At the new high of SUI, let's discuss the three major differences of Move public chains from the user's perspective

Author: Alex Liu, Foresight News

On November 14, SUI broke through 3.5 USDT, and the price reached a new historical high; Bitwise will launch the Aptos Staking ETP on the Swiss Stock Exchange; the Movement mainnet is about to go live… Beyond EVM, Solana, and BTC, a vibrant new ecosystem is rising, and the "Move public chain" is gradually gaining momentum.

Sui, Aptos, and Movement are often discussed together because they are all public chain platforms that support smart contracts in the Move language, known as the "Move public chains." Sui and Aptos are Layer 1 public chains, with most team members coming from the blockchain project Diem/Libra (which was halted due to regulatory pressure, where the Move language was born). Both have successfully raised hundreds of millions of dollars and have launched their mainnets, ranking high in market capitalization; Movement is a Layer 2 built on Ethereum, aiming to bring the Move language into the ETH ecosystem. Movement has raised tens of millions of dollars and is currently in the testnet phase.

Although they are all "Move public chains," the differences among the three are much greater than most people imagine. The author holds SUI and APT and is deeply involved in both ecosystems. As Move Chains gradually gain traction, I hope this article can provide readers with some information they may not have noticed, helping everyone to study and judge.

A Brief Discussion on Technical Differences

This article mainly approaches from a non-technical perspective but also briefly discusses the technical differences among the chains. The well-known market maker research department DWF Ventures recently published a "comparative analysis" of these three chains, listing incorrect facts regarding their technologies. If institutions are like this, it shows that there is considerable room for improvement in everyone's understanding of the technology behind Move public chains.

The architecture of Aptos and Sui is quite unique; strictly speaking, they cannot even be considered a "blockchain," but rather a "Directed Acyclic Graph" (DAG), composed of "checkpoints." Movement, on the other hand, is consistent with conventional chains, consisting of blocks in a linear chain. Other well-known projects that also adopt a DAG architecture include kaspa (KAS), which is a new favorite among PoW miners and claims to revive the original ideals of Bitcoin. DWF Ventures incorrectly classified Aptos as a linear chain in the above image ------ Aptos was indeed a linear chain when it first launched, but later changed to a DAG.

Transaction relationships in DAG

Differences beyond architecture also include consensus mechanisms and different implementations of parallel transactions.

Both Sui and Aptos use a DAG-based BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus, but the specific mechanisms for leader selection differ, while Movement adopts the Snowman consensus of the Avalanche protocol. Different consensus mechanisms lead to different TTF (transaction confirmation times); currently, Sui's Mysticeti consensus is the fastest, able to confirm in 0.5 seconds. Aptos will upgrade to RAPTR consensus in the future, which is also expected to perform well.

For parallel transactions, both Aptos and Movement use the Block-STM parallel engine, which is an optimistic parallelization mechanism that assumes all transactions can be processed in parallel and re-executes in case of erroneous transactions. Sui, on the other hand, uses a "state access" method, categorizing, sorting, and confirming transactions without conflicts before execution.

Although they both use the Move language, the Move language has evolved into two major variants: Sui Move and Aptos Move. Movement theoretically supports both but primarily focuses on Aptos Move.

User Experience

(Movement is still in the testnet phase, so this article does not discuss actual experiences.)

Speed and Costs

For high-performance public chains, speed and low costs are core competitive advantages. In actual use, the speed differences are almost imperceptible, and interactions are nearly instantaneous.

In terms of costs, all types of interactions on Aptos maintain negligible fees, while Sui incurs higher gas costs for certain transactions (as shown in the image below, claiming rewards on Navi costs a $0.14 fee). High gas fees are also related to the quality of contract code, but it is clear that Aptos has more controllable overall costs.

Stability

Stability is also a significant consideration ------ no one wants to use a blockchain that frequently goes down for high-frequency financial activities. Since its mainnet launch, Sui has never gone down and has successfully withstood the test of massive transactions involving inscriptions and runes. However, Aptos did experience a brief stoppage in block production last October.

Hardware Wallet Compatibility

I store a significant amount of tokens in a hardware wallet, and during use, I found that:

Sui's Ledger compatibility is poor; initially, every time I opened the app, I had to reset the blind signing option, and the frequency of software updates and maintenance is very low. Additionally, none of Sui's mainstream mobile wallets support hardware wallets!

In contrast, Aptos has good Ledger compatibility and maintenance frequency, and the official team’s Petra wallet supports multiple hardware wallets, even featuring a dedicated animation for signing ------ the attention to detail is impressive.

Regarding wallet experience, I believe Aptos's official Petra wallet > Sui's official Sui Wallet (from the perspective of balance change simulation, multi-account switching, etc.).

Observations on wallet experience also lead to the conclusion that Sui seems not to care much about Crypto Native users, having not invested significant resources to meet our needs, while Aptos has provided me with a better experience. So, what type of users does Sui care about? I believe it is focused on the narrative of "Mass Adoption" and "incremental users," promoting the creation of Sui wallets through social accounts like Google, Twitch, and Facebook, focusing on bringing in Web2 users to expand the pie rather than competing for existing crypto users.

Is this consideration good or bad? It's actually hard to judge. Solana first captured the existing Crypto Native users and then gradually moved towards "Mass Adoption," and from the results, it executed very successfully.

