Key Insights

1. Aptos and Sui are in the spotlight because they are built on Move, a programming language inspired by Rust and their core team is from Meta–Diem.
2. The Aptos testnet can reach up to 160,000 TPS and is based on the Block-STM parallel execution engine and the critical rotation.
3. Sui’s test network TPS can reach about 120,000 because it uses Objects as a basic unit optimizing its throughput. Also, Sui's Gas pricing and transaction storage mechanism can bring a better experience to users and developers.
4. Aptos is far ahead of Sui in terms of its ecosystem development and development progress.
5. Aptos and Sui still need to get more influential partners to help them survive in the current market.

（Date source：https://medium.com/@pontemjapan/aptos%E3%81%A8sui%E3%81%AE%E6%AF%94%E8%BC%83-2ba60a2abffe）

1. Introduction

The year 2022 sees a bear market with the majority of cryptocurrencies plummeting due to a bunch of macroeconomic factors such as inflation and rising unemployment etc. However, in such a sluggish market, Aptos and Sui suddenly made them the center of attention in the crypto space.
In the past two years, Solana, Avalanche, and other Ethereum killers appeared in the market one after another and brought significant market influence, but no one can take Ethereum’s place. As Ethereum continuously upgrades itself with the recent completion of the Merge, other chains seem to have nothing new to boast about. Even after Dfinity launched its token ICP, a widespread opinion is that the blockchain would no longer get any love from the market. However, Aptos and Sui, whom top VCs sprinted towards, have broken this narrative with the Move language adopted and the team hailing from Diem.

1.1.The Move programming language

1.1.1.Definition of Asset

Move defines tokens as resources, unlike other programming languages, such as Solidity, which generally sees tokens as Numeric variables. The difference between the two is that when a transaction occurs in the account, the Move language believes that the token must transfer to one certain address or another, or else it would be burned. Token as an asset cannot be copied or double spent [1]. Languages such as Solidity consider assets to be digital, so from the moment of the transaction to the end, the balance of the sent and received address decreases or increases. Move's definition of Resource avoids the problem of assets being generated out of nowhere by code logic and algorithm errors from the very beginning.

1.1.2.Static dispatch

A single smart contract cannot implement all functions for some large projects, so dynamic dispatch has become the main calling method of Solidity. The dynamic dispatch stores the code in the library according to the classification and uses the interface call when the contract needs it, but this has also become a breakthrough in the security of the smart contract. Dynamic dispatch improves flexibility, but flexibility means more bugs. In contrast, Move uses static dispatch, which is characterized by the fact that all contracts have already determined their execution paths and verified them during the compilation phase [1], which means that developers can identify errors and execute smart contracts before going online and reduce the probability of downtime at runtime.

1.1.3.Combinability of modules

The move is based on the combination of modules and then interacts with each other through resource passing, while Solidity mainly relies on the combination through message passing under remote calls. The difference between the two is that when optimization or extension is needed, in Move, only the module needs to be optimized and then the smart contracts using the module will be automatically updated, while in Solidity if the previous contract is optimized, it cannot be directly upgraded and iterated [1].

1.2.The rise and fall of Diem

In 2019 Facebook (now Meta) started Libra, a blockchain-based payment system for licensed stablecoins. However, it was later forced to rename Diem, but its tortuous fate did not change at all with its name change.

Regulators from US and EU force it to suspend on the grounds of invasion of antitrust laws and privacy. As a result, several qualified technical staff began to leave the project, including Mo Shaikh and Evan Cheng, who later set up their teams and launched Aptos and Sui separately based on Diem.

2. Aptos vs Sui

2.1. Team

2.2.Investors

Aptos and Sui are backed by an all-star cast, and the fundraising for the first two rounds has reached a very large scale, at $350 million and $236 million respectively with Aptos slightly ahead.

Aptos

As of September 2022, Aptos completed two fundraising rounds at a $2.75B valuation. Binance Labs and Dragonfly announced strategic investments in Aptos on March 28 and September 29, respectively, but the specific cooperation and investment amount have not been disclosed.

