POPA ReconSui's 40.6M TPS claim: what it measures and whether it holds
The figure is real as an announced result, but it is not the speed of Sui's base chain. It was measured inside "tunnels", programmable off-chain channels that settle to Sui mainnet.
What was claimed
The Chainwire press release of 7 October 2026 says Sui set a record of 40 million TPS. It calls this more than 6 times the 6,086,766 TPS record set on July 4, and says both were "measured inside Sui tunnels". The test ran live on the Summit Stage at Sui Basecamp in Singapore. The release says more than 10,000 tunnels opened on Sui mainnet within seconds of each other. Posts quote the exact figure as 40,614,180 TPS against a 20M target, for example Nifemi__001 and LeaderAlphaNews. Cointelegraph described it as "offchain tunnels" in a stress test simulating high-frequency AI agent activity.
How it works
The release says a tunnel needs only two onchain transactions, one to open and one to close. Everything in between happens off-chain, with near-zero cost. BSCNews describes the transactions as gasless, uploaded to Sui afterwards with mutually signed cryptographic proof. So the number counts off-chain interactions between agents, not 40 million transactions per second written to the Sui ledger. datnguyen_tis and gandreou007 both stress this point. Posts that say "40M TPS on mainnet" or "on-chain record", such as LLuciano_BTC, overstate it.
Verification
Several posts say CertiK watched or verified the run, including BSCNews and Nifemi__001. I found no published CertiK report or independent on-chain data. The result rests on Sui's own announcement and secondhand posts. The earlier 6,086,766 TPS July 4 record was also a tunnel result, as RickLFG points out.
Verdict
"Sui hit 40.6M TPS in a live test using programmable tunnels" is accurate as a description of the announced result. "Sui's blockchain processes 40M TPS" is not. The data does not establish how many of the interactions were ever settled on-chain, or how the count was audited.