A&T Talk: How do the dual giants Sui/Aptos create a new narrative for the next cycle?

Author: AnT Capital

Guests:

• 26x14: @26x14eth, Co-founder of 7upDAO

• Jason: @jason_chen998, Co-founder of BuilderDAO

• Zheng Zheng: @linda_guagua, Co-founder of Aptos World

Question 1: When did you first hear about Aptos and Sui, and why were you interested?

@linda_guagua: I remember in May, after hearing a friend talk about the Aptos testnet, I initially wanted to participate in the airdrop. However, after a series of operations, I found myself stuck. I realized that my chances of earning rewards from the testnet by running a node were almost hopeless, so I wrote down my research at that time and posted it online. As a result, I became the first author in the Chinese community to write about Aptos and Sui, and subsequently, several media outlets in the industry published and reprinted those articles.

Currently, our team is creating the Aptos World (@AptosWorld1) and Sui World (Twitter @SuiWorldHQ) ecological communities, which gather content information about the new public chains, news and in-depth reports on ecological projects, project incubation, conduct Move-based hackathons, and are collaborating with several top universities both domestically and internationally to produce Move language teaching courses. We hope to encourage more in-depth research into these two powerful new public chains.

When I was researching Aptos and Sui, it was actually their background story that attracted me first. We now know that the teams behind these two public chains originated from the Facebook project to issue the stablecoin Libra, which later failed, leading to the dissolution of the team and everyone going their separate ways to create Sui and Aptos. They have surpassed their predecessors and inherited the most important legacy of Diem: the Move language.

This phenomenon reminds me of the company "Fairchild Semiconductor," which changed the course of technology in the last century. Eight geniuses left the semiconductor laboratory of Nobel laureate Shockley and, with the support of a big boss, founded Fairchild Semiconductor.

Later, due to failed collaborations, everyone left to start their own ventures, and the subsequent stories are well-known; they founded great companies like Intel, AMD, KPCB, which almost dominated the entire semiconductor industry and opened the era of flourishing Silicon Valley in the last century.

Such a background story fascinates me because I believe history is always strikingly similar. Will Aptos and Sui, emerging from Facebook, recreate the Silicon Valley miracle of the past? Perhaps the future will soon give us the answer.

• Sui World article:

  Sui World Co-founder Linda Zheng Zheng: How will Sui spark a new revolution in public chains?

@jason_chen998: I first learned about Move when I saw their huge financing. Previously, we were mainly focused on EVM Ethereum and Polygon. We didn't pay much attention to new public chains until they announced their massive funding.

Moreover, public chains at any stage have strong narrative potential. The projects and opportunities created around this public chain have investment value. We also see many die-hard fans counting the ecological products developed based on Aptos. After our investigation, we found that many of them were just repackaged and moved over, positioning themselves in the ecosystem.

In summary, we got involved a bit later, but we believe there is significant value in this. After we conducted in-depth research, we focused on the Move language, which is a unique feature of their new public chain. We wrote a research report on this theme, which everyone might find interesting. When we studied Move, I indeed felt that its language is highly advanced, and its team background is strong, rooted in Facebook. This was also a reason that attracted us to conduct research.

• BuidlerDAO article:

  The Strongest Rival to Solidity: The Rise of the MOVE Language and New Public Chains

Question 2: As a new blockchain programming language, in what specific areas does Move excel over Solidity and Rust?

@linda_guagua: In a nutshell, Move is a computer language born for finance. It handles the core token assets of our blockchain in a very fitting manner, making it a truly asset-oriented programming language, which compensates for the shortcomings of Solidity in terms of intuitiveness and security.

In Solidity, the variable "asset" is not treated specially; it is merely considered an ordinary variable, and when assets are transferred, only some addition and subtraction operations are performed on it.

However, a large number of hacker attacks in the past were almost entirely due to the weak design of assets in Solidity. According to a report by SlowMist, blockchain security incidents caused losses of $9.8 billion in 2021, so the security of the language is self-evident; after all, none of us want to lose money.

