Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands, July 6th, 2026, FinanceWire

Autonomous AI agents battling across games, payments, and chat pushed Sui’s programmable tunnels to a peak of 6,086,766 TPS

Sui, where money moves as freely as messages, processed the highest number of transactions per second ever performed on its network on Saturday, July 4, 2026. The milestone was hit live during a public experiment open to anyone and witnessed by thousands during a livestream.

Made possible through “programmable tunnels,” which are offchain payment and state channels that settle to Sui mainnet when closed, the experiment invited users to log into an explorer built specifically for the event, using nothing more than an email address. Once connected, participants watched AI agents battle head-to-head across games, payments, and chat, all contributing transaction volume in real time toward a single goal: pushing Sui mainnet past 1 million transactions per second (TPS).

The network exceeded that target several times over. At approximately 12:30 PM ET, Sui mainnet reached a peak of 6,086,766 TPS: more than six times the experiment’s 1 million TPS goal, and roughly 20 times higher than Sui’s previous maximum-TPS benchmark of 297,000 TPS, set in a controlled testing environment.

Diving Into the Details

The demo was led by Chief Cryptographer Kostas Chalkias, co-founder of Mysten Labs and a contributor to Sui, alongside Daniel Lam, a lead engineer on Mysten’s dedicated Sui hacker team. Participants signed in with zkLogin, the Sui primitive that makes it possible for users to log in with an existing account, such as Google, instead of a traditional crypto wallet, and received a test token, MTPS, to use in the experiment. As gas was sponsored throughout, users needed no prior SUI holdings to take part.

From there, users and AI agents opened programmable, Lightning Network-style offchain channels, or “tunnels,” with one another to play games such as blackjack and “Quantum Poker,” draw together on a shared canvas, chat, and transact, all gaslessly and offchain, with activity settling back to Sui mainnet when each channel closed. Every closed channel was mutually cosigned and independently verifiable onchain, allowing the experiment to combine high throughput with cryptographic proof that no transaction was tampered with.

“We proved that programmable tunnels aren’t just about payments,” said Kostas Chalkias, Chief Cryptographer and Co-Founder at Mysten Labs. “This is agent-to-agent commerce, competitive gaming, and prediction markets running gaslessly at massive scale. A company’s trading agent could play chess or poker against another company’s agent millions of times without touching the base chain. Consider real-world utility: you could lock funds offchain so someone without internet access, in an earthquake or a blackout, can still pay for groceries the moment they’re near a signal again. Right now there are only four or five proven product-market fits in crypto: stablecoins, DeFi, payments, prediction markets. I think programmable tunnels just opened the door to a fifth.”

What’s Next

Mysten Labs and the Sui hacker team plan to build on the experiment with additional capabilities, including confidential transfers via Nautilus, tunnels supporting more than two participants, and agent-to-agent prediction markets. 

About Sui

Sui, where money moves as freely as messages, is a next-generation Layer 1 blockchain built for scalable finance and global payments. Founded by the core team behind Meta’s stablecoin initiative and powered by an object-centric model, Sui makes assets, permissions, and user data programmable and ownable. Sui’s primitives offer builders everything they need to create high-performance payments and financial applications, including instant agentic payments. Users can learn more at sui.io.

Contact

Sui Foundation
media@sui.io

Harmony Labs, a leading global blockchain investment and research institution, has officially announced a full strategic investment in Harmony Link, a Web3 short-video aggregation platform. Leveraging Harmony’s underlying sharding technology and resources from 412 ecosystem projects, the two parties will jointly build an inclusive Web3 gateway serving a billion-scale short-video user base. They aim to create a long-term dual-token economic model—featuring HK as the core value carrier and HAK as the medium of circulation within the ecosystem—with plans for HK to debut on the Binance Alpha board, thereby establishing a closed-loop system for sustainable value growth.

Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Singapore’s financial hub, Harmony Labs focuses on specialized investments and in-depth industry research regarding blockchain infrastructure and ecosystem applications. Its core underlying asset, Harmony (ONE), utilizes random state sharding technology to achieve low-gas, high-throughput cross-chain interactions. The firm has incubated 412 ecosystem projects across DeFi, NFT, and GameFi sectors, amassed a network of 300,000 global developers, maintained long-term deep partnerships with top-tier investors like Binance Labs, and established robust systems for global compliance and capital operations.