Team Dynamics

From the perspective of a non-technical onlooker, Sui indeed has more innovations, while Aptos has some "imitative" tendencies:

Initially, Aptos was based on the code foundation of the Diem project, which is an address model and a chain. Sui later launched its mainnet, and although it also comes from the Diem team, it redesigned many key components and proposed a new solution: Sui is an object-centric DAG. Aptos later also changed to an object model and DAG.

Sui was the first to provide token incentives to DeFi projects in its ecosystem to attract TVL, which successfully increased significantly. Aptos later also began to subsidize tokens for ecosystem projects.

The PoW gameplay first appeared on the PoS chain of Solana, and after Sui, Aptos officially began promoting related clones in its ecosystem.

Sui developer Mysten Labs used the logo shown above for two years, while Aptos Labs recently adopted its latest logo:

This may not be called "similar"…. let's call it the CP feeling between formulaic rivals.

Another aspect of team dynamics is the overall vision; Aptos's testnet provided a large airdrop, which was the first pot of gold for many, while Sui's testnet did not have an airdrop but instead offered token subscription quotas through community lottery.

The most prominent feature of the Movement team is its strong ability to manage the community and generate "Hype" for its project. Even before the mainnet launch, they have convinced the crypto community that they will be "the next big thing."

Research and Engineering

The academic research achievements of Sui developer Mysten Labs are outstanding, with five recent papers accepted by the top conference in the computer industry, ACM CCS. In terms of engineering capability, aside from the well-known Sui public chain, they also launched a decentralized storage protocol called Walrus based on Sui, and are preparing to integrate with the SCION network standard. Additionally, Sui is preparing to implement transaction sending via radio waves without a network.

Sui founder and CEO received the ACM Software System Award in 2012 for contributions to LLVM.

Aptos Labs' research and engineering capabilities are also top-notch in the industry; a simple example is that the Block-STM parallel engine originating from Aptos has been integrated and adopted by several major projects, including Starknet, Monad, and Movement.

It cannot be denied that the comprehensive accumulation of the Movement team is weaker than the above two teams. However, in today's Meme super cycle, the project's vibe may be more important than the fundamentals.

Ecosystem and Community

Sui ecosystem projects, image source: DefiLlama

Objectively speaking, the richness and development status of the Sui ecosystem projects are better than those of the Aptos ecosystem, with higher DeFi TVL. Aptos's TVL has significantly increased recently, but the sources are relatively homogeneous, mainly from lending protocols that have APT token incentives funded by the foundation. Earlier this year, I even experienced a situation in a certain Aptos ecosystem project's Discord where I was the only Chinese person speaking, and the team did not respond to my English inquiries for 3 or 4 days.

Aptos ecosystem projects, image source: DefiLlama

The Sui community is also generally more active than Aptos (perhaps influenced by the strong coin price), and it seems that the slogan "No Airdrop, No Community" has failed. The Movement community is comparable to Monad's Cult, with "gmove" appearing everywhere, giving this yet-to-be-launched project a leading mindshare.

It is also worth mentioning that Sui and Aptos seem to be "old rivals," often "working against each other" in selecting collaborative projects in their ecosystems. The mainstream cross-chain bridge in the Sui ecosystem is Wormhole, and Aptos will certainly not choose the same but will cooperate with LayerZero. Sui Network introduced the native stablecoin USDC, while Aptos's first launched native stablecoin was indeed USDT.

The attitudes of Aptos and Sui towards Movement also differ. Aptos is more open, having stated that it welcomes Movement to expand the Move language ecosystem; almost all Aptos ecosystem projects I have used are preparing to launch on the Movement mainnet; Sui, on the other hand, is relatively more closed, with co-founders previously stating that L2 is meaningless, and most ecosystem projects are built only on the Sui chain.

Movement's co-founder once posted on X criticizing "exclusive agreements," seemingly implying something.

Although Movement is still in the testnet phase, it already has over 60 apps and millions of active addresses, and its ecological effect should not be underestimated.

Common Issues

Currently, the Move ecosystem does not have a significant wealth effect for retail investors. Although there are token subsidies funded by the foundation, interest subsidies are being mined and sold by high-net-worth whales, making it difficult for retail investors to be interested in interest rates of over ten percent. There is a lack of wealth creation stories like the JTO airdrop and Bonk meme coin in the Solana ecosystem.

Specifically, Aptos is more likely to solve this problem because most projects in its ecosystem have not yet issued tokens.

In contrast, third-party ecosystem projects on Sui are gradually issuing tokens, but the airdrop ratios are not high. Even worse, the largest lending protocol on Sui, Navi (which has now been surpassed by Suilend, which is preparing for a December airdrop), launched a points leaderboard earlier this year, announcing that points would play a key role in the "upcoming" token airdrop after the token issuance ------ as a result, this project has not conducted an airdrop since its token issuance in February.

The tokens launched by Sui developers' own projects (Deepbook, Sui NS) follow the model of broad airdrops to the community, raising the coin price, as they have to personally step in to improve the "wealth effect" of the Sui chain due to the lack of effective ecosystem projects.

Specifically regarding the meme wealth effect, both sides still need to work hard. The FDV (Fully Diluted Valuation) of SUI is about 1/3 of SOL, and the circulating market cap is about 1/10, while the largest meme market cap on Sui is only 1/20 of that on Solana, and the largest meme GUI on Aptos is only 1/100 of WIF's market cap.

Although there are various issues, looking at the long term, the future of Move public chains is bright.