ViaWallet | Why Do Top Investors Favor Move-built Public Chains?

[CoinEx]

Three years ago, Facebook (now Meta) loudly announced a whitepaper for Libra, the company’s cryptocurrency project, which attracted worldwide attention. This also made Libra a key target of state regulators across the globe. Facing intensive regulatory scrutiny, Libra struggled as it sought growth and was renamed Diem just one year after its launch. However, the name did not bring any good luck to the project. Diem was eventually acquired by Silvergate, a US-based bank in 2022, and the project was aborted.

Although Diem failed, members of its team made concrete contributions. This year, the field of new public chains witnessed another boom, which fostered new categories that include privacy-preserving public chains, modular public chains, and Move-built public chains. In particular, Move-built public chains have attracted the most attention.



What are Move-built public chains?

Move-built public chains refer to public chains built with Move language, the legacy of the aborted Libra. When it released its whitepaper, Diem also published Move, a new smart contract language based on Rust. At the time, this programming language designed specifically for crypto was considered Diem’s biggest highlight.

According to Move: A Language With Programmable Resources released by Diem, the most prominent feature of Move is that the language is safer and more flexible than Solidity, the language used by Ethereum and EVM-based public chains. When it comes to security, as Move distinguishes assets from other data, it avoids problems such as random token generation and arbitrary asset access. Additionally, Move also differs from Solidity in terms of smart contract calls: the former uses a different design that reduced the security loopholes in contracts. As for flexibility, since Move is based on transitive modules, it is easier for developers to optimize and upgrade Move-built chains. More specifically, after a module is upgraded, all smart contracts using the module will be automatically upgraded.

What Move-built public chains are there?

Right now, Aptos, Sui, and Linera are among some of the most trending Move-built chains, and their founding teams are all from Meta, specifically, Diem and Novi (a crypto wallet built for Diem).

Of the three, Aptos was launched the earliest. From 2021 to 2022, the project raised a stunning $350 million, which demonstrates its popularity in the capital market. Moreover, not long ago, the Aptos mainnet officially went live, and Aptos airdropped tokens worth over $1,200 to each testnet participant on average, which started a new airdrop craze in the current bear market.

Although Aptos boasts a theoretical TPS of 160,000 at most, its real maximum TPS only stands at 2,107 as of November 7. At the moment, the chain has built a booming ecosystem that spans nearly 100 projects, including genres such as infrastructure, games, NFT, and DeFi, among others.

Apart from Aptos, Sui is the most trending public chain during the recent period. Following the Aptos airdrop, many speculators turned to Sui, which shares the same origin as Aptos. Last year, Mysten Labs, the team behind Sui, raised $36 million. The team announced last September that it had completed a $300 million fund-raising round. To date, the market cap of Mysten Labs has exceeded $2 billion, which justifies, to a large extent, users’ confidence in the prospects of Sui and its token value.

With respect to security, Sui resembles Aptos in many ways, but the two significantly differ in terms of their architecture. The biggest highlight of Sui is the Sui consensus engine, which is composed of Narwhal and Tusk (replaced by Bullshark in August). Additionally, Sui has upgraded the Move language into Sui Move, which allows it to benefit from improved network performance. According to the relevant tests, an unoptimized Sui validator running on an 8-core M1 Macbook Pro can execute and commit as many as 120,000 transactions per second (TPS).

Linera is the newest project among the three chains. In June, the chain raised $6 million during a fund-raising round led by a16z. Although Linera did not clearly state its use of Move, its technical logic based on Rust is very similar to that of Move. Besides, the founder of the project also worked on Novi, so Linera is usually considered as the next hit Move-based project, following Aptos and Sui. Linera focuses on linear scaling to scale up performance and solve throughput limits by adding processing units. That said, as Linera remains in its infancy, not much official information is available.

From these three chains, we can tell that institutional investors have a preference for Move-built public chains. Despite that, the real performance of Aptos following the launch of its mainnet has been controversial. Could the Meta background of Move-built chains help them become the next Solana and win over investors? Only time will tell.