Aptos vs Sui Comparison: The New Generation Blockchain Race

Aptos and Sui are 2 new generation blockchains, what will be the project that can rise to become the leading Layer 1 platform in the market?

After Solana, recently, new generation Layer 1 projects have begun to appear, bringing many expectations to realize the "impossible trio of blockchain". Let's learn about Sui and Aptos, projects that are expected to rival Solana or even Ethereum.

Core knowledge:

• Non-EVM L1s are losing ground compared to Ethereum and EVM-chain, the opportunity for new non-EVM L1 appears.
• Aptos and Sui are two projects using the Move programming language, which are evaluated quite well for creativity in technology.
• Aptos came first and is currently realizing the first mover advantage over Sui.

Current Layer 1 context

Since the beginning of 2022, Layer 1 blockchains have shown signs of "unstable" in turn:

• Ethereum "older brother" after the announcement of ETH 2.0 encountered controversy from two sides, one side supported the Proof of Stake school , the other maintained the stance on Proof of Work . 
• Solana encountered a hacked wallet related to Slope wallet with a scale of up to 8000 people and unspecified damage.
• Tron currently exists mainly based on the breath of USDD.
• Fantom no longer attracts users after Andre Cronje left .
• Cardano has not yet formed a DeFi ecosystem while having been around since 2017...

In the context that L1 chains are competing very fiercely, non-EVM chains are somewhat weak, new projects have begun to appear, two names that are being noticed by the whole market, Aptos and Sui will be in charge. The mission is to become a rival to Solana and beyond to Ethereum.

Compare Aptos vs Sui: 2 new generation blockchains

What are Aptos and Sui?

Both Aptos and Sui  are new generation L1 blockchains, developed with the ultimate goal of creating a comprehensive, decentralized, high-transaction, and low-latency blockchain, thereby bringing Web3 closer. with general users.

Aptos and Sui are two project forks developed from Facebook's Diem blockchain (Meta today). After Diem blockchain co-founder David Marcus left Facebook, the project was later abandoned. The team working on the Diem project then gradually separated to develop other projects, in which Aptos and Sui were the two most noticed projects.

These are also two projects using the Move programming language, a programming language researched and developed for Diem.

Team & Formation

Aptos

Behind the Aptos project is Aptos Labs, founded by two co-founders Mo Shaikh (CEO) and Avery Ching (CTO). The two, along with several other team members who worked together at Meta on the Diem blockchain project, later founded Aptos Labs together to further develop the technology they built for Diem.

Other members in Aptos Labs are also people with extensive professional experience, having worked at large companies in the blockchain industry as well as traditional finance such as KPMG, Blackrock, Robinhood, Huobi, JP Morgan...

Recently Aptos has also attracted a few members from Solana Labs, the most prominent of which is Austin Virts, former Head of Marketing at Solana.

See more information about the entire Aptos Labs team here . 

Aptos is still quite new, the development roadmap is quite stable. At the beginning of March 2022, the devnet will be launched, the second quarter of 2022 will launch the incentive testnet, it is expected that the mainnet will be released in Q3/2022 and the network will be further developed in the fourth quarter of 2022 with new updates.

Sui

The team that built the Sui blockchain is Mysten Labs. Mysten Labs was co-founded by members Evan Cheng (CEO), Sam Blackshear (CTO), Adeniyi Abiodun (CPO), and George Danezis (Chief Scientist).

In which, Evan Cheng is the R&D Leader of Novi Financial (Meta's crypto product building branch), Adeniyi Abiodun is the Product Leader of Novi Financial... and many other members hold key roles in Meta's blockchain branch.

Sui launched a bit slower than Aptos. The new Sui will be introduced to the community in March 2022, the devnet will be launched in May 2022 and it is expected that it will not be possible to complete and launch the mainnet until the end of 2022.

