Sui 40.6M TPS Claim Is Offchain, Mainnet Averages 108 TPS

Sui says it hit 40,614,180 transactions per second on October 7. That Sui 40.6M TPS reading tops its July record of 6,086,766. Suiscan, a public Sui explorer, put mainnet's daily average at 95 TPS that same week. Between those two numbers sits a factor of several hundred thousand. The Sui 40.6M TPS test was built to count something other than validator-ordered transactions.

Suiscan's mainnet home page, with Sui's throughput headline above the explorer's own live TPS counters.

How the Sui 40.6M TPS test worked

Coverage places the run at Sui Basecamp in Singapore. A Crypto Times report says more than 10,000 tunnels were opened on mainnet within seconds. The traffic inside them settles on-chain as tunnels close. Sui's announcement says CertiK analyzed the result independently, and CertiK plans to publish findings in coming days. The result beat a 20 million TPS target.

Sui's July write-up defines tunnels as offchain payment and state channels that settle to Sui mainnet when closed. Parties trade messages inside one, and only the opening and closing touch the chain. A count of those messages can run into the millions per second while validators order a small fraction.

Cointelegraph's post on X, the wording that spread furthest.

What mainnet itself was doing

Suiscan lists a current rate of 82 TPS, a daily average of 95 and a monthly peak of 2,632.

Suiscan's network counters, with current, average and peak TPS.

A pull from a public Sui node lines up with that. Sixty hours of checkpoints between October 5 and 8 give an average near 108 TPS, with single hours between 86 and 159.

Divide 40.6 million by that 108 and the claim is about 376,000 times the real average. Even the month's peak of 2,632 is thousands of times smaller.

Reading the headline

A TPS headline beside a chain's name usually reads as base-layer capacity.

Here it counts channel activity, and the mainnet footprint of such a demonstration is settlement, meaning channels opening and closing. Sui's July record of 6.09 million used the same approach. That July 4 run was roughly 20 times Sui's earlier benchmark of 297,000 TPS, which came from a controlled test. The write-up gives no separate count for what settled on mainnet. Independent writers then put real mainnet peaks near 1,000 TPS, and the explorer's 2,632 monthly peak is in that range.

SUI's price did not react

SUI slid about 4% on October 7 and closed near $1.13 on Binance. Most of the slide came overnight in Asia, hours before Cointelegraph's 19:20 UTC post about the test. After the post the price barely moved, and it was still close to $1.13 on the morning of October 8. Suiscan shows the same price and a $4.67 billion market cap.

Figures come from Suiscan, a public Sui node and CoinGecko prices as of October 8, 2026. Nothing here argues that tunnels are useless or that SUI will move either way.