The Sui Basis on Sunday printed a autopsy on the three mainnet outages that took its Layer 1 down on Might 28 and 29, pinning the primary two halts on a gas-charging bug launched by the v1.72 “handle balances” improve and the third on a separate randomness-state fault uncovered when validators restarted to put in an interim repair the workforce admits it shipped realizing it carried a low-probability halt danger.
SUI, the community’s native token, slid 6.6% within the 24 hours after the autopsy and is down 18.5% over seven days at $0.82, trimming Sui’s market capitalization to $3.31 billion, per CoinGecko. The chain holds $479.66 million in whole worth locked, the thirteenth-largest amongst networks tracked by DefiLlama, behind Avalanche and forward of Monad. Sui-based DEXs cleared $77.33 million in 24-hour quantity on Sunday — led by DeepBook V3 at $26.69 million.
Final week, Sui restarted after back-to-back halts tied to the identical 1.72 launch. Additionally it is one of many extra granular Layer 1 incident reviews printed this 12 months, naming particular code paths and conceding the validator community briefly ran on a repair Mysten Labs engineers knew would possibly fail.
The Fuel-Smashing Bug
The primary two halts traced to a nook of execution Sui calls “gasoline smashing” — the method by which the runtime combines all of a transaction’s enter cash right into a single coin and debits it for gasoline, earlier than the transaction itself runs. The v1.72 launch launched “handle balances,” a function that lets customers withdraw from and deposit to a single handle concurrently by emitting stability deltas {that a} system settlement transaction reconciles every block.
The sting case, per the Basis: when a transaction tried to overdraft an handle stability to cowl gasoline, it was appropriately marked cancelled with an `InsufficientFundsForWithdraw` error — however gasoline smashing then ran once more on the identical reservation object, spending funds the transaction had simply been instructed it couldn’t entry. The settlement layer acquired a destructive delta utilized to a zero stability and the validators crashed. As soon as a crash bug is within the enter pipeline, each trustworthy validator hits the identical dangerous enter and the chain stops.
The Recognized-Danger Patch
Sui’s interim repair, deployed Thursday to carry the chain again, was to cease operating gasoline smashing on transactions cancelled with `InsufficientFundsForWithdraw`. The Basis now says the workforce “accepted the danger accompanying this proposal as a way to carry the halted community again as shortly as doable whereas a sturdy repair was developed.” On Friday morning, the community hit a variant of the identical edge case and halted a second time. A second patch adopted.
The third halt arrived hours later on the subsequent scheduled epoch change. Validators restarting to undertake Friday’s patch failed to fulfill the participation threshold for the brand new epoch’s distributed key technology — the protocol step that initializes randomness for an epoch. DKG disabled itself by design, however a latent bug meant that failure verdict was by no means written to disk. As additional restarts adopted, every validator got here again up unaware DKG had failed, the queue of randomness-dependent transactions grew, and end-of-epoch logic stalled ready on a DKG that may by no means run. The everlasting repair continued DKG standing throughout restarts and added a force-close mechanism to converge validators on a caught epoch.
What’s Off the Hook
No consumer funds had been in danger throughout the three halts and no dedicated transactions had been rolled again, per the Basis. The incidents had no relation to visitors load and no relation to an exterior exploit, and transactions returned to sub-second finality after the third restart. The Basis additionally mentioned an inside AI agent with entry to manufacturing validator logs “materially accelerated analysis.”
The Reliability Bar
For context: Solana’s final formally confirmed mainnet halt was February 6, 2024, when a bug within the validator program cache compelled a roughly five-hour coordinated restart. Sui, by comparability, was hit by a short halt in November 2024 on a congestion-control assert and a six-hour consensus stall in January 2026 earlier than this newest run.
The Basis named 4 remediation priorities: extending Sui’s “protected mode” graceful-degradation patterns throughout the remainder of the reconfiguration path; rebuilding gas-charging logic to a code-quality bar akin to the Transfer VM or the Mysticeti consensus protocol; broadening the production-debugging AI agent program; and including a defense-in-depth layer that may let a validator skip a crash-inducing enter reasonably than halt the chain.
Mysten Labs CEO Evan Cheng and Chief Product Officer Adeniyi Abiodun had not posted public commentary on the autopsy as of publication. The Defiant has requested remark from the Sui Basis.