Seed Round
Date：2022.3.15
Total Amount Raised：$200M
Investors: Lead by a16z, other investors include: Multicoin Capital, Katie Haun, 3 Arrows Capital, ParaFi Capital, IRONGREY, Hashed, Variant, Tiger Global, BlockTower, FTX Ventures, Paxos, Coinbase Ventures, etc.

A Round
Date：2022.7.26
Total Amount Raised：$150M
Investors: Lead by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto, other investors include: Griffin Gaming Partners, Franklin Templeton, Circle Ventures, Supers crypto, etc.

Sui

Since December 2021, Mysten Labs, the developing team Sui has raised two rounds of funding at a valuation of $2 billion, and Sui currently expects to raise $236 million.

A Round
Date：2021.12
Total Amount Raised：$36M
Investors: a16z and NFX, Coinbase Ventures, Lightspeed, Samsung NEXT, Scribble Ventures, Redpoint, Electric Capital, Slow Ventures, Standard Crypto, etc.

B Round
Date：2022.7
Total Amount Raised：$200M
Investors: Lead by FTX Ventures, other investors include: a16z, Jump Crypto, Apollo, Binance Labs, Franklin Templeton, Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sino Global, Dentsu Ventures, NGC Ventures, A&T Capital, Greenoaks Capital, O'Leary Ventures, etc.

2.3. Techniques and Mechanism

Aptos and Sui are both based on the Move programming language and focus on high-performance parallel computing blockchain, which claims to be able to reach over 100,000 TPS.

2.3.1 Parallel Execution

Both Aptos and Sui adopt parallel execution. The difference between this and Ethereum's EVM is that it identifies independent transactions and executes them at the same time, while other interdependent transactions will be picked out and executed in sequence. The mechanism of EVM is each transaction is executed individually in order, and when the EVM executes the transaction, all the rest will be suspended until one transaction execution is completed [3].The problem with the EVM mechanism is that it greatly prolongs the transaction execution time, and users are forced to increase the gas fee to execute the transaction earlier than others. In contrast, parallel execution can use hardware more efficiently to reduce transaction confirmation time and achieve better scalability.

The difficulty faced by parallel execution technology is how to quickly identify independent transactions and dependent transactions. When executing in parallel, it is necessary to judge whether a transaction will affect another transaction. If it affects, it is defined as being dependent, and dependent transactions must be executed in order. For example, AMM transactions in the same pool are defined as dependent, because multiple different tokens and accounts are involved in their transactions [3].
The way to identify independent transactions is when an account or smart contract modifies its memory locations when a transaction occurs, and interdependent transactions are those that attempt to change the same memory locations in the same block [3].

Aptos
Aptos developed Block-STM to identify the dependencies of transactions, which is the main factor for Aptos' maximum TPS to reach 160,000 [2]. Block-STM chooses not to let users and developers know in advance which part of the memory they are locating but instead uses Optimistic Concurrency Control (assuming all transactions are independent) to validate when Block-STM executes transactions, and the storage location modified in the transaction will be marked. In the validating phase, if it is found that the marked storage location is accessed by other transactions, it means that the transaction in this storage location is not independent, and the system will take it out and re-execute it in sequence. According to the official test data of Aptos, when the transactions are fewer, the execution speed of Block-STM is 16 times faster than that of sequential execution using 32 threads, and when more transactions execute at the same time, the speed of Block-STM is also 8 times[4].


Data Source：
https://medium.com/aptoslabs/block-stm-how-we-execute-over-160k-transactions-per-second-on-the-aptos-blockchain-3b003657e4ba

Sui
Sui has opted for a different approach than Aptos when it comes to transaction processing. In Sui's mechanism, an Object is used as the basic unit instead of an Account[5], and each object has a unique ID as identification. Objects are classified into three types of assets, namely immutable assets (smart contracts), single assets (which can only be modified by their specific owner), and shared assets (which can be modified by multiple owners). A single asset can only be modified by its specific owner, while a shared asset can be modified by multiple owners. This setting reduces the difficulty of identifying independent transactions or dependencies because asset types can be quickly identified and confirmed when they are independently traded.