→ It can be seen that both projects have talented teams, both of whom have long experience and have worked in big companies. In particular, Mysten Labs has more members who were previously key members of Meta (Facebook) engineering and product development, Aptos Labs is somewhat more diverse in terms of people.

In terms of roadmap and development process, Aptos has a slight advantage over Sui. Completing the mainnet first can give a first mover advantage and attract more users. However, this is only an expected roadmap, we have to wait for the official mainnet time to conclude.

Technology

Programming language

Both Aptos and Sui use the Move programming language used from the Diem project. Move is Solana's Rust-based programming language, Move focuses on memory safety, can provide transparency for immutable values ​​and prevents memory data leaks. 

Move was developed by the Diem team in 2019 - 2020, at that time NFT had not become popular, this new programming language was not optimized for NFT or GameFi genres . Formed in late 2021 early 2022, Sui has improved and added a bit, creating his own version of Sui Move.

This mechanism is called Object-centric model, Sui Move divides property types into object of which there are 3 main types:

• Owned object: Owned by a specific owner and can only be modified by that owner.
• Shared object: Mutable , has no specific owner and can be included in the transaction of different parties without any permission.
• Read-only object: Has no exclusive owner, cannot be changed by anyone after being published, and can be used in transactions by all users.

The division of assets into many types helps Sui to optimize processing speed, transaction time for NFTs, game items, etc. This is in line with the mainstream NFT/Game development orientation on Sui.

Consensus Mechanism

Both Aptos and Sui use a Proof of Stake consensus mechanism with validators staking native tokens and running the network. However, the two projects have different consensus algorithms behind. 

Aptos uses BlockSTM technology and the Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocol.

• Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) Consensus Protocol : Analyzes on-chain states and automatically updates validators to adjust validators that do not meet conditions without human intervention, only maintain network decentralization… The BFT system can continue to function even if some nodes fail.
• BlockSTM: lIs a consensus mechanism evolved from Hotstuff, a parallel transaction execution engine for smart contracts, which in turn can increase throughput for Aptos.

Sui uses Narhal & Tusk consensus algorithm, using DAG-based (directed acyclic graph) mempool to separate data transmission from transaction consensus, parallel transaction processing. The asynchronous protocol means it can withstand denial of service (DoS) attacks.

The parallel naming of the consensus mechanism also reveals two different tasks:

• Narwhal: Ensuring data availability when submitted leads to consensus.
• Tusk: Specifies a specific order of data.

This is done in a layered 2-module model, so Narwhal can also be used in conjunction with other external cryptocurrencies like HotStuff, BFT or Tendermint… Narwhal has also been used by other blockchains such as: Celo, Sommelier. 

→ In terms of technology, Sui is considered a bit better by the community due to having a more optimal programming language and a somewhat more secure consensus mechanism. Both projects scale to parallel transaction processing, maximizing network capacity. 

The whole project can also perform 120,000 - 130,000 TPS under test conditions, but for an accurate assessment, it is necessary to wait until the stage of actual use.

Tokenomics

Aptos

Aptos has not officially announced the token nor has information about the token, the economic model of the ecosystem. But it is also certain that there will be APTOS tokens used for gas fees and network security.

Sui

On the Sui side, information about the SUI token is revealed in more detail. Accordingly, SUI - the network's native coin will have the following main uses:

• Gas fees: all network operations on the platform require gas fees. Gas fees are rewarded to those who participate in the Proof of Stake mechanism. It can also be used to prevent spam and denial of service attacks.
• Storage Fund: In order to pay future validators to bear on-chain data storage costs, Sui's storage is used to distribute stake rewards to validators over time.
• Proof-of-stake Mechanism: Used to select, incentivize and reward platform operators, also known as validators and delegators.
• On-chain voting: To vote on decisions on governance and protocol upgrades.

In addition, Sui also has a gas pricing mechanism to keep gas fees low and predictable.