The industry currently faces clear pain points: Web3 users account for less than 6% of the global population, and customer acquisition costs in the blockchain sector reach as high as $42 per person. Furthermore, traditional text-based educational content presents high barriers to entry, third-party operational tools are prone to bans, and the space is rife with pyramid schemes. Meanwhile, the attention of the billion-strong Web2 short-video user base is consumed without compensation, and there is a lack of practical tools for distributing the value generated by traffic. As a key inclusive project for Harmony Labs through 2026, Harmony Link centers on “TikTok-style” short-video behavior mining. It integrates five key tools—on-chain price chart visualization, decentralized live streaming, AI digital avatar promotion, project advertising, and community management—to comprehensively address eight major bottlenecks hindering industry development.

This strategic investment will fully unleash Harmony Labs’ multi-dimensional resources to empower the platform: leveraging Harmony’s sharding technology to reduce development costs by 87% and utilizing the 300,000-developer network to rapidly iterate on smart contract audits and anti-fraud firewall modules. Additionally, the partnership will facilitate the onboarding of the existing 412 ecosystem projects and capitalize on the market’s established perception of Harmony as an “ultra-low gas public chain” to significantly lower user education costs. The funds will be primarily allocated to four key areas: product iteration, global community expansion, the establishment of an HK price-support reserve pool, and preparations for the HK listing on Binance Alpha.

The Head of Investment at Harmony Labs stated: “The primary bottleneck for the large-scale adoption of Web3 is the high barrier to entry for users; short-form video serves as the optimal vehicle to connect the general public with blockchain technology. Harmony Link’s innovative dual-token model offers immense long-term value: HAK dynamically adjusts user activation ratios in phases to smooth out market selling pressure, while core cash flows from AI leasing and advertising continuously inject USDT into the HK price-support pool. With essential, paid use cases across the platform and a future listing on Binance Alpha, a virtuous cycle of traffic, revenue, and token value will emerge, truly enabling the distribution of ‘attention value’ to the general public.”

The Harmony Link Project Lead added: “Leveraging Harmony Labs’ backing in capital, technology, and ecosystem, the platform will adjust the HAK/USDT ratio for account activation across five stages. Upon reaching the 50% HAK / 50% USDT phase, ‘Computing Power NFTs’ will be launched to generate the core token, HK. With a total supply of 100 million HK, 60% is generated via Computing Power NFTs, and 20% is allocated to a dedicated price-support fund. All B2B paid services across the platform will eventually settle in HK, and the project will leverage Binance Alpha’s global traffic to amplify long-term value.”

Both parties simultaneously announced a comprehensive roadmap: in the short term, they will launch short-video mining and basic live-streaming functions while steadily transitioning to a hybrid activation model; in the medium term, they will enable HK generation via Computing Power NFTs and continuously bolster HK liquidity reserves; in the long term, they will drive HK’s listing on Binance Alpha, implement a full-chain HK payment ecosystem, incubate high-quality Web3 projects, and establish a DAO-based decentralized governance system.

Moving forward, Harmony Labs will continue to provide global compliance research, capital connections, and brand/channel resources. This support aims to help Harmony Link break down the barriers between Web2 and Web3, create a benchmark Web3 traffic platform accessible to everyone, and drive the mass adoption and inclusive growth of blockchain technology.

About Harmony Labs
Founded in Singapore in 2018, Harmony Labs is a global blockchain investment and research institution specializing in blockchain-focused investments and in-depth industry research. Building a complete ecosystem upon the underlying public blockchain Harmony (ONE), the firm focuses on the practical application of cutting-edge technologies such as sharding, cross-chain interoperability, and Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs. With a global footprint spanning North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, Harmony Labs is dedicated to bridging traditional capital with the Web3 industry and fostering inclusive blockchain development.

About Harmony Link
Harmony Link is a Web3 short-video aggregation platform incubated by Harmony Labs. It features an innovative “Proof-of-Action” mining mechanism and a dual-token economy, integrating data visualization, decentralized live streaming, AI digital avatars, project advertising, and community management. With HK serving as its long-term core value token, the platform plans to launch on the Binance Alpha sector, aiming to reshape the Web3 traffic monetization ecosystem.