Developers said that denoting Sui in Mist units will enable more flexibility in SUI transactions by supporting micropayments at very low gas fees.
Developers of the Sui Network introduced Mist units for the project’s native SUI tokens in a move geared towards more efficient micropayments.
Mist is not a separate token, but functions similar to how 100 cents become $1. Each SUI will be broken up into 1 billion MIST, developers said, allowing for low gas fees while conducting transfers worth a few dollars.
Gas fees refers to a fee paid by users to perform any function on a blockchain. These can range from a few pennies to several hundred dollars based on demand or the underlying network.
Utilizing MIST will also mitigate the insufficient gas problems caused by coin dust, a phenomena where coins with very low value that are stored in a users’ wallet add up to tens of dollars over time and become unusable due to high gas fees.
The SUI coin balance in Move or Sui protocol was previously interpreted as SUI directly. For example, a SUI coin with a balance of 100 used to be interpreted as 100 SUI. With the MIST update, the value will be interpreted as 100 MIST or 10^-7 SUI, as per developers.
The new SUI and MIST values will soon be displayed on the Sui Wallet and Sui blockchain explorer.