Aptos vs Sui Blockchain: Similarities and Differences

Which Layer 1 Blockchain is “Better”?

In the past year, layer 1 (L1) blockchains have exploded, facilitating ecosystem pumps throughout the market. L1s have become a viable alternative blockchain to Ethereum, the OG. They offer better scalability, lower fees, native DApps, risky meme tokens, massive APYs and more.

As smart investors, we know that when an ecosystem is performing well, its underlying token is a great opportunity to make substantial profits. And with the Solana and Nomad hack happening recently, other L1s have become increasingly popular as investors are looking for a more secure and innovative blockchain.

Aptos and Sui are among the most discussed L1s recently, with many venture capitals (VC) expressing investment interest in them.

Both show a lot of promise to blockchain veterans as these web3 startups are formed by ex-Meta (formerly Facebook) blockchain developers as well as their infrastructure being based on Meta’s abandoned blockchain intiative, Diem.

However, both teams have vastly different approaches to tackling the issue of blockchain scalability. In this article, we will compare and contrast Aptos and Sui, and consider which L1 blockchain you should be more bullish on.

What is Aptos?

Aptos is co-founded by Mo Shaikh (CEO) and Avery Ching (CTO), both former Meta employees who have years of experience as a senior developer and engineer in the blockchain industry.

The team behind Aptos, also known as Aptos Labs, consists of an impressive group of PhDs, researchers, engineers, designers and strategists. Moreover, the team at Aptos has been aggresively expanding. They recently acquired several former Solana staff, most notably Austin Virts, former Head of Marketing at Solana.

Aptos utilizes key elements of the former Diem blockchain as well as Move, a Rust-based programming language independently developed by Meta. Aptos claims the network will be able to process over 130k transactions per second using its parallel execution engine (Block-STM), which will mean lower transaction costs for users.

See also: Aptos Blockchain Guide: the Next Big Innovation in Blockchain Scaling (Layer 1)?

What is Sui?

Sui is co-founded by Evan Cheng (CEO), Sam Blackshear (CTO), Adeniyi Abiodun (CPO), and George Danezis (Chief Scientist). They were former senior leaders of Meta’s advanced blockchain research and development organization.

They were responsible for creating some of the most advanced open source components such as the programming language, execution engine and cryptography of the Diem blockchain.

Sui is a decentralized, permissionless L1 blockchain designed to allow creators and developers to build experiences for web3 users. Similar to Aptos, its proof-of-stake network will scale horizontally and organise data such that transactions are executed in parallel. This greatly reduces computational power and transaction costs.

Although both Aptos and Sui use Move as their programming language, their versions differ from each other, as such that their infrastructure operates distinctively on a fundamental level.

See also: Sui Blockchain Guide: Revolutionary Scalability Solution?

Aptos vs Sui Comparison

Programming Language

Both Aptos and Sui use Move, a Rust-based programming language, for parallel execution, but Sui uses has a different version of it.

In short, Move is an executable bytecode language used to create smart contracts as well as custom transactions on the blockchain. According to Diem’s whitepaper on Move, it focuses on two major digital assets: scarcity and access control. Scarcity imposes limitations on asset creations, preventing any double-spending, while access control manages ownership and privileges.

It differs from other programming language like Solidity because of its use of resources, which is drawn from the mathematical concept of linear logic. In linear logic, formulas are treated as fundamental resources that can only be used once. In the case of Move, “a resource can never be copied or implicitly discarded, only moved between program storage locations“, hence their name “Move”. This mechanism was designed to maximize security without adding complications to transactions, reducing gas fees.

Aptos generally follows the textbook design of Diem’s whitepaper. On the other hand, Sui has a slightly different object model from Aptos. Its storage system is object-centric, which means that you can see most things on the blockchain, including addresses and transactions. These are represented as “objects.”

Sui’s version of Move makes it clear when an object is owned, shared, mutable or immutable, whereas Aptos does not. Moreover, Sui’s ownership API is cleaner than that of Aptos, as it shows the blockchain design more clearly.

Architecture

Though both Aptos and Sui use proof-of-stake as their consensus mechanism, the consensus algorithm behind it is different.

Aptos employs parallelization by dynamically detecting dependencies and scheduling execution tasks using BlockSTM, which is a derivative of the HotStuff consensus protocol.

Sui implements Narwhal and Tusk as their consensus algorithm, which is a DAG-based (directed acyclic graph) mempool used for parallelization at the execution layer. The protocol is asynchronous which means it can withstand DoS (denial of service) attacks.

