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Detailed Move: Can it become Javascript in Web3?

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Can Move and MoveVM build their own vibrant ecosystem?

Original title: "Move: Javascript for Web3"

Original source: Bixin Ventures

Foreword:

Looking around Twitter posts and encrypted publications, Sui and Aptos' name always comes up. What's up with these new high-throughput L1 blockchains? Why do they attract investment from a16z, FTX, Multicoin, etc.? We discovered that both blockchains have deep historical ties to Diem, and both use a new programming language — Move.

In this article, we will deeply discuss the characteristics of Move, and briefly introduce blockchains such as Sui and Aptos that adopt Move, then review the birth of Solidity/EVM, and finally compare whether Move and MoveVM are You can create your own vibrant ecosystem.

< h4>Simple directory:

1. The origin of Move

2. The advantages of Move

3. The development ecology of Move

4. Solidity/EVM: it How to become the most dynamic developer ecosystem

5. The future of the Move language

1. The origin of Move

Move is a Rust-based programming language developed for Meta's Diem blockchain project. The team was working on other smart contract languages at the time, but none had the properties of scarcity, determinism, and verifiability, so they built Move.

The existing Move github source code repository is currently managed by Mysten Labs, and the teams from Aptos and Sui form the core development team of Move. The vision of the Move language is to become the Javascript in Web3, a framework that helps developers build blockchain applications safely, easily and quickly.

Second, the advantages of Move

Move has nothing to do with the platform , supporting shared libraries, tools, and developer communities across blockchains. The Move language has been designed with an emphasis on security to avoid many scenarios where Web 3.0 users are victimized, including but not limited to re-entrancy vulnerabilities, poison tokens and spoofed token approvals approvals) and other issues. Digital assets should also be considered resources, which means that digital assets cannot be randomly copied or accidentally destroyed.

For additional protection, Move can be assisted by the Move Prover verification tool, which allows developers to write formal specifications for key Check code execution correctness.

3. The development ecology of Move

1. Sui developed by Mysten Labs< /h4>

(1) What is Sui and what is the background of the team?

Mysten Labs' Sui is a decentralized proof-of-stake blockchain with horizontally scalable throughput and storage. The team behind Mysten Labs comes from Novi Research, the advanced blockchain R&D division within Meta, working on the operation and encryption of the Diem blockchain and the Move programming language. The founding team includes CEO Evan Cheng, CPO Adeniyi Abiodun, CTO Sam Blackshear (founder of Move), Chief Scientist George Danezis and Chief Cryptographer Kostas Chalkais.

(2) Financing event

Mysten Labs is in talks to raise a $200 million Series B round at a $2 billion valuation, led by FTX Ventures. Mysten Labs raised $36 million in a Series A round led by Andressen Horowitz in late 2021.

(3) Performance


Sui processing speed is expected to exceed 120,000 TPS, can process independent transactions at a sub-second speed, and can process more complex transactions (shared objects) at 3 Second speed processing. Dependencies of transactions are mapped out before being executed, allowing independent transactions to be processed through Byzantine consensus broadcasting, while transactions involving shared objects are handled by another consensus protocol called Narwhal & Tusk .

（4）Move language on Sui


When Sui uses Move, it makes some changes to the core functionality of Move, especially in terms of global storage operators and key abilities . These changes preserve the security and flexibility of Move, but optimize the storage and address mechanisms, resulting in improved network performance and reduced transaction confirmation times.


(5) Development Roadmap

Sui DevNet has been publicly available since May, and the team has announced the launch of an incentivized testnet in August 2022. Registration for the Sui Hackathon has also been open since the end of June.

（6）Ecological Project


There has been little information about projects developed on Sui. So far, the Chrome extension self-hosted wallet Sui Wallet has been launched, while the third-party Ethos Wallet is live on DevNet.

2, Apots

(1) What is Aptos and who is behind it?

Aptos is a layer 1 blockchain with a mission to create universal and fair access to decentralized assets for billions of people. Aptos was co-founded by CEO Mo Shaik and former CTO Avery Ching Chief Software Engineer, Meta Internal Blockchain Solutions. Prior to Meta, Mo worked at Conesnsys, BlackRock and Boston Consulting Group, while Avery worked at Yahoo. The rest of the Aptos team consists of PhDs, researchers, engineers, designers, and strategists with work experience in Meta, Novi, Amazon, VMware, and more.

(2) Financing event

Aptos completed a $200 million investment led by a16z in March, with participation from Tiger Global, Katie Haun, Multicoin Capital, 3 Arrows Capital, FTX Ventures and Coinbase Ventures followed on July 25 with a $150 million round led by FTX Ventures.

(3) Performance

Aptos can now reach a maximum of 10,000 TPS, and the theoretical maximum throughput is 160,000 TPS. Most transactions are verified after two network broadcasts, with a finalization time of 250 milliseconds. The key to Aptos' high throughput is the ability to separate the transaction execution layer from the consensus protocol, achieve parallel execution capabilities through Block-STM, and achieve sub-second latency through state synchronization. The consensus engine was adapted from the 4th iteration of Diem's HotStuff and his team.

（4）Move language on Aptos

Aptos extends the core MoveVM with additional functionality through an adapter layer, which includes parallelism via Block-STM, allowing concurrent execution without user input Executing transactions, used for large-scale storage in accounts, tables for storing keys, and decoupled fine-grained storage (fine grained storage) The amount of data in accounts will affect the Gas Fee for transactions related to accounts.

