Can the rapidly developing Sui become the next Layer 1 disruptor?

Author: Daniel Li, CoinVoice

Layer1 blockchain Sui announced that its mainnet will launch in the second quarter of this year and has initiated a series of educational activities and content called "Wave to Mainnet" aimed at helping the community understand the potential of the Sui protocol before the mainnet goes live. Sui and Layer1 leader Aptos both belong to the Meta ecosystem, having been established around the same time. Compared to Aptos, Sui places greater emphasis on innovation in underlying technology, aiming to become the first programmable blockchain platform at internet scale. Although Sui's development momentum is far behind that of Aptos, projects driven by technological innovation often have the potential for explosive growth. With Sui's mainnet about to be released, it is believed that Sui will soon experience a wave of development.

Quietly Cultivating Sui vs. Aptos in the Spotlight

Aptos inherits nearly three years of open-source technology and development experience from the Diem project, allowing it to quickly establish its underlying architecture and ecosystem projects. In contrast, Sui chose to build its Layer1 network from scratch, resulting in a significant lag in its development progress compared to Aptos. As a result, in the early stages of attracting capital and investor attention, the rapidly developing Aptos was more capable of capturing investor interest than Sui, which was still building its underlying architecture. Furthermore, both projects, as Layer1 public chains, are committed to improving blockchain security and scalability, creating a high-performance blockchain infrastructure network for billions of users. However, there are certain differences in their strategies or focuses in achieving these goals.

Aptos focuses on marketing, packaging itself as a unique product created by the best developers from the IT industry. Although exaggerated, this approach has proven effective, attracting a large number of investors under the banner of being a Layer1 leader. Last year, it launched its mainnet and concurrent tokens in Q4. Despite a price drop of over 76%, it has performed strongly since the beginning of the year, with a recent pullback, but its total market capitalization still reached $2.08 billion. Additionally, in terms of ecosystem project collaborations, Aptos emphasizes partnerships with well-known companies, such as launching an acceleration program with Google Cloud for infrastructure; collaborating with South Korean AAA game studio NPIXEL in gaming; and integrating ecosystem projects like Petra with Web3 fintech company MoonPay. Collaborations with well-known companies have brought significant traffic and attention to Aptos, promoting the rapid development of its ecosystem projects.

Unlike Aptos, Sui places greater importance on the innovative application of underlying technology rather than marketing. For example, the improved Move language of Sui can more clearly indicate object ownership, mutability, and composability, making it inherently suitable for building metaverse infrastructure. In terms of ecosystem projects, since Sui's mainnet has not yet launched, most projects are still in the testing phase, resulting in significantly less attention compared to Aptos. Therefore, at many times, Aptos appears to be a star in the spotlight, while Sui seems more like a diligent worker quietly toiling in the background.

Both Sui and Aptos are Layer1 public chains, with founding teams from Diem and belonging to the Move ecosystem, so they have been in a competitive relationship from the start. However, since Sui is building its Layer1 network from scratch, its development progress is relatively lagging, and early market attention was mostly focused on Aptos, making the competitive relationship between the two less apparent in the initial stages. It wasn't until recently, when Sui's Wave 2 testing concluded successfully and the mainnet was announced to be launching soon, that Aptos began to take notice and become cautious. Last month, Sui's CTO accused Aptos on Twitter of pressuring the organizers of MOVECON (the first large-scale forum for the Move ecosystem), the Pontem team, to cancel the Sui team's presentation and even remove the Sui Foundation from the list of event organizers. This indicates that Aptos has begun to view the rising Sui as a competitor, indirectly affirming Sui's market position and potential.

Sui's Clear Advantages in Underlying Technology Compared to Aptos

Although Sui has many shortcomings compared to Aptos, such as in ecosystem projects and community size, Sui has consistently focused on innovation and application of underlying technology. Over the past year, it has accumulated significant technological advantages, from the Sui-Move language to the Narwhal-Tusk consensus mechanism and storage fund token economics. Sui has made significant innovations at every level of blockchain projects, making it unique even compared to other new Layer1 public chains like Aptos.

