Sui Unveils Tidehunter Database to Eliminate Blockchain Storage Bottlenecks

• Sui has unveiled Tidehunter, a new storage engine designed to enable more stable performance at scale.
• The new database allows Sui to scale without limits and cuts costs for apps built on the network as it aims to become the blockchain for autonomous AI agents.

Mysten Labs, the company behind the Sui network, has launched Tidehunter, a new storage engine that it says will eliminate blockchain storage bottlenecks.

In a blog announcing Tidehunter, Mysten explained that storage is a bigger challenge for advanced blockchains with millions of users than computation or execution. Unfortunately, most databases can’t keep up with blockchains that can scale massively.

Sui has been relying on RocksDB, an industry embedded key-value database that allows low latency and high throughput. Sui says it settled on RocksDB as it had other priorities. However, in time, the team found that a general-purpose database was ill-suited to blockchain workloads.

One of the main challenges with RocksDB was write amplification, or the data that a system writes to the disk compared to what an app initially sends. Sui says RocksDB had a 10x-12x write amplification, meaning for every 10MB of data an app on Sui sent, RocksDB wrote over 100MB. This resulted in SSD wear and high cloud costs, input/outlput saturation and high latency during periods of heavy computation.

“For blockchain workloads, which are typically write-heavy or close to a 50/50 read-write split, this tradeoff becomes increasingly costly as throughput grows,” Sui says.

It gradually became clear that the team needed a different approach and its own custom storage engine, which led to the development of Tidehunter.

Tidehunter Eliminates Storage Bottlenecks on Sui

Tidehunter has been designed to integrate with most major blockchains. It’s built to work with networks that use uniformly distirbuted keys with large values and that rely on sequential log-like structures, including checkpoints and consensus blocks.

Additionally, blockchain networks are usually write intensive. This is because they are always updating balances and smart contracts while recording transactions and updating indexes. Where read functionality is required, it must be extremely fast. This makes any database with high write amplification almost useless.

With Tidehunter, “all writes flow through an ultra-fast, lock-free write-ahead log (WAL), capable of sustaining on the order of one million operations per second.”

It then uses the WAL as permanent storage, not as transient buffer. Values are only written once, eliminating a massive amount of redundant writes.

Sui added:

Tidehunter will play an important role for Sui as the network targets the AI sector. As we reported, it has set its sights on becoming the blockchain for autonomous AI agents.

SUI trades at $1.13, gaining modestly in the past day for a $4.38 billion market cap.