Sui Network Hit by Third Transaction Halt in 48 Hours

Sui Network recorded its third transaction processing disruption in approximately 48 hours on the mainnet on May 29, when an issue during the epoch transition caused the network to temporarily reject user transactions. According to updates from Sui, the incident occurred following a series of patches related to a gas-charging logic bug in the v1.72 release, raising concerns about the stability of this Layer-1 as DeFi and stablecoin activities on the network continue to expand.

By the end of May 29 PDT, Sui stated that the mainnet was back online and transactions were being processed normally. However, the Sui Status page still noted that validator participation had not fully stabilized following the “Mainnet settlement” incident.

Incident Timeline

• May 28, 07:15 PDT: Sui Status recorded the “Mainnet settlement” incident and stated that the mainnet was experiencing a disruption while the Sui Core team investigated the cause. 
• May 28, 13:32 PDT: Sui stated that more than 2/3 of the stake had upgraded to the patch, helping the mainnet resume operations after the incident related to the gas-charging logic in the v1.72 release. The first disruption lasted nearly 6 hours.
• May 29, 08:43 PDT: Sui continued to record a new halt. According to a subsequent update, more than 2/3 of the stake had upgraded to the next fix, and the network resumed. GNcrypto noted that block production during this period was paused for about 3 hours and 30 minutes.
• May 29, 13:57 PDT: The third disruption appeared during the epoch transition. Sui Status stated that validators were still waiting to complete the epoch change and were only processing system transactions, while user transactions were not yet accepted.
• May 29, 19:32 PDT: Sui stated that the network had advanced to epoch 1143 and was back online. However, validator participation was still marked as degraded on Sui Status.

Technical Cause

Sui stated that the incidents on May 28 and May 29 were related to the interaction between the v1.72 release, the Address Balances feature, and the new gas calculation logic. Following the halt on May 29, the project said the previous temporary patch had a low-probability issue that could cause the network to continue halting transaction processing before validators deployed a long-term solution.

Sui mainnet is back online and transactions are flowing normally.

The end of epoch halt was triggered during the rollout of yesterday’s long-term fix. As validators restarted to deploy the new binary, the randomness initialization that runs at the start of each epoch was unable…

— Sui (@SuiNetwork) May 30, 2026

The third disruption occurred during the epoch transition while validators were rolling out the long-term fix. According to Sui, a bug during the randomness initialization at the beginning of the epoch, combined with the way the error state was retained across validator restarts, prevented the network from completing the transition to the next epoch.

Sui has not yet published a full postmortem, so there is currently no basis to conclude whether this series of disruptions is a security flaw or a long-term design issue of the network.

Market and User Impact

The series of halts meant that user transactions on the Sui mainnet could be delayed or unconfirmed, affecting token transfers, swaps, deposits, and asset withdrawals from DeFi applications. The clearest impact appeared when validators only processed system transactions while the network waited to complete the epoch change.

SUI price chart (4h). Source: TradingView

At the time of recording, SUI was trading around $0.090-$0.92 while the mainnet incidents were being widely discussed. DeFiLlama data showed that Sui had approximately $527.91 million in TVL and $459.25 million in stablecoin market cap, reflecting the scale of the ecosystem that could be affected when the mainnet experiences consecutive disruptions.

This incident occurred just over a week after Sui announced gasless stablecoin transfers on May 20, a protocol-level change that allows users to transfer certain supported stablecoins without needing to hold SUI to pay for gas fees.

What to Watch Next

After three disruptions within 48 hours, the issue with Sui is not just a technical bug but also the reliability of the network as a settlement layer for DeFi and stablecoin payments. The consecutive series of halts will draw more attention from the market and developers to how Sui tests releases, coordinates validators, and handles errors while the mainnet is operating.

In the immediate term, the point to watch is when the “Mainnet settlement” incident is marked as resolved on Sui Status and validator participation returns to a fully operational state. Subsequent updates from Sui or Mysten Labs, if any, will also serve as a basis to assess whether the network will change its rollout process after the incident.

Once the network stabilizes, TVL, DEX volume, and stablecoin transfer activity will show whether the incident has a lasting impact on liquidity and usage on Sui.