So how does the Move language achieve innovation and breakthroughs in security?

The Move language redefines digital assets. It treats money in Web3 as a very special and important type of data, not just an ordinary numeric type, thus creating a Resource to define tokens and distinguish them from other data.

Additionally, the biggest difference between Move and other mainstream Web3 languages like Solidity and Rust is that the resource data of tokens is mandated to be stored under accounts.

In our transaction process, it is stipulated that assets cannot be copied or double-spent; they must flow to one place, either to another address or be destroyed. This prevents the accidental loss of digital assets, so we say the Move language primarily enhances the security of digital assets.

@jason_chen998: From my perspective, the greatest advancement of Move lies in its true realization of data assetization. What does data assetization mean? It refers to how Solidity implements the creation, transfer, and destruction of an asset or token. For example, when I send you a red envelope of one dollar on WeChat, the representation in the database is simply that my account balance decreases by 1, and your account balance increases by 1. It’s just a matter of adding and subtracting numbers, mathematically reflecting the transfer of assets.

In contrast, Move truly maps your data assets to tangible assets. The benefit of this is that assets in Move are defined separately; tokens are not just ordinary numeric variables. They are not like your phone number or age, but rather a distinct variable form that must be executed with certain actions. The advantage is that it can rigorously ensure the movement of your assets, like a brick flowing from one place to another, rather than just adding or subtracting 1.

From the perspective of technical originality, it aligns very well with the spirit of blockchain, which fundamentally aims to assetize your data. Solidity operates data assetization through traditional web code or traditional mathematical addition and subtraction methods. However, in Move, it can genuinely represent assets in code form for transfer, treating these defining variables separately, which I find very appealing.

I would also like to add that their advantages still revolve around solving the blockchain trilemma of security, speed, and decentralization. I have also seen some predictions that Aptos will be able to increase its concurrency after going live. Most of the new strategies I currently see are still focused on how to enhance transaction speed more quickly and securely, as well as the modular blockchain that was very hot a month ago.

Question 3: What are the main characteristics and differences between Aptos and Sui?

@linda_guagua: Aptos has a key rotation and recovery technology, making it more user-friendly for users migrating from Web2.

Sui, on the other hand, has modified the Move language to emphasize its object-oriented features and has designed a voting gas mechanism, which makes Sui's gas fees relatively stable.

However, I believe that as two high-performance public chains, the differences between Aptos and Sui are not too significant; rather, they share some similar characteristics, especially in parallel processing and scalability.

First, let's talk about parallel processing. Speaking too much technical jargon might bore people, so let’s use real estate transactions as an example.

Most real estate transactions only require a transfer of ownership from the seller to the buyer, so in a transaction hall with multiple windows, these can be processed in parallel to speed up the process. However, if the buyer needs to handle mortgage procedures after the transfer, then the transfer and mortgage have a sequential relationship, often requiring the transfer to be processed first before the mortgage, meaning these two steps cannot be processed in parallel.

In contrast, based on the characteristics of Move-based public chains, transactions that only require a transfer can be distinguished from those that require both transfer and mortgage. This allows for a large number of transactions that only need a transfer to be processed in parallel, while a smaller number of transactions requiring both transfer and mortgage can be processed sequentially, thereby improving the overall network processing speed.

Next, let’s look at scalability. Taking Sui as an example, the architectural design of Sui can increase the transaction processing speed of nodes by adding machine resources.

Reportedly, in an experiment on March 19, 2022, a single unoptimized Sui node running on an 8-core M1 MacBook Pro could execute and submit 120,000 transactions per second. Its transmission speed is linearly related to the number of cores, so theoretically, Sui can effectively scale network throughput infinitely by adding machine resources, thus achieving timely settlement capabilities.

