Asset management firm VanEck recently published a report that provides a comprehensive comparison of the two major Move language blockchains, Sui and Aptos. This article will excerpt the content, accompanied by vivid analogies, to help readers understand the development and competition between Sui and Aptos.
Table of Contents
ToggleOrigin and Overview of Sui and Aptos
Sui and Aptos were both founded by members of the Facebook blockchain project Diem team. Diem originally aimed to establish a stablecoin payment system, but was terminated due to regulatory pressure. These two blockchains are both based on the Move smart contract language, which is derived from Rust. Move language helps improve transaction processing speed and throughput, making Aptos and Sui representatives of technical innovation. The Move ecosystem has grown from a market capitalization of $50 billion to $220 billion within a year.
Additionally, the Move language provides a better entry point for new developers in the cryptocurrency field, as cryptocurrency developers are only a thousandth of the size of the JavaScript (the most widely used programming language in the world) developer community. VanEck cited a joke: "Meta (Facebook)'s full-time developers are more than the entire cryptocurrency field." By providing a more approachable and efficient language, Move has the potential to attract a wider developer community, promoting experimentation and innovation.
Sui and Aptos: Blockchain Performance and Scalability
Blockchain Transaction Processing
Although Aptos and Sui both use the Move language, they actually adopt different versions of Move, primarily based on their transaction processing approaches. Both utilize parallel transaction processing techniques, but the specific implementations differ.
Sui employs static parallel processing, identifying conflicts and determining the execution order before transactions start, improving efficiency and reducing resource waste during processing.
- Advantages: Increases transaction throughput and reduces computational overhead, suitable for DeFi transactions like DEXes.
- Challenges: More strict on developers, requiring more granular transaction design.
Aptos uses dynamic parallel processing, where transactions do not need to pre-annotate state access parts and are processed directly. If conflicts occur, they are rolled back and reordered.
- Advantages: More developer-friendly, able to dynamically adapt to different application scenarios.
- Challenges: May face efficiency issues in high-intensity transaction scenarios (e.g., NFT minting rushes or DEX high-volume trading).
Blockchain Transaction Throughput
Aptos reached 13.3K TPS in October 2024, while Sui has demonstrated even stronger theoretical scalability. Aptos relies on Quorum Store technology to boost throughput, while Sui leverages Pilot Fish to horizontally scale validator processing capacity.
Ethereum is a Slow Restaurant, Move Blockchains Reform the Architecture
VanEck further describes blockchains using a restaurant analogy:
- The blockchain is the restaurant, providing the infrastructure and environment for the entire process.
- Blockchain users are the customers, interacting with the restaurant by placing orders, just as users interact with the blockchain through transactions.
- User transactions are restaurant orders, these are the demands made by the customers.
- On-chain applications are the waiters, serving as intermediaries, accepting customer orders (transactions) and delivering them to the kitchen (validators) for processing. They also return the completed orders (state changes) to the customers.
- Validators are the kitchen, responsible for processing orders (verifying and executing transactions) and preparing the output (state changes).
- State changes are the food delivered to the customers, the final product representing the processed transactions or updated blockchain state, provided to the customers.
Ethereum is a blockchain that processes one state update per block, with each transaction block being small and able to handle a limited number of transactions. Additionally, transactions are processed sequentially, not in parallel, meaning each transaction must be executed one after the other. Even if transactions touch different parts of the blockchain state, they must wait for other transactions to be processed.
Imagining Ethereum as a restaurant, many waiters are taking orders at the tables, but there is only one chef in the kitchen. In the Ethereum restaurant, customers give their food orders to the waiters, and these waiters compile a massive list of orders. The list capacity is limited; if a customer doesn't buy an expensive enough meal, their order will be removed from the list (and they still owe the order fee). After some time (about 12 seconds), the customer order list is sent to the chef, who arranges the batches based on their own needs.
Since the Ethereum restaurant has only one person cooking, many tables ordering at the same time will lead to order queues. While many people think the food at the Ethereum restaurant is very good, it has proven to be too popular to meet customer demand. Ethereum restaurant customers are frustrated with the long wait times and the high "tips" (gas fees) they have to pay the maitre d' to get their food faster.
