Sui (SUI) and Aptos (APT): Comparing Move Layer 1 Heavyweights

Interconnected Facebook Origins

In 2017, Facebook took its first steps into blockchain on the initiative of a single employee, Morgan Beller, who saw its potential applications. As interest in the field grew, the company expanded its crypto and blockchain development team and launched the Libra project in 2019. 

The intention was to create a global cryptocurrency network suitable for international payments that would seamlessly integrate with the traditional financial system. One of the ideas was to build a US dollar stablecoin operating atop a Layer 1 blockchain. 

Libra was rebranded as Diem in late 2020. Shortly after its inception, Facebook Diem ran into a wide range of regulatory issues which it was never able to overcome. Despite significant efforts, the project never launched and the project was wound down permanently in early 2022. 

During its existence, Diem pioneered the development of the Move programming language, which would later become the backbone of both Sui and Aptos, among other open public blockchain systems. 

Although the Libra/Diem project was eventually shut down, the codebase for the core blockchain, the Move programming language, and the Move Virtual Machine (MoveVM) were released under an open source Apache 2.0 license.

This allowed Sui and Aptos and others to make use of the technology moving forward. As many of you may know, Sui and Aptos are two prominent L1 blockchains that offer a plethora of wide-ranging applications in the Web3 sector and beyond and share a common ancestry of the defunct Facebook Libra and Diem projects. 

In general, both networks are designed to be highly efficient Proof-of-Stake (PoS) smart contract platforms, representing different takes on the technology originally pioneered by Facebook. Below we’ll analyze how Sui and Aptos are unique and what they offer, along with their similarities and differences.

Sui Overview

For those unfamiliar, Sui is built by Mysten Labs, a software development lab founded in late 2021. In particular, Mysten Labs was founded by Evan Cheng (CEO), Sam Blackshear (CTO), Adeniyi Abiodun (CPO), Kostas Chalkias, and George Danezis, all of which spent time on the development on the Facebook and Meta projects prior to launching Sui. Blackshear was even the original architect of the Move programming language during his time at Facebook. 

Like Aptos, Sui is a Layer 1 blockchain that based much of its underlying architecture on Facebook’s original Diem proposition. Designed with scalability and user-experience top-of-mind, Sui harnesses a variant of the Diem-derived Move language called Sui Move that focuses on an object-oriented approach, while incorporating several improvements over the original Move paradigm. 

Though Sui exhibits several similarities with Aptos, Sui's focus lies in delivering unprecedented speed and low-latency transactions through parallelization and object-centric data models, making Sui an ideal choice for a host of real-time applications.

Sui reaches consensus using an extremely low-latency protocol called Mysticeti which has a latency of only 390 ms. The protocol boasts decreased complexity, parallelized transactions, and optimized resource utility. Sui is capable of processing over 297,000 transactions per second (TPS) with sub-second finality, with many lauding it as the only real competitor to Solana’s firedancer. 

Sui Key Features 

• Sui Move language: Sui developed a variant of the Move programming language called Sui Move that diverges significantly from its initial version. Sui Move emphasizes simplicity in object state management to enable highly parallelized transaction execution.
• Object-oriented model: Sui's architecture allows independent management of on-chain objects, reducing transaction contention, while optimizing throughput.
• Scalability: Sui achieves horizontal scalability by scaling resources with demand, making it suitable for high-load scenarios that require extreme scalability.
• Developer-friendly environment: Sui offers comprehensive developer tools, encouraging seamless decentralized application development and innovation.
• Mysticeti consensus: Mysten Labs' highly optimized Mysticeti consensus allows Sui to reach speeds simply not possible on other networks, while also being extremely efficient, without compromising security.

Use Cases

• Asset management: Sui’s object-oriented Move design allows for seamless asset tracking and management.
• Real-time applications: With its combination of extreme scalability, speed, and throughput, Sui is the ideal choice for gaming and other applications requiring instant finality and high responsiveness.
• Decentralized finance (DeFi): Sui supports DeFi platforms with robust transaction throughput, native central limit order books, and near-instant settlement.

Aptos Overview

Aptos Labs was founded in 2021 by CEO Mo Shaikh and CTO Avery Ching, both former key contributors to the Facebook Diem project. Previously, Shaikh was responsible for the development of strategic partnerships at Facebook and Ching worked as a principal software engineer leading numerous initiatives inside Facebook and its related enterprises. 

As Facebook wound down the development of Diem, Shaikh and Ching became unwilling to abandon their ideas and set out to source funding for a new project that would go on to become Aptos. They left Facebook in December 2021 and by March 2022 they had managed to secure $200 million for the continued development of Aptos. 

Specifically, Aptos is a Layer-1 blockchain built to offer a safe, scalable, and upgradeable Web3 infrastructure. The project’s creators leveraged their expertise to build a decentralized blockchain to help bring about the mass adoption of open public blockchain systems and Web3 at large.

Aptos utilizes Block-STM, a multi-threaded parallel execution engine. Of great significance, Block-STM is designed to process multiple transactions simultaneously, ensuring high throughput and low latency while allowing up to 160,000 transactions per second (TPS). In some instances, Aptos has reported as many as 326 million successful transactions in a single day. With an average of closer to around 1 million transactions per day, this means that the system has ample headroom for expected growth.

