Bloodsucking, Migration and Capital Bureau: The Rise of Move Public Chain

Written by: Julian, Deep Tide TechFlow & Aptos World

"In this Aptos Builder community of nearly 200 people, hardly anyone spoke. Since they were all familiar faces from the Solana ecosystem, everyone tacitly kept silent until more newcomers gradually joined, and only then did the group start to become active." Tom, the head of a project ranked among the top five in Solana's TVL, mentioned.

The Aptos builder community Tom referred to was initiated in June this year by Ian Macalinao, co-founder of Saber Labs, a stable asset trading protocol on Solana, and an early Solana developer. He and another Solana developer, Dylan, announced in July this year the launch of a $100 million Protagonist fund, focusing on investments in the Aptos ecosystem.

Ian Macalinao invited over a hundred mature projects and developers from the Solana ecosystem into the Aptos Builder community through one-on-one private chats, and it has now grown to over 800 members. However, this Aptos community, primarily composed of Solana project teams and developers, did not attract much attention initially.

It wasn't until July this year that Aptos announced it had completed $350 million in funding; another Move twin-chain, Sui, also announced a $300 million Series B funding round. At this point, people began to realize that Aptos and Sui not only share a similar investor matrix primarily composed of Solana's investors, but even the project teams, developers, and some employees are highly overlapping.

Compared to the "institutional" migration supporting the Rust language on Solana, another leading public chain that also supports Rust, Polkadot, is quietly undergoing deployment migrations. Like Solana, many existing Polkadot project teams are also simultaneously developing and deploying multiple projects in the Aptos and Sui ecosystems.

Regarding the popular Move public chains Sui and Aptos, over 20 venture capital institutions, project teams, and developers from China and the U.S. will take you behind the scenes.

What does leaving Solana mean?

"The execution layer is much more difficult than consensus; consensus is 'relatively simple.' We do not see Avalanche or BNB Chain as Solana's main competitors, but rather Aptos & Mysten."

In July, during an online meeting hosted by Dragonfly partner Haseeb, Solana co-founder Aeyakovenko stated this.

The fact seems to be true, Aptos's first step in challenging Solana is to poach people and projects.

In addition to Ian Macalinao's large-scale migration of Solana projects to Aptos with a $100 million ecological fund mentioned above, an Aptos developer also initiated a poll asking, "What was your background/experience before developing on Aptos?" 50% of the voters had previously been developers in the Solana ecosystem.

After contacting numerous Solana project teams, we found that choosing to migrate or deploy multi-chain on the Move public chain has almost become a consensus among Solana ecosystem projects.

From the perspective of project teams, regardless of whether the Move public chain becomes a killer for Rust and EVM & Solidity public chains, choosing to migrate or deploy multi-chain on the Move public chain is a bet on "doing more for oneself."

As one of the few hot spots in a bear market, if the Move public chain takes off, the project teams that migrated and deployed there can continue their narratives and fundraising in both primary and secondary markets. Even if the Move public chain ecosystem does not achieve expected results or progresses slowly, the project teams would only lose a few months of learning and development costs, which is very worthwhile in a bear market. However, once successful, they will reap a new wave of wealth opportunities.

Ian Macalinao also stated, "Leaving" is a strong word; most strong developers will not lose anything by spending time in the Move ecosystem because the market is very difficult for projects without PMF (Product-Market Fit).

For example, the Web3 smart messaging platform Dialect, based on Solana, announced in March this year that it had completed a $4.1 million funding round led by Multicoin Capital and Jump.

Although Dialect's investors overlap significantly with Aptos, it cannot be ruled out that there is capital behind the push for this deployment. Dialect's official explanation for choosing Aptos is:

Solana's unique architecture allows for extremely fast speeds and ultra-low costs, but the future is multi-chain. If Dialect sets up any isolated islands, it cannot provide the best service for its customers. For Solana developers, Dialect will continue to provide tool support; for Aptos developers, Dialect is eager to collaborate and see what incredible things Aptos developers have built.

On the other hand, market controversies regarding the Aptos ecosystem have begun to emerge, with investors and core Solana investors highly overlapping, and project teams also coming from the Solana ecosystem, leading to questions: Are the VCs who made a fortune on Solana trying to replicate the next Solana?

