Sui Network just posted a number that would make Visa’s infrastructure engineers do a double take. During a live experiment on July 4, the blockchain hit a peak of 6,086,766 transactions per second, driven entirely by autonomous AI agents trading and transacting with each other.
The test, dubbed “Sui Tunnels,” was originally designed to crack the 1 million TPS barrier. It overshot that goal by more than six times. For context, the network’s previous controlled benchmark sat at 297,000 TPS, meaning this experiment produced roughly 20x the throughput of its own prior record.
How programmable tunnels actually work
Sui Tunnels use what the team calls “programmable tunnels,” which are essentially off-chain payment and state channels. Transactions happen off the main road at blazing speed, then get batched together and settled on the actual mainnet in bulk.
In English: millions of individual agent-to-agent interactions were processed off-chain, with only the final settlement hitting Sui’s Layer 1. The raw throughput number reflects the total activity across these tunnels, not transactions individually confirmed on the public blockchain in real time.