2.3.2.Other Mechanism

Aptos Hybrid Custody Option and Trade Pre-Execution Mechanism
Security issues such as wallet theft and wrongly signing malicious transactions have always been the nightmare of many users. Therefore, Aptos has launched two functions, key management and signing transaction precautionary measures, to protect the property safety of its users. According to the Aptos white paper, Aptos accounts support key rotation and new hybrid models of custody, so users can delegate the ability to rotate the account’s private key to one or more custodians and other trusted entities. Then the user can design a strategy through Move, the purpose of this strategy is to allow the custodian to rotate the key under certain circumstances [4]. The benefit of this is that when a user loses his key, the custodian can restore the service for his key to avoid loss of assets.

In addition, the transaction pre-execution and transaction restriction services are also used by Aptos to protect the security of user assets. When users sign a transaction, Aptos will provide them with transaction results and compare known attacks and malicious smart contracts in the past, thereby reducing the probability of users being deceived. And users can also set limits on transactions so that when malicious transactions violate these rules, the transaction will be terminated.

Sui Gas price and Transaction storage mechanism
The highlight of Sui's economic model is the pricing mechanism of Gas and the storage fund. The pricing mechanism gives users a better experience because they do not need to predict the cost of Gas, and the validators can propose their ideal price of Gas for voting, and even if the ideal price is not reached, the incentive rewards can still bring them objective revenue, thus reducing unhealthy competition. and prevent denial of service (DoS) attacks.
The benefits of the storage fund are threefold. First, it solves the problem of storage costs for validators. Second, a self-regulating mechanism is developed for Sui's on-chain storage, and validators consciously delete useless data. Third, it increases the demand for the use of Sui tokens, thus reducing its inflation.

1) Gas pricing mechanism, where validators determine a reference Gas price by voting, which is used as a reference price when the validator processes user transactions [4]. When a validator completes a validation request to obtain a Gas cost around the reference price it will receive a reward from Sui, exceeding the price and non-responsive validators will reduce the reward they receive, and conversely, validators below the reference price will receive an additional reward.

2) Transaction storage, which is designed to solve the problem of future users paying for the storage of early adopters. Since Sui can handle any amount of data on the chain when subsequent users use the same data stored by past users, subsequent users may have to pay disproportionately high storage fees for them, and this negative network externality will put a lot of pressure on Sui in the long run. The storage fees are deposited in the fund for distribution to future validators [8]. In addition, a "deletion option" mechanism is designed so that the verifier only needs to delete the data stored in the chain to get a rebate on the storage fee.

2.4. Tokenomics

Just one day before Aptos announced its official tokenomics, the details of which are still waiting for the official update.

It is worth noting that the current tokenomics of Sui does not have a burning mechanism, which might harm the token value retention. However, Sui's storage fund mechanism has reduced the inflation of Sui tokens to a certain extent.


Data Source：
1.https://medium.com/mysten-labs/recap-sui-ama-tokenomics-ca00967b937d
2.https://aptosfoundation.org/currents/aptos-tokenomics-overview

2.5. Product Progress

From the perspective of development progress, Aptos with its third network nest surpasses Sui at this point.


（Data Source：1.https://aptoslabs.medium.com/2.https://medium.com/mysten-labs）

2.6. Potential Risks

On May 20, 2022, a well-known American entrepreneur and investor Shari Glazer sued Mohammed Shaikh, founder of Aptos Labs, alleging that Shaikh cheated her out of 50% ownership of the partnership. The case has not yet progressed, and if it does, it will have a significant impact on Mohammed Shaikh, but it does not involve Aptos at this time and therefore will not have any significant impact on it.

In contrast, Sui has not had any negative news on the legal front, so it is potentially less risky than Aptos.

2.7.Token

APT (Aptos token) was listed on October 19, 2022. According to Coingecko, APT is currently priced at $7.38 with a 24-hour trading volume of $1,007,472,882 while this article is being edited. The exchanges APT had listed include Gate.io, Binance, FTX, Coinbase, OKX, Kucoin, Huobi, Bybit, MEXC, etc. Driven by market enthusiasm, the trading volume has been at a very high level.

In contrast, Sui is far behind, with no official announcement of any tokens going on the list at this moment.

3. Ecosystem Development

（Data Source：https://www.aptos.systems/）

4. Blockchain Trilemma

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Gate.io Team
Nov 23rd, 2022