Using the previous real estate transaction example, Sui's scalability is like adding more windows in the transaction hall; by increasing resources, more processing windows can be added, thereby enhancing transaction processing speed.

Through parallel processing and scalability, Move-based public chains provide strong network capacity support for the migration of Web2 applications to Web3. This could potentially trigger a wave of Web2 projects migrating to Web3 in the future, leading us into a true Web3 revolution.

Question 4: How will Move-based public chains change the current landscape of public chains?

@jason_chen998: First of all, this question is quite broad and macro, and I will try to share some relatively one-sided information. As long as blockchain exists, the story of public chains will continue to be told; this is an industry trend. Public chains are essentially about continuously developing new urban areas, planning them well, and then attracting investment so that everyone can come in to build factories, companies, etc.

As long as a public chain can be established and the ecosystem can be developed, there will be numerous project and investment opportunities within it. For example, the Ethereum ecosystem is now relatively mature, as we have done many projects on it, making it difficult to create new native chain projects.

If you ask whether these two public chains can shake Ethereum's position, I believe they will definitely take a share of the pie.

@linda_guagua: Let’s first look at the previous landscape of public chains. New public chains have generally been narrating around the concept of competing with Ethereum, meaning they want to create a better Ethereum.

The so-called "high-performance" public chains that rose in the last cycle, such as Solana, Arbitrum, Fantom, and Polygon, have repeatedly exposed issues of extreme centralization, network outages, severe congestion, and high gas fees.

These common problems among new public chains reflect a widespread infrastructure crisis. Taking Solana as an example, it pushed the narrative of Layer 1 expansion to its peak at the cost of system availability. However, after multiple outages, it may indicate that sacrificing availability for efficiency is not a viable approach.

As Ethereum's upgrade approaches, most new public chains must face a soul-searching question: If there is a faster, cheaper, safer, and more decentralized Ethereum, do we still need these compromise-based competing chains?

At this point, a completely new narrative for public chains is needed to answer this question. Move-based public chains are likely to change the existing landscape of public chains.

Many people now believe that Solidity & EVM are the endpoints of smart contracts, and the vast majority of new public chains are basically compatible with or porting Solidity & EVM.

At this time, capital may promote a new smart contract programming language, proving its stronger ecological building capabilities to persuade everyone to pay attention and invest, which is more promising than public chains that are compatible with or porting Solidity & EVM.

Because Move-based public chains possess strong scalability and security, they can serve as competing chains after Ethereum's upgrade. This will serve as the underlying infrastructure to support Web3, billions of users, and grand narratives like the metaverse.

Meanwhile, previous new public chains from the last bull market, such as Solana and Avalanche, either sought EVM compatibility to capture the overflow value of Ethereum or aimed to be Ethereum killers or create a better Ethereum.

Thus, Move-based public chains will revolutionarily and innovatively change the existing landscape of public chains.

Question 5: Which specific segments are Aptos and Sui more suitable for, and why?

@linda_guagua: Currently, the ecological projects on Aptos and Sui are basically similar to those on ETH; we can say that whatever ETH is suitable for, they are also suitable for.

However, faster TPS is suitable for higher-frequency trading scenarios, and gaming might be one of them. Moreover, compared to Aptos, Sui is more suitable for GameFi development because Sui has modified Move to make it more object-oriented. Many current Web2 development languages are object-oriented, making it easier for Web2 developers to migrate to the Sui chain.

Sui assets can be defined as the attributes of items, or different items can be combined into new items.

In games, you can have a sword to collect experience points to level up, where points and levels can be defined as attributes. You can also combine different items, such as a sword and a gem, to create a new sword, and all these records can be stored on-chain.

Additionally, according to a revelation from the Sui founder during an AMA, Sui intends to collaborate with Unity to integrate Unity plugins into Sui's SDK.

As we all know, Unity and Unreal are the two most widely used game engines in the gaming field. If Sui can integrate Unity's plugins into its SDK, it will undoubtedly greatly reduce the difficulty for game developers to create on-chain games.