Perhaps due to the pressure of ecosystem project loss, according to information from the Solana Foundation's GitHub page, the team has included the Move language in its development strategy.

It is worth noting that after preliminary statistics by Deep Tide and AptosWorld, almost all tracks of DeFi in the Aptos ecosystem have been monopolized by DeFi projects from the Solana ecosystem. For example, in every DeFi sub-track such as DEX, NFT, lending, derivatives, and cross-chain bridges, there are at least two to three more mature projects running on Solana developing Move versions. This means that among the hundreds of ecological projects that have migrated and deployed from Solana, many have already started rolling out before officially launching.

However, many industry practitioners believe that such "bubble phenomena" are inevitable in the early stages of most large public chains.

A large influx of projects, both good and bad, or chasing trends, into the public chain ecosystem, followed by market scrutiny to filter out excellent projects, is almost a necessary path for the prosperous development of every public chain ecosystem. Moreover, the movement of developers in open-source communities of major public chains participating in project development is a normal phenomenon.

Nothing Research Partner Allen Ding stated that the arrival of developers from other ecosystems can quickly enrich the Move ecosystem, and it is not a problem for the initial phase to focus on Fork and migration-type projects. After all, the foundational applications of public chains have already established paradigms, such as DEX, lending, and stablecoins in DeFi, which are very mature tracks. For new public chains, quickly filling the ecosystem is more significant than pursuing innovative paradigms at the application layer. In the current DeFi 2.0 era, building upper-layer applications based on underlying applications, i.e., the composability of applications, is what everyone values more.

What experiences do Polkadot project teams have in migration?

In addition to Solana ecosystem projects eyeing the Move public chain's lucrative cake, another force is also watching closely—Polkadot.

Among the few publicly announced cooperation projects by Aptos, one is Pontem Network, which received its eighth grant from the Polkadot Web3 Foundation at the end of 2020. After announcing cooperation with Aptos in April this year, it also stated that the test incentive tokens will be issued on Aptos in the future.

In addition to Pontem, we have learned that many Polkadot project teams are also simultaneously developing multiple projects in the Aptos and Sui ecosystems.

At the beginning of September, a Polkadot ecosystem project held a Move developer conference in Hangzhou and invited Sam Blackshear, the father of the Move language and CTO & co-founder of Sui, to give a video speech.

At the conference, multiple Polkadot projects introduced several products and project plans that they will deploy in the Aptos and Sui ecosystems, with some teams having already deployed over five products in the Move ecosystem.

Like Solana, as one of the biggest value capture winners in the last bull market narrative of new public chains, many experiences from Polkadot ecosystem project teams are worth learning from, especially regarding how project teams can maximize benefits when facing the early stages of public chains with incomplete infrastructure.

Regarding how to maximize the capture and realization of public chain value, Max, the founder of Dharma Protocol and a proponent of the DeFi concept, posed an interesting question in 2019: "Project teams are burning money daily on development and operations through financing. If Ethereum continues to be so slow, so expensive, and has such a high barrier for newcomers, are we really going to wait three to five years to build ecosystem projects on it?"

Looking back a few years later, this question seems to have many answers. Although Ethereum 2.0 has not been fully realized, public chains like Solana, Polygon, and BSC have already thrived through a complete cycle, and various Layer 2 solutions also have substantial ecological markets.

The almost standard answer given by Polkadot ecosystem project teams is: In the early stages of public chains, actively obtaining official grants to increase key endorsements and financing; when the public chain infrastructure is still incomplete, mapping onto other mature public chains first, and launching tokens in favorable market conditions to realize the capital-backed value of the public chain ecosystem; as the public chain infrastructure begins to improve, extending the narrative cycle through early networks/early coins/crowdfunding auctions.

For example, official grants from the Polkadot Web3 Foundation are crucial for most Polkadot ecosystem project teams, especially in terms of brand endorsement, project financing, and ecological cooperation. Nowadays, many projects choosing to migrate or deploy multi-chain to the Move public chain are also actively applying for grants from Aptos and Sui, with the overwhelming number of applications even prompting Aptos officials to pause the application portal.

A project team providing DID solutions and Elixir language SDK stated that they had previously won awards in several hackathons sponsored by various public chains, and their project recently made it onto Aptos's second batch of grant lists (note: the second batch of grants from Aptos is still under review and has not been officially announced), and they are making final confirmations.

