Sui Lutris is the first smart-contract platform to sustainably achieve sub-second finality. It achieves this significant decrease by employing consensusless agreement not only for simple payments but for a large variety of transactions. Unlike prior work, Sui Lutris neither compromises expressiveness nor throughput and can run perpetually without restarts. Sui Lutris achieves this by safely integrating consensuless agreement with a high-throughput consensus protocol that is invoked out of the critical finality path but ensures that when a transaction is at risk of inconsistent concurrent accesses, its settlement is delayed until the total ordering is resolved. Building such a hybrid architecture is especially delicate during reconfiguration events, where the system needs to preserve the safety of the consensusless path without compromising the long-term liveness of potentially misconfigured clients. We thus develop a novel reconfiguration protocol, the first to provably show the safe and efficient reconfiguration of a consensusless blockchain. Sui Lutris is currently running in production and underpins the Sui smart-contract platform. Combined with the use of Objects instead of accounts it enables the safe execution of smart contracts that expose objects as a first-class resource. In our experiments Sui Lutris achieves latency lower than 0.5 seconds for throughput up to 5,000 certificates per second (150k ops/s with transaction blocks), compared to the state-of-the-art real-world consensus latencies of 3 seconds. Furthermore, it gracefully handles validators crash-recovery and does not suffer visible performance degradation during reconfiguration.

Recent advancements on DAG-based consensus protocols allow for blockchains with improved metrics and properties, such as throughput and censorship-resistance. Variants of the Bullshark [18] consensus protocol are adopted for practical use by the Sui blockchain, for improved latency. However, the protocol is leader-based, and is strongly affected by crashed leaders that can lead to various performance issues, for example, decreased transaction throughput. In this paper, we propose HammerHead, a DAG-based consensus protocol, that is inspired by Carousel [8] and provides Leader-Utilization. Our proposal differs from Carousel, which is built for a chained consensus protocol; in HammerHead chain quality is inherited by the DAG. HammerHead needs to preserve safety and liveness, despite validators committing leader vertices asynchronously. The key idea is to update leader schedules dynamically, based on the validators' scores during the previous schedule. We implement HammerHead and show a minor improvement in performance for cases without faults. The major improvements in comparison to Bullshark appear in faulty settings. Specifically, we show a drastic, 2x-latency improvement and up to 40% increased throughput when crash faults occur (100 validators, 33 faults).