Sui-Move

Both Aptos and Sui use the Move language, but there are differences between them. Aptos largely follows the classic design principles outlined in the Diem white paper, while Sui has upgraded and adjusted it to form the unique Sui-Move language. The biggest difference from Move is that Sui adopts an object-centric model rather than an address-centric model. Therefore, on Sui, almost everything, such as tokens, smart contracts, NFTs, etc., can be represented as "objects." Each object has a series of attributes, including owner address, read/write properties, transferability, functional properties, and more. Sui-Move clearly indicates characteristics such as ownership, sharing, mutability, or immutability of objects, which Aptos does not explicitly state. Additionally, Sui's ownership API is more concise than Aptos's API, as it more clearly showcases blockchain design. In terms of functionality, Sui-Move has certain advantages over the Move language in security, smart contract support, programming model flexibility, and compatibility.

Narwhal & Tusk

Sui's consensus mechanism minimizes the communication required between validators to process transactions, achieving lower latency. Sui's consensus mechanism is divided into two parts: Narwhal and Tusk. Narwhal is a mempool protocol used to store unconfirmed blockchain transactions and broadcasts these transactions before the consensus protocol verifies them. The task of this protocol is to achieve consensus while maintaining data availability, and it operates independently of the consensus protocol, tolerating asynchronous or intermittent failures. Tusk is an asynchronous consensus protocol responsible for transaction ordering. This protocol uses shared randomness to eliminate additional communication between nodes and allows each node to determine the total order of transactions. When used in conjunction with the Narwhal protocol, it ensures high performance even in the event of failures.

Theoretically, the throughput scalability of Sui's design has no known upper limit. In terms of security, compared to synchronous blockchains (i.e., most proof-of-work blockchains), Sui's security attributes can withstand adverse network conditions, network partitions, or DoS attacks on validators, as it does not impose any synchronization assumptions on the network.

Developer Experience

Aptos's core feature is seamless upgrades, allowing developers to focus on building without disrupting users. In contrast, Sui's software development kit (SDK) provides more convenience for developers. The SDK offers open-source, general-purpose, and user-friendly tools, allowing developers to save significant time on debugging smart contracts, waiting for audits, and building basic technology stack elements. Additionally, the SDK attempts to connect with other ecosystems and non-crypto use cases, such as: game APIs directly connecting to a general Layer1 rather than sidechains or L2 focused on gaming; "SuiEcho," which guides the community by promoting the portability of digital assets from other ecosystems to Sui; and "Handshake," a frontend tool that serves as a channel for users to distribute, claim/redeem Sui digital assets (such as payments, merchant coupons) to both crypto and non-crypto users.

Sui Token Economics

In addition to a series of technological innovations aimed at optimizing system composability and scalability, Sui has implemented a unique token economics model. Unlike traditional proof-of-stake chain token economics models, Sui's token economics model adds a "storage fund" feature. As blockchains are a data structure that only grows, the amount of data that needs to be maintained on-chain increases over time, leading to higher costs. This results in later users of Sui needing to pay higher fees than early users. The "storage fund" is essentially designed to address this issue, allowing early users to pay more fees so that all users can use the network at similar fee levels.

Furthermore, Sui's storage fund will also pay validators in the system or those who actually store blockchain data and complete data maintenance tasks. As maintenance work increases, the expenditures for validators will also rise, incentivizing more people to become validators in the system. As more people become validators, the total available storage space will also increase, further leading to a decrease in gas fees for writing to the blockchain. Sui's token economics model is a typical representative of a highly scalable chain economic model, using game theory to ensure that gas fees remain relatively constant throughout the blockchain's lifecycle.

Overview of Sui Ecosystem Projects

Hybrid Liquidity Trading Application MovEX

MovEX is the first AMM+ order book hybrid liquidity DEX on Sui, combining the advantages of AMM and order books to provide a liquidity trading experience for everyone by creating hybrid liquidity pools. Internally, MovEX has a settlement engine that allocates orders between AMM and order books, ensuring minimal slippage for traders while guaranteeing fairness for liquidity providers. Liquidity providers can also customize price ranges to provide unilateral liquidity, effectively managing impermanent loss.

MovEX supports both market trading and limit order trading, common features found on centralized trading platforms. Regular users can provide liquidity to the liquidity pool at customized price ranges; professional traders and liquidity providers can become liquidity providers through the order book, similar to market makers on centralized exchanges. Currently, the MovEX product is still in the testing phase, and users can link their Sui Wallet to the application to experience the product.