Sui Utilizes Static Parallelism, Similar to Solana's Process
For example, in the Sui restaurant, when customers place orders, the waiters will categorize the orders based on which parts of the kitchen they require. If someone orders a burger and fries, the waiter will tell the kitchen to use the grill and fryer. A more Taiwanese-style analogy would be, in a stir-fry restaurant, if Tables A and B both order fried dragon balls, the waiters will ask the chef to stay by the fryer to increase efficiency.
Aptos Uses Dynamic Parallelism, Similar to Monad
In the Aptos restaurant, the waiters do not actually touch the kitchen (transaction processing). Once the orders reach the kitchen, the kitchen manager (scheduler) receives the orders and devises the most efficient cooking process.
When an order comes in, the kitchen manager assumes the transaction has no conflicts and instructs the chefs to start cooking the food. If conflicts arise, they are only discovered after the chefs have started cooking. If there is a dispute, the chefs must stop cooking, discard the unfinished meals, and have the kitchen manager resolve the conflict. Although the "throwing away the cooked meal" process sounds wasteful and may slow down Aptos, it won't significantly impact output in most cases. This is because the Aptos kitchen is very fast.
Aptos is More Developer-Friendly, Sui is More Efficient
Aptos is more developer-friendly, as the waiters (applications) do not need to consider which parts of the kitchen the orders require. From the perspective of attracting developers to the ecosystem, some find this frustrating, and thus choose Aptos over Sui. This is because writing the additional code takes time, and dependencies may need to be changed frequently. Due to Aptos' design, application creators' development becomes simpler.
Sui pre-resolves conflicts between competing transactions, allowing it to establish orders from the start. This approach reduces the computational resources needed to handle conflicts during execution, freeing up the ability to process other matters. This design has advantages in scenarios with frequent decentralized exchange activities.
Going back to the restaurant analogy, Sui can pre-order the orders to prevent conflicts due to limited kitchen space. Even during peak hours, Sui's kitchen space can be more effectively allocated. However, Aptos' dynamic conflict resolution usually works well, but may cause chaos during high-demand periods. Imagine a Friday night at the Aptos restaurant, with many customers competing for the popular dishes. The kitchen staff would have to re-check, re-cook, and re-serve orders during the busy time, potentially leading to delays and inefficiencies under high demand.
Sui introduced a unique advantage called the local fee market, where if the trading demand for the SUI/USDC pool on a DEX on Sui is high, the blockchain can specifically raise the transaction fee for that pool. At the same time, other users will not face increased fees.
This localized pricing model contrasts sharply with blockchains like Aptos and Ethereum that have a global unified fee market. On these platforms, a surge in demand for a particular application (such as during a scramble for NFTs) will increase transaction fees for all users. This makes the entire blockchain more expensive and difficult to use.
In the Sui restaurant, each cooking station in the kitchen can set its own price based on demand. For example, if the demand for pasta is high, the pasta station can raise the price, but the price of the steak at the grill station will not be affected. In contrast, Aptos has a single pricing mechanism that shares kitchen resources. If the demand for ice cream surges, the fees for unrelated items like pizza will also increase, even if the pizza oven is underutilized.
For simple transactions like payments, Sui outperforms other blockchains in terms of latency and throughput (TPS). Sui calls these "fast fish" and "pilot fish". The Fast Path allows simple payment transactions to bypass consensus, resulting in transaction latency as low as 300ms. At the same time, Pilot Fish proves that by allowing validators to add more servers, Sui can scale almost infinitely.
Aptos developed an expansion mechanism called Quorum Store, which focuses on the consensus process to increase blockchain speed, improve throughput, and reduce latency. It allows more validators to participate in the initial transaction processing, not just the leader.
Sui's DeFi is more mature, Aptos has stronger stablecoins
Currently, the history of these two Move blockchains is less than a few years; users are still in the early stages. Sui is ahead of Aptos in user metrics. Although the number of monthly active addresses for Sui and Aptos is roughly the same, with Sui at 9.2 million and Aptos at 8.9 million, Sui has performed well in terms of profitability (note: active addresses may not be a reliable measure of user activity due to the ease of a user controlling multiple addresses).
