments, games and chat interactions to model the high-frequency workloads Sui expects from autonomous software. The network previously reached 6,086,766 tunnel TPS during a July experiment involving AI agents, meaning the October test increased the measured tunnel peak by more than sixfold.
That focus extends beyond benchmarking. Sui and Alibaba Cloud are developing pay-per-call infrastructure for AI agents, while other networks are similarly experimenting with agent marketplaces and machine-driven payments. The common assumption is that autonomous software could generate financial interactions far more frequently than human users.
Still, capacity should remain separate from adoption. A stress test demonstrating billions of cryptographically verifiable interactions does not establish that production applications currently generate comparable demand. The benchmark measures what the tunnel architecture handled under a deliberately high-load campaign, not ordinary Sui traffic.
Sui already has production settlement use cases, including gasless stablecoin transfers through Daya, but those deployments provide a different kind of evidence than synthetic or event-driven throughput tests.
CertiK’s verification therefore strengthens the technical credibility of the Basecamp result while narrowing what it actually demonstrates. Sui Tunnels sustained roughly 40 million offchain interactions per second while anchoring their lifecycle to mainnet; Sui mainnet itself did not process 40 million blockchain transactions per second. The remaining question is whether applications eventually generate enough machine-scale activity to make that capacity operationally relevant.