Sui's 40.6 million TPS ran in offchain tunnels that hit mainnet only to open and close

Every tunnel touches the chain twice, once to open and once to close ^[3], so more than 10,000 tunnels ^[8] add up to at least 20,000 mainnet transactions for the whole event ^[16]. That count stays the same however much traffic runs inside. The peak second carried 40,614,180 interactions ^[1], or at most about 2,031 offchain interactions for every onchain transaction the entire test needed ^[21]. Per tunnel, the peak averages no more than about 4,061 transactions per second ^[17].

The record measures channels, then. Activity between opening and closing stays inside the tunnel and is not submitted to the blockchain one interaction at a time, according to Sui Foundation ^[3]. Sui built it that way on purpose: the high-frequency traffic sits in the tunnels, and the chain handles opening and final settlement ^[3]. The July run reached about 6.1 million TPS on the same type of channel ^[7]. The new peak is about 6.7 times that ^[18] and roughly double the event's 20 million target ^[19]. The foundation did not say how long the peak was held.

Adeniyi Abiodun, the Mysten Labs co-founder and chief product officer who led the test ^[12], made the demand argument himself. "No market in the world needs 6 million transactions per second, let alone 40 million: people just don't move that fast. Agents do," he said ^[9]. On his own numbers, Sui had more channel capacity than any human market needed back in July, and the added 34.5 million TPS ^[20] stacks more supply on top. What the company has to show now is agents arriving with money. The one cash figure in the record is the more than $111 billion of stablecoin transfers on Sui in January 2026 ^[15]. Crypto.news notes that figure measures value, while the October announcement counts interactions ^[15].

If CertiK's report confirms the count and the method, the 40.6 million stands as a channel benchmark and says no more about mainnet load than it does today. If the report qualifies the peak or the way interactions were tallied, the headline figure shrinks, and the 6.7-fold gain over July ^[18] shrinks with it. If agent applications start opening tunnels outside a demo, the useful figure becomes opens and closes, a mainnet count anyone can check ^[4].

I'd treat the 40.6 million as an unaudited stress test of agent-payment plumbing. The counter-thesis has force: if agents will transact inside tunnels anyway, channel throughput is the capacity that matters, and the chain only has to settle. Sui's dollar token, USDsui, has been issued by Stripe subsidiary Bridge since March 4 ^[14]. What would prove me wrong is agent apps opening production tunnels that settle USDsui at a volume visible in those opens and closes.