From a fee revenue perspective, Sui generated 6 times more fee revenue than Aptos last year ($10.4 million vs $1.7 million). Sui's trading volume is also 3.5 times that of Aptos ($38.3B vs $10.8B). In terms of DeFi TVL, Sui is at $1.6B, while Aptos is at $930 million. However, Aptos ($750 million) has more on-chain stablecoins than Sui ($476 million).
Both Sui and Aptos face the problem of hired capital
Sui's lending is mainly concentrated on Suilend and Navi, both of which have a TVL of over $450 million. In comparison, the largest lending protocol on Aptos had only $300 million before the deadline. Sui has deeper perpetual futures trading depth, with Bluefin's average trading volume of around $250 million, ranking seventh among all perpetual futures. However, Aptos has a more successful decentralized stablecoin project called Thala (TVL $135 million), in contrast to Sui's Bucket Protocol with a TVL of around $73 million.
Sui has already rewarded over 7 million Sui (currently worth around $300 million) in 2024 alone, and since June 2024, the collective Sui incentives have added approximately 5.2% to 10% to the annualized yield of DeFi protocols.
Aptos follows a similar path to Sui in incentivizing DeFi TVL, currently adding around 6.5% APT rewards for borrowing/lending USDC/USDT, 8% to 12% APT rewards for depositing BTC, and around 15% to 20% APT rewards for DEX pools to encourage liquidity provision. It is estimated that Aptos has spent over 10 million APT (around $100 million) to incentivize its DeFi ecosystem.
The result is that both Sui and Aptos have grown their DeFi development very directly and quickly. However, this has also led to a large amount of "hired capital" (users just for the rewards), similar to the federal government subsidizing a particular industry. Sui and Aptos' incentive activities have created a massive ecosystem, but whether it is sustainable remains to be seen.
Sui's community has gone further than Aptos
Compared to traditional blockchains, the culture of these two chains currently lacks substantial depth. Sui had an average of 280 active developers per week in the first half of 2024, while Aptos had 272. In comparison, Ethereum has 3,300, and Solana has 1,200. Sui and Aptos developers collectively account for less than 4% of all active developers in the cryptocurrency field.
Sui also leads Aptos by nearly 9 times in Google searches. In fact, over the past 90 days, Sui's global search interest has exceeded Solana for 17 days and Ethereum for 16 days.
The relatively impoverished developer communities of Aptos and Sui have resulted in neither being able to have truly differentiated successful applications. Another disappointing aspect is that neither has been able to develop applications that leverage the unique technical capabilities of either chain. For example, the most important perpetual exchange on Sui, Bluefin, has its entire trading engine deployed on Bluefin's private servers, rather than on Sui's blockchain.
Sui's trading experience is significantly better than Aptos
VanEck asserts that Sui's system is currently more suitable for traders than Aptos, as Sui has built a better system for traders, which should theoretically translate into better pricing on Sui DEXs, primarily based on the following components:
- Programmable Transaction Blocks (PTB)
- Predictable gas fee pricing
- Favorable fee structure for large trades
- Local fee market
- Deepbook
Sui's PTB allows transactions to dynamically decide which calls to make and which parts of the state to touch. This enables real-time decision-making based on on-chain and off-chain data, providing unprecedented flexibility. This feature is particularly important for high-performance applications, such as decentralized exchange aggregators. On Sui, these aggregators can leverage off-chain computation (such as ASICs/GPUs) to determine the optimal trade routes, combining on-chain liquidity and external pricing data.
DeFi was added to the Sui blockchain, which is a global centralized limit order book (CLOB) on Sui. This liquidity layer allows DEXs and aggregators to leverage Sui's global liquidity. It consolidates Sui's liquidity into a unified pool and provides deeper liquidity for traders operating on Sui. Since any application can leverage its liquidity layer, it reduces the advantage of liquidity giants, creating a fair competitive environment and lowering the prices charged by DEXs to users.
SUI and APT will see billions of dollars unlocked
A key difference between SUI and APT tokens is that SUI has a capped token supply, while APT tokens have no maximum supply. The Aptos inflation rate is currently 6.7% per year, decreasing by 1.5% annually. However, the unlimited supply of APT caused by persistent inflation is offset by the token burning from transaction fees on Aptos.
In contrast, Sui does not consume fees in transactions. As a result, the more frequent transactions on Sui benefit those who stake tokens as validators. This is because those who stake as validators on Sui will receive the transaction fees. On Aptos, the increase in transaction fees benefits everyone equally due to the token burning.