Therefore, even though there are many projects on Aptos now, if they cannot obtain official grants or are not invested in by major VCs, they will only become "local dogs" in the Move ecosystem.

In response to the current trend of projects "straddling two boats," some public chain foundations have begun to take countermeasures.

An anonymous DeFi project team stated that they also received a grant from the Web3 Foundation this year, but the foundation did not immediately announce the approved list and provide the sponsorship funds all at once. Instead, they are evaluating the project team's submitted development progress and releasing sponsorship funds in batches to prevent project teams from obtaining "grant endorsements" and then running off to develop on other chains. Currently, they are developing on Rust during the day and learning Move to test development on Aptos at night.

Regardless, project teams will vote with code, and moving towards Move has become an unstoppable trend.

"The Move ecosystem may even give some projects that haven't thrived on Polkadot and other public chains a chance to rise again."

Allen Ding expressed that the deployment of Move ecosystems by projects from other public chains is also a reflection of the current bear market environment, where market funds tend to cluster together. Aptos and Sui are currently the best choices. Developers will definitely prioritize places with users and capital. Not only Solana and Polkadot ecosystem projects but developers from other public chains will also pay attention to the development of the Move ecosystem and even join in.

Chinese Presence in the Move Ecosystem

Looking back at the entire history of Layer 1 development, Chinese capital has often played an important role.

Whether it is the early Ethereum, BTS, EOS, or later Polkadot, Cosmos, NEAR, Filecoin, Flow, Dfinity (Internet Computer), Solana, and many other star public chains, there has been deep involvement from Chinese background crypto VCs. These Chinese VCs are also willing to invest in and build ecosystems, such as DFG supporting the Polkadot ecosystem, Distributed Capital supporting Filecoin and Flow ecosystems, and SNZ supporting the ICP ecosystem. Even though the financial returns from investing in public chain ecosystems themselves may not be very high, they have already made substantial profits from Layer 1 itself.

However, in the investments in Aptos and Sui, Chinese VCs are relatively absent, leading to a lack of enthusiasm for investing in the Move ecosystem, while Chinese developers are more proactive.

From the perspective of investor lineups, Aptos and Sui are primarily backed by leading U.S. crypto VCs such as a16z, FTX Ventures, and Jump Crypto. Additionally, the high valuations have deterred many investors; for example, Aptos's earliest valuation reached $1 billion, with the latest equity valuation at $2.8 billion and a token FDV of $4.2 billion.

Although many domestic individual and institutional investors are participating in the investments of the two major Move public chains through SPVs, most still belong to the participation-type investments. Currently, the only Chinese background VCs publicly stating their involvement in building the MOVE ecosystem are Bixin Ventures and A&T.

Bixin Ventures has invested in both Aptos and Sui, and its partner Wangxi told Deep Tide TechFlow that Bixin started researching the Move language very early and began supporting the development of the Move language through Starcoin in 2019, which is a key factor in Bixin's connection with Aptos and Sui.

"Due to our familiarity with the Move ecosystem and the Libra system (later renamed Diem), we believe that the teams behind Aptos and Sui will definitely become challengers to the current blockchain systems."

Wangxi stated that the innovations of Aptos and Sui are not limited to technology. As projects that the entire market has high expectations for, backed by top capital, their innovations are comprehensive. This is also an important reason for Bixin's participation, and Bixin is willing to support outstanding projects migrating to Aptos and Sui.

Jolestar, a core developer of Starcoin, stated that they began experimenting with Move as early as June 2019 when Libra was released, including trying a layered state channel solution on Move, executing contracts in state channels, and validating the feasibility of Move as a layered smart contract. They then began designing the public chain Starcoin based on Move in early 2020, and the Starcoin mainnet officially launched in June 2021. As the first Move public chain, no one had experience building DeFi applications based on Move. The team collaborated with ecological projects to explore Move's applications in areas such as Swap, StableCoin, NFT Market, and CrossChain Bridge. Meanwhile, Move's development tools and documentation were incomplete. After a year of effort, the documentation, development testing tools, and developer experience have significantly improved.