In terms of security, Sui has a slight edge over Aptos.

Scalability

Instead of home validator case or large-scale decentralization, both Aptos and Sui aim to optimize scalability by maximizing network capacity, similar to Solana. However, the bottleneck would most likely be state growth in the ecosystem.

To address the state growth bottleneck, Aptos prioritizes heterogeneous validators (constrained CPU and storage), whereas Sui plans to shard data storage efficiently, and scale its resources horizontally.

Tokenomics

There are five major components of the Sui economic model:

Sui blockchain’s economic model (Source: Medium)

SUI token: SUI is the native coin of Sui.
Gas fees: all network operations on the platform require gas fees. Gas fees are rewarded to participants in the proof-of-stake mechanism. It can also be used to prevent spam and denial-of-service attacks.
Storage fund: In order to compensate future validators for the storage expenses of previously stored on-chain data, Sui’s storage fund is used to distribute stake rewards over time.
Proof-of-stake mechanism: Used to select, incentivize and reward platform operators i.e. the validators and SUI delegators.
On-chain voting: for voting and deciding on governance and protocol upgrades.

On the other hand, Aptos has no coin yet and its whitepaper has yet to be published. However, Aptos has launched their testnet in March and its developer community has been very active. For more information on their testnet development, you can read our previous article here.

Funding

Aptos Labs has raised $350 million in total from FTX Ventures, Jump Crypto, a16z, Tiger Global, Multicoin Capital, among many other capital ventures. Currently, Aptos Labs has 28 investors.

Sui is fast catching up after its latest Series B funding round in September 2022. Mysten Labs, the company behind Sui closed a US$300 million fundraise in this round. This brings Sui to a combined raise of US$36 million so far, after adding up the $36 million from Series A. Sui also states that they are currently valued at over US$2 billion.

Development Status

Aptos launched its Mainnet in October 2022 and developers can now build on Aptos. They are also currently working on improving the gas schedule in 3 parts. In the short term, to have dynamic NFT gas reduction. Then, in the medium term, to have gas-efficient data structures. Finally, the long-term plan is to adopt demand-driven gas costs.

Sui has recently finished their Sui Testnet Wave 2. Their Sui wallet is also up and running, albeit in the Devenet stage. Nevertheless, you can install the Sui wallet and request Devnet SUI tokens to try out the wallet. The Sui wallet currently has features such as sending, staking, and minting their Capy NFTs. Users can also register their domain name on Sui Name Service. (https://casadelninobilingual.com/)

Conclusion

It is still too early to say which one you should be more bullish on. Both projects have been developing rapidly and have done an excellent job of optimizing its current design. But whatever the case is, Move technology is most likely here to stay as it shows a lot of promise in blockchain scalability and security.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Is Aptos blockchain the same or related to Sui blockchain?

No, Aptos and Sui and completely different and unrelated projects. The only connection between the two projects is that both teams have previously worked in blockchain development at Meta (formerly Facebook).

Is Aptos blockchain better than Sui blockchain?

It is still too early to say which one you should be more bullish on. Both projects have been developing rapidly and have done an excellent job of optimizing its current design. But whatever the case is, Move technology is most likely here to stay as it shows a lot of promise in blockchain scalability and security.

Is Sui blockchain better than Aptos blockchain?

It is still too early to say which one you should be more bullish on. Both projects have been developing rapidly and have done an excellent job of optimizing its current design. But whatever the case is, Move technology is most likely here to stay as it shows a lot of promise in blockchain scalability and security.

What are the similarities between Aptos and Sui blockchain?

Both Aptos and Sui use Move, a Rust-based programming language, for parallel execution on the blockchain, but Sui has a slightly version of it than Aptos.

What are the differences between Aptos and Sui blockchain?

Sui’s version of Move programming language makes it clear when an object is owned, shared, mutable or immutable, whereas Aptos does not. And although both blockchains use proof-of-stake as their consensus mechanism, the consensus algorithm behind it is different. Aptos uses BlockSTM for parallel executions, which is a derivative of HotStuff protocol, whereas Sui uses Narwhal and Tusk, a DAG-based mempool used for parallelization at the execution layer.

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Ronal Thapa
Ronal is a Senior China Blockchain Correspondant who has been covering the Chinese blockchain industry since its inception. He has written extensively on the subject, and his work has been featured in some of the world’s leading publications. Ronal is an expert on the Chinese blockchain market and has a deep understanding of the technology and its potential applications.