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Sui’s gas mechanism is designed to be transparent, predictable, and sustainable. It separates computation costs from storage costs and implements a storage rebate system for long-term sustainability.

Gas Model Overview

Sui uses a two-dimensional gas model:

Computation Gas

Pay for CPU and network resources used during execution

Storage Gas

Pay for on-chain storage of data

Gas Cost Formula

Total cost:

Computation Gas

Charged for:
  • Move bytecode execution
  • Native function calls
  • Object reads and writes
  • Event emissions
  • Transaction processing overhead

Gas Units

Typical operations:

Storage Gas

Storage Pricing

Storage cost is calculated as:
The storage price per byte is set by the protocol and adjusts based on network conditions.

Storage Rebate

When you delete or modify an object:
The storage rebate is not a full refund. A small percentage (non-refundable fee) is kept by the system to fund long-term storage.

Gas Smearing

Gas costs are “smeared” to prevent MEV opportunities:
This rounds gas costs to prevent micro-optimizations that could create unfair advantages.

Reference Gas Price (RGP)

Validators vote on the reference gas price each epoch:
Transactions must have gas_price >= RGP:

Gas Budget

Every transaction specifies a maximum gas budget:

Budget Enforcement

  • Transaction aborts if gas budget is exceeded
  • Gas used up to abort point is still charged
  • Prevents runaway computation

Gas Optimizations

Coin-Specific Optimizations

Coins have fixed 40-byte layout enabling direct balance access without full deserialization.

Storage Read Charges

Reading objects incurs a small gas cost based on size.

Economic Incentives

For Users

Recover storage rebates by cleaning up:

For Validators

Validators earn:
  • Gas fees from transactions
  • Storage fees from object creation
  • Staking rewards

Gas Pricing

Gas pricing details

Storage Fund

Storage economics

SUI Token

Learn about SUI