(5) Development Roadmap

Aptos DevNet has been publicly available since March, and the team has completed Phase 1 of 4 planned incentivized testnets, Phase 2 is currently underway. Aptos also announced a grant program in June to further accelerate the rapid development of the Aptos ecosystem, with applications now open and live.

（6）Ecological Progress

There are more than 1,500 Forks on the Aptos core repository, and now more than 100 projects across DeFi, NFT, games, etc. are expected to be deployed on the mainnet. Pontem Network, Macalinao brothers, Nutrios, PayMagic, MartianDAO, Solrise and other teams are already preparing for the Aptos mainnet, which is expected to launch around the end of September.

3. Other blockchains using Move language

(1) 0L - an L1 blockchain protocol forked from an open source codebase created by Diem. The open source project started in 2019 as a community-driven initiative with no corporate sponsors, venture capital or foundations.

(2) Starcoin - a smart contract platform using enhanced proof-of-work consensus and Move language. It optimizes the construction of different ecosystems such as DeFi, NFT, and games through layered and flexible interoperability.

4. Comparison between Sui/Aptos and other blockchains

Multi-dimensional comparison of four public chains

< blockquote style="text-align: center;">Source: Aptos, Solana Explorer, Etherscan, Sui Node, Aptos Node, Solana Node, ETH Node

From the above comparison, Sui and Aptos are similar to Solana in executing transactions in parallel, so they have more High throughput.

However, when running Both Sui and Aptos are closer to Ethereum when it comes to full validator nodes, as the barrier to entry is lower, which will contribute to greater decentralization of the community validator network.

Interestingly, Sui and Aptos have much lower storage requirements than Solana and Ethereum. Once more similar historical states appear on the two nascent blockchains, then we need to see if the larger storage space is worthwhile.

V. Solidity/EVM: How it became the most dynamic developer ecosystem

To fully understand the path Move/MoveVM took to build their own programming language and virtual machine, we need to review Solidity/EVM and how they became the de facto smart contract programming language today.

In the early days, there were There are two ways to write smart contracts on the new blockchain.

a) Use current Take your own programming language and run it through the general-purpose virtual machine WebAssembly (WASM)

b) Build a new programming language and a new virtual machine from scratch.

Although Solidity and EVM It’s the road less traveled, but it appears to be bearing fruit after 2020’s DeFi boom. So how does Solidity/EVM outperform the general-purpose WASM VM? Starcoin core developer @jolestar believes there are three reasons:

a) A common language is better suited for an operating system than a blockchain. If functions such as operating system calls, file I/O, hardware, networking, and concurrency libraries are stripped away, then the libraries shared between smart contracts and programming languages are minimal. This defeats the purpose of using a general-purpose programming language, since the main advantage of a programming language is to leverage existing shared libraries in the developer ecosystem.

b) Although in theory WASM can support different programming languages, the reality is that programming languages with runtime systems (such as Go, Java) are not suitable for blockchains, because once Compilation will have a large number of binary files. This effectively limits the programming languages to C, C++, and Rust, which, from a new developer's perspective, are not much different from Solidity in terms of difficulty of learning. Additionally, various programming languages can lead to unexpected fragmentation of the developer ecosystem.

c) Given that each chain handles state differently, even if they run on the same WASM VM, interoperability is still an issue. Since the smart contracts on each chain cannot be directly migrated to different chains, there is also the problem of fragmentation of the developer ecosystem.

Furthermore, Solidity has proven user-sticky given its reproducible open-source library. The ability to use audited code is a huge convenience for application developers; knowing that a secure smart contract requires a security audit, each line of code incurs an additional cost.

A larger developer ecosystem from the EVM community contributes to a large amount of audited code, which will encourage more developers to build on the EVM.

6. The Future of Move Language

Move/MoveVM is now going down the same path as Solidity/EVM, and there is some data to show that it does.

Source: a16z State of Crypto

Solana has made a similar choice, using the programming language Rust Build your own virtual machine and see massive developer activity on the Move chain similar to Solidity's early growth trajectory. In terms of users, Solana has also established itself as the chain with the highest number of active accounts on the daily, 7D and 30D metrics.

Given that FTX Ventures is an investor in both Sui and Aptos, we believe they can help develop the Move ecosystem as they did during Solana's bootstrap phase. All that said, both Sui and Aptos are pushing their DevNets heavily, including incubation bounties and hackathons, and we expect to see increased developer activity in the coming months.

Furthermore, to help overcome the initial lack of developer resources for new programming languages, and to assist in the gradual migration of developers from other languages to new languages, projects such as Pontem have developed a fork of Diem MoveVM, It can now be deployed to other existing chains, such as Polkadot, Cosmos, Avalanche, etc., and a new EVM compatible with MoveVM is being developed.

In general, We believe that Move is a language that can provide a safer, faster, and easier way to write smart contracts. It will become the base layer of a strong and vibrant developer ecosystem. I believe that someone will use Move to build The next generation of Web3 applications to attract more Web3 users.

In the coming weeks, we will be sharing our deeper findings and analysis of the Sui and Aptos blockchains.

This article Completion must thank Jolestar, who provided his technical expertise and perspective. Jolestar is an early adopter of Move and a core developer of Starcoin.