Both Sui and Aptos will face significant token unlocks in the coming years. Currently, Aptos' circulating supply is greater than Sui's (39.9% vs. 30.9%). Next year, with investor unlocks, both protocols will significantly increase their token supplies. Aptos will release 11.9% of its total supply (valued at $1.2B at current prices), while Sui will release 7.6% of its total supply (valued at $3.65B at current prices).
Sui and Aptos: Our Valuation
Our valuation of Sui and Aptos is based on their expected year-end market share in the Smart Contract Platform (SCP) total market value. Our forecast for the SCP market value is derived from the projected growth of the US M2 money supply, reflecting their historical correlation. We expect M2 to reach around $22.3 trillion by the end of 2025, maintaining a 3.2% annualized growth rate since the last trough in October 2023.
Through regression analysis, we estimate the total SCP market value to reach $1.1 trillion by the end of 2025, a 43% growth from the current $770 billion market value. In comparison, the historical peak of the SCP valuation was $989 billion in November 2021. The 12-month moving average of SCP market value changes is positively correlated with monthly M2 changes, with an R² of 0.36 and a t-statistic of 5.7 (p < 0.0001).
Currently, Move-based blockchains collectively account for approximately 2.7% of the SCP market share, with Aptos (0.7%) and Sui (2%). We use an AR model to forecast this proportion to rise to 6.5%, which exhibits the lowest AIC among comparable forecasting models. The model also predicts the individual prices for Aptos and Sui.
Sui and Aptos: Price Forecast Estimates by the End of 2025
Sui: Capturing 5.5% of the SCP market, corresponding to a market value of $61 billion. In January 2025, 3 billion tokens will be unlocked, which translates to a token price of around $16. This represents a 326% increase from the current price of $3.75.
Aptos: Capturing 1% of the SCP market, corresponding to a market value of $11 billion. With 50.5% of the token supply (507 million tokens) already unlocked, this translates to a token price of around $22, a 201% increase from the current price of $7.30.
Sui and Aptos: Our Conclusion
We believe the evidence supports Sui being superior to Aptos due to Sui's performance advantages and expansion potential. The advantages we found are not replicable in Aptos, including the native fee market, Pilot Fish, and Fast Path. Additionally, Sui's superior technical capabilities and economics make it more attractive to market participants, leading to a more favorable DeFi ecosystem. From a marketing perspective, Sui has formed a powerful meme narrative around its technical capabilities.
However, we believe Aptos' advantages in design flexibility and a more robust chain architecture may prove to be competitive advantages. While Sui currently leads in many economic metrics such as TVL, DEX trading volume, and transaction fees, this advantage may be dynamic. The long-term winner will depend on which platform can sustain innovation and translate it into ecosystem expansion, including novel applications of cryptography.
Investment Risks for Sui and Aptos
Sui and Aptos employ novel blockchain designs that have not been thoroughly stress-tested in high-intensity environments. Although both have experienced surges in transaction volume, most have been simple transactions, rather than the level of DEX trading activity seen on Solana.
As second-generation high-throughput blockchains, Aptos and Sui face competition from mature ecosystems such as Ethereum and Solana. While these older public chains may lack the technical complexity of Aptos and Sui, they benefit from larger developer bases and user support with substantial financial resources.
Emerging competitors like Monad and Berachain further intensify the landscape. Monad combines powerful technology with a focused community, while Berachain has gained momentum by leveraging the speculative animal spirits of the crypto community. Additionally, Solana's upcoming Firedancer upgrade in 2025 is expected to enhance its performance, potentially surpassing Aptos and Sui in speed and throughput.
Finally, like all financial instruments, cryptocurrencies are subject to the broader economic cycles. As alternative forms of currency and finance, they compete with traditional monetary frameworks. The crypto markets also exhibit high sensitivity to financial policy cycles. Our analysis reveals a strong correlation between M2 supply and the value of smart contract platforms, underscoring the importance of macroeconomic trends in influencing blockchain token valuations.
Risk Disclaimer
Cryptocurrency investments carry high risks, and their prices may fluctuate significantly, potentially resulting in a total loss of the principal. Please carefully evaluate the risks.
