Three Sui mainnet halts in 48 hours traced to an upgrade bug by developers
The Sui Foundation’s post-mortem published Sunday traces all three outages to interactions between a new address-balance feature shipped in the v1.72 release and the network’s existing gas and consensus logic.
What to know:
- Sui’s mainnet halted three times on May 28 and 29 after a new v1.72 feature exposed an edge case in the blockchain’s gas-charging logic, according to a post-mortem from the Sui Foundation.
- The first two outages stemmed from related bugs in how mixed gas payments were handled when transactions lacked sufficient funds, while the third resulted from a latent bug tied to the network’s on-chain randomness protocol during validator restarts.
- No user funds were lost or transactions reversed, but the SUI token fell about 19 percent over the week, and the incidents marked the network’s third major reliability failure since its 2023 mainnet launch.
According to the foundation, it stemmed from a rare issue in how the network charged gas for transactions paying with a mix of the new address-balance feature and traditional coin objects. The bug caused validators to crash with an underflow error when a transaction was canceled for insufficient funds, but the gas-smashing routine still tried to spend those same funds.
Think of a coin object as a digital banknote. A user’s SUI balance isn’t a single number — it’s a stack of distinct “notes,” each with its own ID, that can be moved or combined. The wallet might hold three coin objects worth 60, 30, and 10 SUI rather than a single 100-SUI balance. To pay for something, the network combines the notes it needs.
Validators are computers (and the operators behind them) that run the network by processing transactions, voting on which ones are valid, and keeping the chain alive.
