Studio Mirai's Validator Node is Now Live on Sui Mainnet

On March 31, 2024, Studio Mirai joined Sui's validator set on mainnet. In this post, we'll discuss what this means for us, and what we will accomplish as a validator.

The TL;DR

• Studio Mirai is now a Sui validator. Delegate your SUI to us if you like what we're doing for the Sui ecosystem!
• Believe it or not, several of our team members (including our CTO) have day jobs, and are only able to spend a few hours a day working on Sui-related projects. With the supplemental income from our Sui validator node, our team will be able to transition to building on Sui full-time in the coming months.
• We will be committing 25% of our validator profits to the "SM Culture Fund", which supports positive culture-building assets on Sui. The FUD token will be the first asset to be acquired by the SM Culture Fund.
• Our validator node is provisioned on a high-end bare metal server (AMD EPYC 7443P CPU, 256 GB RAM, 2x 3.84TB NVME SSDs in RAID1, 1 Gbps network).

What is a Validator Node?

Before we dive into why you should delegate your hard-earned SUI to Studio Mirai, let's first go over what a validator node even does.

On Sui, there are two types of nodes – RPC (Remote Procedure Call) nodes and validator nodes. RPC nodes are nodes that replicate the blockchain state, and help forward transactions to validator nodes – they don't write any new blocks to the blockchain. When you make a transaction from a Sui wallet, your request is forwarded to an RPC node, and that RPC then forwards it to a validator node.

On the other hand, a validator node is a node that does write new blocks to the blockchain. To do this, a validator node communicates with the other 100+ validator nodes running on Sui to decide what transactions to include in the next block. This process is also known as consensus and happens very quickly on Sui. In exchange for providing computational resources, validator nodes are compensated with SUI, and the amount of SUI a validator receives scales up and down with the amount of SUI delegation they have.

Our Philosophy as a Sui Validator

Validator nodes are not cheap to run, but they're also not prohibitively expensive. At this point in time, most validator nodes on Sui are earning upwards of $12,000/month. In terms of hard costs, a bare metal server that fulfills the recommended specifications costs ~$1,000/month.

Since Sui validators are also expected to run an equivalent testnet node as well, the monthly server costs amount to ~$2,000 (before considering any long-term discounts). Thus, at this point in time with the current price of SUI, validators have a healthy profit margin to work with.

So, what should validators do with that profit margin?

In our opinion, validators should re-invest as much as possible back into the Sui ecosystem. The rewards that validators receive are paid by the Sui network, and the Sui network is owned by SUI stakers. This is precisely why stakers should choose wisely when selecting which validator node to delegate to. For the Sui network as a whole, the road to sustainability is much clearer if the community delegates to validators that provide more value than they extract!

What does this mean practically?

It's simple. Let's use Studio Mirai as an example. At our current delegation, we'll be earning ~$10,000/month after infrastructure costs. We can do one of two things with that $10,000.

1. Pocket the money and spend it on things that do not benefit Sui (extracting value from Sui).
2. Re-invest the money back into Sui (providing value to Sui).

Don't worry. We're going with Option #2!

This means, over the long run, our goal is to provide more than 1 SUI of value for every SUI token we receive as a validator.

To accomplish this, we're doing the following:

Building Coda

Coda is the flagship product we're working on. It's a protocol and app that's being built for mainstream consumers. Since we're explicitly targeting users who are outside of Web3, this also provides us with the opportunity to help bring more external fiat capital into the Sui ecosystem. All purchases on Coda will also perform an automatic SUI buyback on the Cetus DEX, which over time will help establish a base demand for the SUI token – we hope this will encourage other consumer app builders to adopt a similar buyback model.

Content, Content, and more Content!

Not only is Sui a very young blockchain, it also has a radically different architecture – object-centric versus account-centric. This makes it difficult for both users, developers, and investors when it comes to onboarding to Sui in a meaningful way beyond just buying the token to speculate on.

To help reduce the current knowledge gap that exists, we will be investing HEAVILY in content over the coming months with the following projects:

• Hiring a dedicated writer to work with our CTO to consistently publish blog posts about Sui.
• Starting a bi-weekly newsletter focused on why Sui is currently the best blockchain for building scalable consumer apps.
• Continuing the "Block by Block" X space with Bryan Jun of Hyperspace.
• Producing videos with Anima Labs, Bucket Protocol, Typus Finance, Bushi, Shinami, Sudo Finance, Web3 Builders Alliance, Lucky Kat Studio, Gifted, Mysten Labs, Sui Foundation, and more at Basecamp 2024 in Paris.

NFT Consulting for Web2 and Web3 Brands

Over the past few months, we've worked with a number of prominent projects on Sui to develop their NFT strategies. Our first collaboration was with Typus Finance, where we helped develop the art concept for Tails by Typus, as well as the 3D rendering system to generate the PFPs. Since then, we've worked with a number of protocols and brands in both Web2 and Web3, and we look forward to sharing more once those projects have been launched!

Developer Relations and Advocacy

Over the long term, Sui can only thrive if it has a strong and knowledgable developer community. This means onboarding, educating, and retaining developers is extremely important!

To help in this area, we are committed to open sourcing codebases that have been fully-developed by Studio Mirai. The first codebase that we will be open sourcing in May 2024 is Prime Machin, which showcases a fully-featured PFP collection, a parallelized onchain image uploading system, creative uses of Sui's "transfer to object" feature, and more. In addition to open sourcing the code itself, we will also be releasing in-depth video walkthroughs of the codebase to further explain and break down our implementation decisions.

SM Culture Fund

We will be investing 25% of our validator profits into the "SM Culture Fund". This fund will target culturally-relevant assets on Sui. A basket of qualifying assets will be selected once per quarter. To kick off Q2 2024, the SM Culture Fund will be focused on acquiring FUD and providing liquidity to the KOTO/SUI pair on Turbos Finance.

Over time, we hope to see this fund transition to investing in assets that also hold cultural relevant outside of the immediate Sui community (e.g. cultural RWAs that just happen to be tokenized on Sui).

Conclusion

We are beyond excited to join the Sui network as a validator. Our team has been nonstop building on and contributing to Sui since testnet, and we look forward to working with our fellow Sui builders and community members for many more years. We would also like to thank the Sui Foundation for its delegation support, and the Studio Mirai community members for believing in our team and our work.