Fundraising

Aptos

Recently, Aptos has made a big splash when it comes to raising capital from big investors right in the gloomy market period. Up to now, Aptos has completed 2 rounds of Seed Round and Series A funding with a total amount of 350 million USD.

Seed Round:

• Publication date: March 15, 2022
• Amount raised: 200 million USD
• Main investor: Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)
• Other investors: Multicoin Capital, Three Arrows Capital (not yet collapsed), Hashed, Tiger Global, FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Parafi Capital…
• Valuation: Over 1 billion USD 

Series A:

• Publication date: July 25, 2022
• Amount raised: 150 million USD
• Main Investor: FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto
• Other investors: Apollo, Griffin Gaming Partners, Franklin Templeton, Circle Ventures, Superscrypt, and continued support of a16z, Multicoin Capital…
• Valuation: $2 billion

Sui 

On Sui's side, this project is also receiving the attention of many large investment funds in the market. Sui has completed a Series A funding round and is said to be conducting a Series B funding round. Specifically:

Series A:

• Announcement date: 6/12/2021
• Amount raised: 36 million USD
• Main investor: a16z
• Other investors: NFX, Scribble Ventures, Redpoint, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Electric Capital, Samsung NEXT, Slow Ventures, Standard Crypto, Coinbase Ventures…

Series B (ongoing):

• Release date: Unofficial
• Raised amount: $200 million (estimated)
• Investor (known): FTX Ventures with at least $140 million
• In this funding round, Mysten Labs is said to be raising capital at a valuation of 2-3 billion USD. A total of $236 million is expected to be raised.

→ Both projects have one of the biggest backers in the market, showing the potential of the two projects. Aptos is somewhat more prominent in terms of funding as well as valuation when in fact Sui has only recorded $ 36 million in capital. This also means that Aptos Labs is having stronger financial potential than Mysten Labs, this money will be used to develop the ecosystem in the future.

Ecosystem

Aptos

In general, the Aptos ecosystem has had a certain completion in terms of projects in different areas, the DeFi ecosystem is also quite complete even though it is only at the devnet stage, the projects span the arrays from AMM, Yield Optimizer, Derivative, Aggregator…. 

In addition to the above projects, there are projects Tsunami Exchange, Laminar, Mariana Exchange, AptoSwap, Umi Protocol, Econia in the DEX array that have confirmed to build on Aptos but have not yet launched products.

It can be seen that even in important sectors such as AMM or wallet, NFT Marketplace has also appeared the competition of many different projects, which will create motivation for projects to develop further. Although the projects are still new, this is a positive sign for the entire ecosystem.

Sui

Sui's ecosystem is still very new, the network is only in the DevNet stage, there are not many projects announced to deploy on this network. However, it is not nothing, there have been first projects appearing in different areas such as AMM, NFT, Wallet, Infrastructure.

The ecosystem is still very young, not yet formed enough basic puzzle pieces. This can be explained by forming and developing later than Aptos, the Sui Move programming language is somewhat different from the original Move, making Sui more picky developers.

See also: Overview of the Sui . ecosystem

→ In terms of ecosystem overview, Aptos is proving to be more dominant than Sui in terms of the number of projects as well as the completion level of the overall picture. This shows that Aptos is receiving more attention from the community, a larger ecosystem will attract more users and increase competition in the system.

Although both ecosystems are in fact at the devnet stage, not yet the mainnet, but the complete ecosystem and the large number of projects are a plus point for Aptos.

summary

In general, these are two projects that have attracted the attention of the community due to their new technology and huge amount of capital. To confirm which project has more potential at this stage is impossible because it is too early. However, at the present time, it can be seen that Aptos has a slight advantage over Sui due to its prior formation and development, community advantage and abundant financial potential after successful fundraising rounds. .

Information about 2 projects will be continuously updated by Coin98 Insights in this article when the projects are announced. Let's continue to wait for the race between the two ecosystems, who will become the real rival of Solana or even Ethereum?