Aptos Key Features

• Move language: Aptos utilizes the Move language, designed for secure and efficient smart contract execution. It features formal verification via the Move Prover, enhancing contract safety.
• Parallel execution with Block-STM: Aptos employs parallel transaction execution, improving throughput and latency without sacrificing atomicity.
• High performance: Aptos boasts sub-second transaction finality, low fees, and a modular architecture that supports seamless upgrades. 
• On-chain upgrades: Aptos’ infrastructure allows frequent and secure protocol upgrades, enabling adaptability to continually changing technologies.
• AptosBFT consensus: Aptos utilizes a modern consensus mechanism that is directly derived from Facebook's DiemBFT. 

Use Cases

• DeFi and TradFi applications: Aptos supports the infrastructure needed to realize a plethora of high-performance financial services such as decentralized exchanges (DEX) and those tailored to legacy systems. For example, Mastercard recently built a specialized identity verification tool on Aptos called Mastercard Crypto Credential.
• NFT ecosystem: Aptos facilitates efficient NFT minting and trading and the infrastructure needed to achieve various other NFT-specific utilities such as smart ticketing and others.
• Gaming: Aptos’ speed and cost-effectiveness are advantageous for a wide range of gaming applications. As an example, like most other L1s, Aptos allows users to safely deposit in-game assets on-chain while retaining or transferring asset ownership as desired.
• Web3 infrastructure: Aptos allows for the seamless integration of Web3 and blockchain with traditional finance and numerous mainstream industries, especially those for large-scale enterprises, institutions, retail users, and governments.

Aptos’ vision is to deliver fair and universal accessibility to decentralized assets, while overcoming Web3 adoption challenges associated with scalability, cost, and reliability. To help achieve these goals and others, Aptos is currently focused on the development of a more efficient consensus mechanism called Raptr that will eventually be deployed on the network.

Comparing Sui and Aptos

While both Sui and Aptos emerged from similar origins à la Facebook, both have chosen different consensus mechanisms, technical architectures, individualized Move-specific programming languages, tokenomic designs, and other variabilities. 

As it relates to tokenomics in particular, Aptos exhibits an uncapped maximum supply with a 7% annual inflation rate, while Sui capped its maximum supply at 10 billion (with only 4.7 billion of these being released by 2030). As of December 2024, 48% of Aptos’ total supply is in circulation with a market cap of over $7 billion and a fully diluted valuation of over $15 billion and growing.

In contrast, as of December 2024, 28% of Sui’s total supply is in circulation, while Sui’s market cap is over $10 billion with a fully diluted valuation of more than $34 billion and increasing.

Now let’s summarize several important differences and similarities between the two projects:

Similarities:

• Shared origins: Both Sui and Aptos were developed by former Diem engineers at Facebook, leveraging similar foundational principles and technology.
• Move language: Both blockchains use variations of the Move language, providing high security, formal verification, and efficient resource management.
• Layer-1 infrastructure: Sui and Aptos are designed as base-layer blockchains with high throughput and low latency, suitable for a wide range of real-world applications and utilities.
• Scalability: Both utilize parallel processing to scale transaction throughput and reduce time to finality and latency.

Differences:

• Execution Models:
  • Aptos – utilizes Block-STM for parallel execution without losing transaction atomicity, enabling highly complex and interdependent smart contracts
  • Sui – adopts an object-centric execution model, prioritizing independent transaction execution for greater simplicity and speed
• Upgradeability:
  • Aptos – features on-chain upgradable protocols, emphasizing frequent and seamless system improvements
  • Sui – while also upgradeable, Sui focuses more on optimizing real-time transactions and data state management
• Use Cases:
  • Aptos – targets broader applications such as DeFi, gaming, and NFTs, with a focus on modularity and ecosystem adaptability
  • Sui – prioritizes real-time applications and asset-centric use cases, excelling in scenarios with high transaction demands
• Community and Ecosystem:
  • Aptos – boasts a rapidly growing ecosystem with active engagement from developers across the DeFi and NFT sectors
  • Sui – focuses on attracting developers with robust tools and educational resources, encouraging the creation of innovative applications

Both Aptos and Sui represent cutting-edge blockchain technologies that push the boundaries of blockchain science. While Aptos stands out with its modular and upgradeable infrastructure, making it a flexible platform for a diverse range of use cases, Sui excels in optimizing real-time, high-throughput applications with its object-centric execution model.

Aptos aims to be one of the highest-performing general-purpose blockchains available in direct competition with other well-established systems such as Ethereum, Solana, et al. On the other hand, in many ways Sui is designed to cater to time-critical applications and even radically removes the requirement for consensus for simple non-dependent transactions such as token transfers, further improving latency.

Together, Aptos and Sui embody the evolution of blockchain-enabled smart contract technology towards scalability, usability, and mass adoption.

DISCLAIMER: This is not financial advice. Staking, delegation, and cryptocurrencies involve a high degree of risk, and there is always the possibility of loss, including the failure of all staked digital assets. Additionally, delegators are at risk of slashing in case of security or liveness faults on some protocols. We advise you to do your due diligence before choosing a validator.