Sui has published a direct technical comparison with Ethereum centered on settlement speed, transaction costs and blockchain architecture. The Sui Foundation positions sub-second deterministic finality as one of the clearest differences between the two networks, contrasting its Layer 1 design with Ethereum’s slower base-layer settlement and rollup-centric scaling strategy.
According to the official Sui comparison, Sui cites approximately 390 milliseconds of deterministic finality, while Ethereum produces blocks roughly every 12 seconds and reaches full consensus finality in about 15 minutes. Those figures describe different stages of transaction settlement and should not be treated as equivalent confirmation metrics.
Sui’s technical documentation places typical end-to-end transaction finality between 400 and 700 milliseconds, depending partly on network geography. Ethereum’s approximately 12-second block interval can provide an initial confirmation well before its roughly 15-minute finality threshold, meaning applications do not necessarily wait for full finality before treating every transaction as usable.
Sui and Ethereum Take Different Scaling Paths
The comparison extends beyond latency because Sui and Ethereum organize transaction execution and scaling around materially different architectures. Ethereum increasingly pushes execution toward Layer 2 rollups, while its base layer provides settlement, data availability and consensus for an ecosystem distributed across multiple execution environments.
Sui instead uses an object-centric data model and its Mysticeti consensus protocol. Transactions touching independent objects can execute in parallel rather than competing for the same sequential execution path, allowing the base layer to process unrelated activity concurrently while preserving a common state environment.
That architecture has also shaped Sui’s recent performance work. A 40.68 million TPS benchmark independently recalculated by CertiK involved Sui Tunnels rather than ordinary Layer 1 transactions, illustrating why headline throughput figures must distinguish mainnet consensus activity from execution occurring through off-chain channels.
Fees provide a less dramatic contrast than finality. Sui’s comparison says its average transaction costs less than $0.02, while citing Ethereum mainnet costs below $0.03 for a basic transfer and around $0.21 for a swap under the May 2026 conditions used in the analysis. Transaction fees are dynamic snapshots rather than permanent architectural constants, particularly on Ethereum where gas prices vary with blockspace demand.
Performance Claims Meet Real-World Usage
Lower latency and predictable costs can matter for payments, trading and other applications involving frequent state changes, but technical capacity does not by itself demonstrate that users require or consistently exploit those performance characteristics. Adoption has to be measured through actual transaction activity, capital deployment and recurring application usage.
There are already production examples where Sui’s design is being applied to payment infrastructure. Daya has integrated the network for gasless stablecoin settlement across business payment workflows, where supported stablecoins can move without customers separately holding SUI solely to cover network gas.
Institutional infrastructure has expanded as well. Copper’s existing Sui integration now supports custody and staking for institutional clients, although availability through institutional custody infrastructure should not be interpreted as evidence of corresponding capital inflows or transaction demand.
Ethereum retains a different advantage in ecosystem depth, liquidity, tooling and its longer production history. Sui’s comparison therefore describes a trade-off between an integrated high-performance Layer 1 and Ethereum’s mature but increasingly multi-layer execution environment, rather than establishing that latency alone makes either architecture universally superior.
The most measurable distinction remains settlement design. Sui can demonstrate sub-second deterministic finality today, while Ethereum’s full finality still operates on a roughly 15-minute timescale and single-slot finality remains a research objective. Whether that difference becomes decisive for developers depends less on benchmark comparisons than on which applications genuinely benefit from irreversible settlement measured in milliseconds.