Wallet Sui Wallet

Sui Wallet is a browser extension that serves as a gateway to the Web3 world, allowing users to connect to DApps and sign human-readable transactions from trusted DApps. It is the official wallet of the Sui blockchain, allowing users to create, import, and persistently store mnemonic phrases and derived private keys, transfer coins and NFTs, and view owned fungible tokens and NFTs. Sui Wallet was initially developed for Sui developers to test and is currently the most recognized wallet on the testnet.

Decentralized Trading Application Suiswap

Suiswap is a DEX with an automated market maker (AMM) mechanism on the Sui chain, supporting the exchange and trading of native assets within the Sui ecosystem. Currently, Suiswap allows users to claim test tokens, trade, or form LPs to provide liquidity to the liquidity pool. The final form of the product will be seen only after the Sui mainnet goes live.

Over-Collateralized Lending Application Leizd Protocol

Leizd Protocol is a decentralized lending application within the Sui ecosystem that operates on an over-collateralized basis. This application uses the decentralized stablecoin USDZ as an intermediary asset, similar to MakerDAO on the Ethereum chain, to achieve controllable risk in lending products through the minting of stablecoins. In Leizd Protocol, borrowers can deposit crypto assets as collateral to mint USDZ, then borrow the required USDZ and exchange it for stablecoins like USDT or USDC, repaying the borrowed USDZ and interest upon maturity to withdraw the collateral. Depositors can also collateralize crypto assets to mint USDZ in exchange for deposit interest or exchange USDZ for other crypto assets and deposit them in the deposit pool to earn interest.

It is reported that Leizd Protocol plans to deploy across multiple chains on both Sui and Aptos networks, allowing users to borrow using assets from both chains. However, the test product of Leizd Protocol has not yet launched and is still in the conceptual introduction phase.

NFT Trading Platform BlueMove

BlueMove is a platform that supports NFT creation and trading, successfully deployed on both Sui and Aptos networks. The platform's smart contracts adopt a modular system and clearly define the execution scope through standardized signatures, allowing new features to be introduced over time without compromising security, such as collection bidding, feature bidding, and multiple cancellations.

In addition, BlueMove has issued a total of 300 million platform tokens MOVE, with 5% allocated for airdrops, 40% for rewarding actively participating traders and collectors on the platform, 15% for rewarding users who stake MOVE tokens, and the remainder for financing and team development. The main utility of the MOVE token is for on-chain governance and membership rights.

Currently, users can buy or sell NFTs on BlueMove and earn MOVE rewards. Additionally, users can stake MOVE tokens to receive a share of the platform's trading fees and additional MOVE rewards.

Web3 Chain Game: Abyss Worlds

Abyss World is an action role-playing game developed by Metagame Industries based on the Sui Layer 1 blockchain, featuring powerful Web3 technology and gaming experience. It aggregates Web2 and Web3 gamers, allowing players to experience immersive gaming fun in a virtual world. Various characters, maps, and storylines in the game will be supported by Sui blockchain technology, enabling players to create a real gaming world. According to the roadmap, Abyss World will officially launch its public beta in the third quarter of this year.

In the Web3 gameplay, NFTs are a key option to attract early user participation in projects. Abyss World launched the sale of its first batch of Genesis NFTs, the Gazer series, on March 23. These NFTs are not just simple images; they are tied to in-game rights and functionalities: players holding NFTs can share potential income within the game, obtain more rare items and skins, and gain early access to the game's internal testing. Additionally, due to a deep collaboration with Mysten Labs, these NFTs not only tie to Abyss World's native game token AWT but also have rights tied to Sui token airdrops, making it one of the leading projects in the Sui ecosystem.

Conclusion

Sui is the first permissionless Layer1 blockchain designed from scratch, committed to providing a more user-friendly experience for Web3 users. However, technology can only realize its value when it addresses real problems and can only achieve true success when people are willing to pay for it. Sui has consistently focused on innovation and application of underlying technology, which has brought it rich technological advantages. With Sui's mainnet about to launch, now is the time to translate these technological advantages into market competitiveness. Through the "Wave to Mainnet" series of activities, Sui is stepping out from behind the scenes to showcase the technological strength it has accumulated over the years. In the future, how underlying technology will drive overall DX/UX and who will be able to attract more users and liquidity will gradually be answered over time.