t’order & Sui: Enabling Sub-Second Crypto Payments in Korea
t’order integrates Sui Blockchain for sub-second payments, cutting fees and boosting trust in Korea’s retail sector.
Introduction
In the evolving landscape of blockchain-enabled commerce, a new collaboration is poised to redefine payment infrastructure in South Korea. t’order—South Korea’s leading table-ordering platform, servicing over 300,000 in-restaurant tablet interfaces—is entering a strategic partnership with Sui Blockchain. Their goal: to deliver ultra-fast, low-cost retail payments with high transparency and security. This article explores the significance, technical underpinnings, and implications of this integration for both the Sui ecosystem and real-world adoption of blockchain payments.
t’order at a glance: scale and challenge
t’order has grown substantially, processing roughly USD 350 million monthly—equivalent to over USD 4.3 billion on an annualized basis. The company provides ordering and payment solutions via tablets in restaurants, replacing staff-mediated payment flow with self-service systems.
Despite its success, t’order faces familiar pain points in retail: traditional card networks and payment gateway (PG) fees, latency, and dispute resolution overhead. In conventional setups, a customer’s transaction may take 2–3 seconds (or more) to clear. Especially in high-throughput contexts, even these delays become friction.
As Austin Kwon, CEO of t’order, remarks: the existing card/PG paradigm is structurally limited by cost and rigidity. Their alliance with Sui is about tackling that at its root via on-chain architecture.
What Sui brings: speed, throughput, and programmability
To understand why t’order opted for Sui, it helps to unpack Sui’s architectural advantages:
Parallelism and “fast path” execution
Unlike many blockchains that serialize execution, Sui’s object-centric model allows non-conflicting transactions to bypass global consensus and settle in sub-second time frames. This “fast path” helps reduce latency for straightforward payments and transfers.
Measured throughput & latency
In stress testing, a Sui deployment with 100 globally distributed validators recorded throughput in the range of 10,871 TPS to 297,000 TPS depending on workload. It's time to finality for many transactions to be finalized in approximately 480 milliseconds.
Moreover, Sui now emphasizes Commands Per Second (CPS)—a more precise metric capturing bundled operations—with Programmable Transaction Blocks (PTBs) able to include up to 1,024 atomic operations in a single transaction.
These performance characteristics make Sui well-suited for applications requiring massive throughput and minimal latency—precisely what a retail payments scenario demands.
Horizontal scalability and architecture
Sui’s architecture is designed to scale out: adding more validators increases capacity without severely compromising latency. The combination of Narwhal/Bullshark consensus and the Mysticeti protocol aims to minimize latency in real-world conditions.
How the integration works: stablecoins, devices, fees
Native KRW stablecoin as a payment medium
A core component of the t’order–Sui partnership is the introduction of a KRW-pegged stablecoin, allowing payments to flow natively on-chain. Rather than using SUI or generic stablecoins, this localized token ensures minimal exchange friction for consumers and merchants.
By eliminating intermediaries and traditional routing, t’order expects to reduce per-transaction costs dramatically. Where card/PG fees today range from 0.8% to 2.5%, the new system intends to charge only KRW 13 per transaction (a few US cents). Over time, t’order projects annual savings across its merchant network in the range of KRW 58 billion to KRW 150 billion.
Further, facial-recognition payments (FacePay) may be integrated as a front-end convenience layer atop blockchain settlement.
Instant settlement at the point of order
In the envisioned flow, payment confirmation via Sui occurs in under 0.5 seconds, aligning with order placement. This contrasts with the 2–3 second average for typical card systems in-store. Because the blockchain ledger validates and finalizes transactions nearly instantly, point-of-sale systems can treat the payment as confirmed upon order submission.
Transparency, auditability, and dispute reduction
One of blockchain’s strongest value propositions is immutability and verifiable audit trails. In the t’order model, every transaction is recorded on-chain in real time. Kwon highlights that this reduces disputes and increases consumer confidence: “small business owners can secure transaction credibility.”
Using on-chain records as a single source of truth diminishes the need for intermediated reconciliation or manual dispute handling.
Strategic implications for Sui and the blockchain payments space
This integration carries important implications:
Real-world adoption of blockchain in retail
t’order brings a concrete real-world use case for crypto payments—not speculative trading but daily commerce. Success could serve as a template for other markets (cafés, retail chains, fast food).
Strengthening Sui’s utility narrative
By anchoring transactions in a stablecoin pegged to the local currency, Sui transitions from a “crypto chain” to a payments rails layer in the local economy. That’s a powerful use case to bring developers, regulators, and merchants onboard.
Ecosystem growth and composability
Once in operation, the system can layer loyalty, micropayments, automated refunds, and smart offers—all native on-chain. t’order’s existing POS reach could catalyze onboarding of new dApps and consumer services into the Sui ecosystem.
Competition in Layer-1 payments
This move positions Sui more firmly in competition with blockchains that emphasize payments (e.g., Solana, Aptos). Its architectural advantages—low latency, high throughput, object-centric execution—could become differentiators in this niche.
Conclusion
The integration of t’order with Sui represents a watershed for blockchain payments in everyday commerce. By marrying high-scale POS reach with fast, low-cost, and audit-ready blockchain settlement, the partnership could validate a blueprint for how Web3 interacts with traditional retail infrastructure.
From Sui’s perspective, this is not just another partnership—it is a live, visible validation of its performance, architecture, and real-world relevance. If the rollout succeeds, it may catalyze further adoption across one of the hardest domains for blockchain to crack: the physical retail economy.
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