Placeholder: Is it time to move beyond Solidity?

Original Title: Is It Time To Move Beyond Solidity?

Original Author: Joel Monegro, Partner at Placeholder

Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News

Since the birth of Ethereum a decade ago, the EVM has been the most popular blockchain operating system. However, few developers enjoy using its native programming language, Solidity; some even compare the experience to "chewing glass." Nevertheless, entrepreneurs choose Solidity because it conveniently connects to Ethereum's users, assets, and liquidity. But if we want to scale the number of on-chain applications by tenfold, we need a hundred times the number of developers to build them. To achieve this, we must make it easier for ordinary programmers to write complex smart contracts while enhancing the security and scalability of the underlying infrastructure. This is the core promise behind the Move programming language and the emerging network ecosystem that uses it.

Solidity developers struggle because its execution environment is hard to scale, lacks basic security features, and imposes unintuitive programming paradigms. Clever engineers and thousands of dollars in audits can address these three issues, but therein lies the problem: providing secure, scalable, and complex smart contract applications on EVM networks requires experienced developers and significant funding.

Move is the smart contract programming language developed by Facebook for its Libra blockchain project. Libra was dissolved in 2020 for political reasons, but it left behind some excellent open-source technology built for the global market. Move was created around three main values: security, functionality, and usability. It provides robust security protections by default, capable of supporting highly complex applications while remaining simple to use. If we had to summarize its effectiveness in a thought-provoking way, it would be: one Move developer can deliver better applications than ten Solidity developers.

Aptos and Sui

Of course, the applications you write in Move ultimately run on a blockchain. The Aptos and Sui networks are both spin-offs from the Libra project. They belong to the next generation of blockchains, offering ultra-high throughput and low transaction fees, similar to Solana (a more mature ecosystem with many advantages, but requiring higher talent due to the complexity of Rust). Aptos and Sui use variants of Move, with different underlying network architectures. Aptos Move is closest to the original specifications developed for Libra, and this network uses a consensus mechanism familiar to users. Sui Move introduces an object-oriented programming paradigm for smart contracts, which is more familiar to traditional non-crypto developers, while the network employs a DAG-based consensus system architecture instead of a typical blockchain. Each approach has its trade-offs, and there have been many articles discussing their differences (see also), so we need not repeat the details here. More importantly, developers can choose the approach that best suits them.

Although Aptos and Sui are emerging networks, they stand out in the public chain wars as strong competitors. Few other blockchains can provide high performance at the lowest cost without sacrificing developer experience, making it easier to create better applications.

Modularity and Move

While Move directly challenges Solidity as a development language, Aptos and Sui compete more with highly integrated networks like Solana rather than Ethereum. The alternative virtual machines and languages should not offend Ethereum, as one of the main selling points of the modularity movement is the ability to layer custom execution environments on top of Ethereum's ledger. Therefore, if you like Move but prefer the Ethereum ecosystem, its modularity allows you to have the best of both worlds.

This is precisely what Move ment Labs achieves with its new Rollup and SDK. Their tools and service stack includes: (1) a public Move VM (M VM) on Ethereum Layer 2 called M2, (2) the Move ment SDK, and (3) a decentralized shared sequencer.

M2 is the first Move-based L2 on Ethereum, allowing developers to write applications settled on Ethereum using Move. It can run both Aptos and Sui Move simultaneously. It also includes an EVM proxy, enabling developers to mix and match Move and Solidity contracts within the same execution environment. It allows users to use Move applications with existing Ethereum wallets and pay transaction fees in ETH. They refer to it as "Move-EVM" or M EVM. You can think of it as a multi-execution environment that maximizes developer choice without sacrificing access to established EVM infrastructure.

M2 is built on the Move ment SDK, an open-source framework for deploying custom M EVM Rollups on Ethereum or other EVM networks. The SDK allows developers to launch Move-based application Rollups using the same technology as M2. Due to its architecture, M2 cannot match the absolute performance of Aptos or Sui. However, M2 can do things that Aptos and Sui cannot, and the Move ment SDK provides a pathway for developers needing that scale to deploy their own M EVM environments and combine them with other emerging technologies (for example, M2 uses Celestia for data availability).

Finally, the shared sequencer manages the connection between all MEVM Rollups (including M2) and Ethereum. Because it is decentralized, it ensures the security of all MEVM networks. At the same time, because it is shared, it can lower costs for all users by bundling transactions from multiple parallel Rollups into the same batch, making them interoperable.

The main criticism of modularity is the complexity of managing multiple components, which is true. But this does not diminish the long-term value of modularity. For Movement, it allows developers to combine elements of Aptos, Sui, and Ethereum in ways that no single network could achieve alone. This combination maximizes developer flexibility without sacrificing access to existing EVM resources and infrastructure.

The Road Ahead

The lack of scalability and high transaction fees were once major bottlenecks for Web3. Today, there is ample block space and low transaction fees, but building secure smart contracts remains quite challenging for most developers. Most developers are not well-versed in cryptocurrency; to change this, we need to continually improve the developer experience until developing on Web3 is easier than developing on Web2. Our bet on Move stems from the belief that, thanks to Move's inherent security and scalability features, it provides a better entry point for new developers to build on-chain applications.

This does not mean we no longer have faith in the other ecosystems we support, including Ethereum and Solana. Tribalism leads many to believe that supporting one choice means opposing its so-called rivals; for example, supporting Solana means opposing Ethereum, or supporting the Move ecosystem means opposing Solana, and so on. This binary thinking overlooks the broader reality that the industry thrives on consumer choice and competition.

It is also worth emphasizing that, despite its limitations, the EVM standard will not disappear anytime soon, and its continued dominance proves the power of first-mover advantage and network effects. Instead, its limitations will be surpassed by the layers of abstraction built on top of it. In hindsight, the evolution of blockchain operating systems will resemble the evolution of computers: we started with primitive versions and then built increasingly complex systems that are better suited for developers and users. Think of the BIOS in computers as the lowest-level operating system that handles communication between hardware and the operating system, but most users never interact with it and few even know it exists. Or, in the first decade, Windows was built on the more primitive MS-DOS. The EVM is likely to follow a similar path, becoming a lower-level primitive system upon which more powerful systems will be built, which is why incorporating the EVM into the Movement Labs stack is particularly interesting.

The development trajectory of Web2 tells us that there is a direct correlation between development difficulty and application quality. The results brought by Aptos, Sui, and Movement bring us closer to this vision, and we are excited to see developers leveraging them to build a whole new world.

Disclosure: Placeholder is an investor in Movement Labs and holds APT and SUI.