Sui Developer Kit: Building Optimized UX

The Sui Smart Contracts Platform is a high-performance, horizontally-scalable blockchain. Its capacity has no theoretical limits and requires extremely low computation resources per transaction. Sui is designed from the ground up to facilitate instant settlement, delivering the high throughput, low latency, and low cost needed to power applications for billions of users.

From the get-go, however, we recognized that having the engine to drive such an ecosystem is just the bare minimum. We are committed to going further and are creating the tooling to help build this ecosystem. If there’s one thing to remember from web1, it’s that upholding core principles like decentralization and community governance is not enough. Tech has to be easy, safe, and comfortable to use in order to succeed and gain widespread adoption.

We want to make Sui the most accessible smart contracts platform; empowering developers to create great user experiences. We want Sui to be approachable to everyone, including end-users and content creators. Launching the network is only the first step in this journey. As we move forward, our product roadmap includes a suite of building blocks — the Sui Developer Kit — aimed at making building on Sui an easy and painless activity.

Our goal is for Sui to become the world’s premier open and decentralized network for builders. And for that to occur, we are committed to ensuring builders can focus on what they do best: building. Be that a financial application, a stunning series of dynamic and composable NFTs, game assets where ownership transcends product boundaries or new experiences the world has yet to see.

The Sui Developer kit will deliver open-source, flexible, and easy-to-use tools for you to focus on your product. What does that mean for developers? Less time debugging your smart contract, waiting for audits, or building basic tech stack elements. More time figuring out how to deliver the best version of your product to your users.

To materialize these ambitions, we are initiating work on three building blocks of the Sui Developer Kit. We hope that as the network launches and matures, developers across the globe will contribute to the Sui Developer Kit and provide additional elements for building cutting-edge applications on Sui. We’ve chosen the following three examples to kick off this endeavor, hoping that future iterations far surpass these early efforts.

1. SDK for Gaming

Our conversations with partners have convinced us of the strong synergies between gaming applications and blockchain tech. But we’ve also realized that this unity remains constrained by the challenges in melding gaming and blockchain tooling.

The Sui Developer Kit’s first goal is to provide a series of APIs for gaming developers to interact seamlessly with the Sui platform and Move language. The days where minting, mutating, and composing on-chain digital assets involves hours of coding, testing, and luck will soon be long gone. Sui’s Gaming SDK will let developers unleash the power of Sui with a few lines of code. And, unlike some other gaming SDKs, the Sui Developer Kit connects developers directly to a public, general-purpose Layer 1 blockchain, not a sidechain, a gaming-focused Layer 2, or a private chain. Thus giving game developers seamless access to assets, users, and non-gaming applications built directly on Sui.

Read our post here to see an example of a game studio using our precursor APIs to build web3 game prototypes.

2. SDK for Bootstrapping Communities

We believe that open networks should usher in an era of genuine openness — where users own and control their assets and can move them across networks. At the same time, the Sui platform is at the frontier in performance for on-chain digital content storage, mutability, and composability. How can existing communities take advantage of these benefits?

We are introducing our vision of SuiEcho as a simple tool for porting over and building new communities. An on-chain game, for instance, could use SuiEcho to enable holders of a famous NFT character series to feature them as in-game avatars on Sui. This SDK will thus let Sui applications seed their communities by selecting members based on their history on other networks. This step is only the beginning. By taking advantage of Sui’s native ability to evolve on-chain digital content, communities will mature through wholly new and unexpected journeys.

To reflect our excitement about SuiEcho, we’ve written a companion blog post here.

3. SDK for Handshake

We believe that all of Sui’s users should enjoy the sovereignty of non-custodial ownership. But we are also aware of many use cases where direct ownership is not essential.

Our Handshake SDK will enable anyone to implement a tool for reaching (and onboarding!) users through traditional communication channels — email, SMS, or even snail mail — and access Sui digital assets without interacting with Sui on the front end. At its core, this SDK effectively functions as a claimable redemption mechanism — similar to a prepaid card. The following use cases illustrate the power of this tool:

• Sui should allow users to send cross-border payments even to people who do not have a Sui address or wallet. The Handshake SDK responds to this challenge by enabling recipients to receive a transfer and withdraw funds at their nearest cash distributor or deposit into a Sui address if they so choose.
• Sui should enable merchants and brands to distribute coupons to millions of their customers regardless of whether they know about Sui or have a Sui wallet. The Handshake SDK lets merchants implement coupon operations with Sui without revealing the Sui rails to their customers.

The most exciting feature of Handshake SDK is that it will provide easy access to crypto services without requiring up-front account creation or interacting with the underlying complexity.

Next Steps

We are mindful that this is an ambitious product roadmap and humbled by the positive feedback we’ve received so far. That said, this is only the very first inning of the Sui Developer Kit, and we hope the community will ultimately lead this effort. We will soon announce dates for Sui hackathons and developer grants for you to take the front seat and help take the Sui ecosystem to its next level. In the mean time, check out the Sui Developer Portal and let us know your thoughts at suidevcommunity@mystenlabs.com.