We are excited to announce our partnership and investment in Anapaya, a leading company within the SCION network. Together, we’re exploring how the SCION next-generation network technology can be used to provide secure communication for web3 infrastructures, in particular Sui. We also leverage the Sui blockchain to implement functions within the SCION network, illustrating how web3 technology has matured to support diverse infrastructure use-cases.

Anapaya is the major manufacturer of SCION infrastructure, a next-generation wide-area network technology that was built for high assurance from the ground up. Specifically, SCION mitigates denial of service attacks, provides strong authentication options for all network traffic, and is by design immune to routing attacks, offering a security level not available with conventional IP networks. Notably, SCION has been deployed in Switzerland in the banking and healthcare sectors for exactly this reason. 

Web3 infrastructures are network native services and the use of SCION for their communications significantly increases their security. We are currently experimenting with enabling the Sui protocol through SCION to strengthen the communications between validators, full nodes, and clients of the blockchain in order to make Sui immune to IP network-level attacks. Mysten Labs is committed to ensuring Sui remains the most trustworthy web3 infrastructure available to businesses and builders alike.

At the same time, some elements of SCION can be enhanced by using Sui’s fast transaction processing capabilities. Earlier this year, Mysten Labs announced that Professor Adrian Perrig, designer of the SCION network, had joined Mysten Labs as an advisor. We are now exploring products that will combine the industry-leading tech from both Sui and SCION. For example, in August, we published a design, called Hummingbird [1], to augment the SCION network with guaranteed quality of service features, using a control plane powered by Sui. 

We discussed the opportunities at the intersection of Sui and SCION at SCION Day 2023 on October 18.

You can also watch Markus Legner, Senior Software Engineer, speak about the opportunities and synergies of SCION and blockchain technology at SCION Day here.

[1] Hummingbird: A Flexible and Lightweight Inter-Domain Bandwidth-Reservation System. Giacomo Giuliari, Markus Legner, Adrian Perrig, Jean-Pierre Smith, Karl Wüst. 19 August 2023

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2308.09959