As one of the earliest Move developers in China, Jolestar believes that Move has the most potential to build an ecosystem like Solidity, even surpassing it:

The dependency and calling methods between Move contracts allow for maximum module reuse, suitable for building the infrastructure of smart contracts layer by layer. The "free state" model of Move allows digital assets to flow between different contracts, providing type-based composability. Based on these two characteristics, Move can play a greater role in layered scaling solutions, such as achieving cross-layer contract reuse and combinations, and arbitrary state cross-layer migration. Move has also evolved from a smart contract language designed for Libra into an open-source community project, becoming multi-chain designed, making it possible for more public chains and infrastructure projects to adopt it, thus constructing a larger ecosystem.

It can be said that Starcoin has helped cultivate and educate some of the earliest Move developers in China, and the Asia-Pacific region remains one of the most active regions for Move development. After SUI's developer Mysten Labs completed a new round of $300 million financing, they stated that this funding will be invested in the Sui ecosystem and continue to expand into the Asia-Pacific region.

Will the Move public chain become a killer for other public chains?

Since the first day of the Move public chain's funding announcements, controversies have never ceased.

Some believe this is a clear "capital game": Having played once, they are playing a second time without any cover, and with such a high initial valuation, there is little speculative opportunity.

However, some industry practitioners express excitement about this, especially since a new language like Move can bring some changes to the industry.

"Aptos and Sui almost gather all the elements of top projects in the industry: royal bloodlines, star teams, public chain tracks, a more blockchain-friendly Move language, technical highlights, a cluster of developers, and T0-level investment lineups."

Allen Ding believes that the rise of Aptos and Sui represents the arrival of a new public chain era. The last round of rising Layer 1 mainly captured the overflow value of Ethereum, with no significant highlights in its own vertical scenarios and technology. Aptos and Sui are telling a narrative that departs from Ethereum. This could be the narrative direction for future new public chains, which have clear scenarios while moving away from the EVM & Solidity architectural design.

Regarding new public chains, we are still often asked several questions: "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 fragmentation and division of value. If it is merely because Move might be superior to Solidity or other development languages, should we tirelessly start building the ecosystem from scratch?

Another question is that from the moment Aptos and Sui appeared with golden keys, developers have liked to compare the Move language with Rust, Aptos with Solana, and even believe that Aptos/Sui will be the killers of Solana, just as Solana claimed it was the killer of Ethereum.

The answers to these questions can borrow from Binance founder CZ's response regarding the relationship between BSC and Ethereum: the user groups of those using Ethereum and BSC are quite different. After BSC rose, Ethereum's transaction volume did not decrease but also did not grow, as it encountered technical bottlenecks with a maximum network capacity of 15 to 20 transactions per second. In more unseen places like Southeast Asia, India, and Africa, BSC provides a cheaper network, allowing more people to use and enter the blockchain.

Bixin Ventures' Wangxi stated that one of the most questioned aspects of Web3 is, why are there no killer applications? The performance bottlenecks of blockchains should account for the majority of factors, and Aptos and SUI are expected to make groundbreaking innovations in this regard. In the future, Aptos could handle 160,000 transactions per second, while SUI is around 120,000, with both having sub-second finality.

Aptos and SUI have broken through the basic ideas of previous blockchain scaling, proposing new implementation paths such as modularization and parallel processing. Although the two have slightly different technical routes, they both focus on building secure, scalable, and upgradeable blockchain systems for Web3, enabling developers to easily create applications that meet consumer needs and build infrastructure networks that can serve billions of people, providing a user experience that combines decentralization, speed, and affordability.

Therefore, from Aptos World's perspective, this is not just about repeating the wheel to create a new Layer 1. Just as we believe Solana is not the next Ethereum, nor a killer of Ethereum, it has created an entirely new market. The same goes for today's public chain killers—Aptos and Sui—they will not kill any public chain but will serve markets that other public chains do not cover.

Of course, for most people, they might not care whether Aptos and Sui can truly succeed in achieving large-scale applications for WEB3. In their eyes, the Move public chain is just a new narrative that will bring new investment and speculative opportunities that cannot be missed.

"Whether Aptos and Sui are a bubble or whether they can stay hot is not important; they just need to stay hot for a while and not cool down too quickly," said an investor who is incubating a Move project.