Settlement & Bridging

Sui is a sovereign L1, so "settlement" means Sui's own finality model, and "bridging" means moving assets and messages in and out of it. Both are worth understanding precisely because the mental model differs from EVM chains.

Settlement and finality

• Fast-path transactions — final once a quorum certificate exists. This is effectively instant and is the common case for payments and transfers.
• Consensus transactions — final once their effects are committed into a signed checkpoint.
• Checkpoints — the settlement record. Everything referenced by a finalized checkpoint is immutable; validators cannot retroactively change it (the checkpoint signatures commit to the state).

For builders, finality means: after a sui_executeTransactionBlock returns a status of success, the effects are real; there is no "wait for more confirmations" for the fast path in the same way EVM users wait for block depth.

Bridging assets in and out

Because Sui is not EVM-compatible, bridging is a first-class integration problem. The options, in decreasing order of native-ness:

• Native Sui bridges — Sui's own bridge (and the Sui Foundation–led efforts) provide a canonical path to/from Ethereum and other L1s, with the same lock-and-mint semantics as other canonical bridges.
• Third-party bridges — Wormhole, and other general message-passing protocols, support Sui and let dapps receive messages or assets from other chains.
• Native assets — SUI itself is native; wrapped representations of foreign assets (e.g. WETH via a bridge) are just Move Coin objects managed by a trusted bridge package.

The bridge flow (lock & mint)

1. On the source chain, the user locks the asset into the bridge contract (L1) or burns the Sui Coin (Sui as source).
2. The bridge's off-chain relayer observes the event, attests it, and submits a message to the destination.
3. On Sui, the destination package mints a representation Coin (or burns on withdrawal) using a TreasuryCap-style capability held by the bridge.

Trust assumptions to check

Every bridge has its own security model. Before building on one, verify: who attests messages (validator set? committee? multi-sig?), what the slashing/staking is, and whether the Sui-side mint is gated by a capability the same entities control.

Edge cases

• Fast-path finality is per-transaction; a bridge that relays based on an unconfirmed checkpoint is trusting the validator set twice over — prefer checkpoint-confirmed messages for anything with value.
• Wrapped assets on Sui are plain Move coins — they are not the native SUI and cannot pay gas. Users must hold a small SUI balance alongside any wrapped token they want to move.
• Epoch boundaries can briefly pause some bridge relays; treat "no message yet" within an epoch window as normal, and rely on the bridge's own timers.