On the other hand, Aptos officially seems to favor the NFT sector more at present, as it has mentioned its support for NFTs in multiple promotions, such as being able to mint 1 million NFTs in one hour.

At the same time, the official SDK also provides a Token client specifically for NFT applications, offering built-in support for NFT minting and querying.

However, all of the above is still too early to tell, as the actual performance needs time and practice to verify; we should look at the results rather than the advertisements and anticipate their actual performance.

Question 6: Some people are concerned that this is just another capital game, fearing it will become the next EOS-level project. What do you think of this viewpoint?

@linda_guagua: Regarding the Move public chain, we are often asked several questions, such as, "Why create a new Layer 1?" There are already too many various Layer 1 public chains on the market. Is this just capital repeating the wheel for profit?

The blockchain ecosystem needs more aggregation, not the fragmentation and division of value. So it is certainly not just because Move may be a better language than Solidity that we need to start building a public chain and ecosystem from scratch.

One question we often ask is that from the moment Aptos and Sui emerged with a golden key, developers tend to compare the Move language with Rust and Aptos with Solana. They believe Aptos/Sui will be the Solana killer, just as everyone once touted Solana as the Ethereum killer.

The answer to these questions can borrow from Binance founder CZ's response regarding the relationship between BSC and Ethereum. He said that the user groups of Ethereum and BSC are quite different.

After BSC emerged, Ethereum's transaction volume did not decrease, although it no longer grew, because it hit a technical bottleneck, with a maximum network capacity of 15 to 20 transactions per second. In Southeast Asia, India, and more unseen places in Africa, BSC provides a cheaper network, allowing more people to use and enter blockchain.

The visions of Aptos and Sui are to use the Move language as the development language, committed to improving blockchain security and scalability, and building an infrastructure network that can serve billions of people, not just repeating the wheel to create a new Layer 1—despite currently having significant overlap with ecosystems like Solana in terms of developer ecosystems.

We also believe that just as Solana is neither the next Ethereum nor an Ethereum killer, it has created an entirely new market.

The same goes for any new public chains today—Aptos and Sui will not kill Solana, but they will serve markets that Solana does not address.

Question 7: How can ordinary users participate in the development of the Move ecosystem?

@jason_chen998: For ordinary people, we can divide them into two categories: those who understand technology and those who do not.

For those who understand technology, I remember that Aptos just announced the results of this round of nodes last week, and ordinary developers can participate. Because a new public chain requires a large ecosystem to support it. This ecosystem includes things that individuals can do, such as setting up nodes and helping to run data.

For those who do not understand technology, they can also contribute to this ecosystem. I have seen many teams doing this, such as building communities, helping to activate communities, translating relevant articles, and helping to construct potential universal tokens to gain possible future rewards. This includes our previous collaboration with Aptos, where we obtained their pre-sale to translate their white paper.

If you are an entrepreneur, we indeed lack sufficient energy, but we still very much want to participate in some projects. As Lina mentioned earlier, the projects we can see in the Aptos ecosystem also exist in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Currently, everyone is still in the process of "moving bricks," planning a new area, and it is still time to fix the water pipes and set up gas lines. If you are a project party, you can also try to do some low-cost "moving bricks" activities.

@linda_guagua: Developers should immerse themselves in learning the Move language, join the developer community, create Move projects, participate in hackathons, and work on Move-based projects, which can lead to legendary hourly wages and a choice for a more adventurous and promising future.

According to feedback from experienced Solidity developers, many engineers proficient in Rust only took one or two weeks to transition to Move.

Move is designed as a cross-platform language, and some basic functions are still applicable. It is not only aimed at Web3 but also covers smart contract development experts and newcomers from major Web2 companies, offering high flexibility.

So as an ordinary user, when participating in the investment and experience of the Move ecosystem, you can refer to past experiences with public chains.