If Sui presses the acceleration key, can it become the next breaker of Layer 1

原文标题：《 加速发展的 Sui，能否成为下一个 Layer 1 破局者 》

原文来源： Daniel Li, CoinVoice

Layer1 Blockchain Sui announced its Mainnet launch in the second quarter of this year, kicking off a series of educational events and content called "Wave to Mainnet" designed to educate the community about the potential of the Sui protocol ahead of the Mainnet launch. Sui and Aptos, the leader of Layer1, belong to the same Meta chain, and they were founded almost at the same time in terms of project establishment. Compared with Aptos, Sui paid more attention to the innovation of underlying technologies, with the goal of becoming the first Internet-based programmable blockchain platform. Although Sui was far inferior to Aptos in terms of development momentum, projects driven by technological innovation often had the potential to accumulate steadily. Sui had accumulated rich technical advantages in the past few years. With the upcoming release of Sui's main network, it was believed that Sui would soon usher in a wave of development climax.

Sui cultivated quietly and Aptos stood in the spotlight

Aptos inherits nearly three years of open source technology and development experience of Diem project, which can quickly realize the construction of the underlying architecture and the layout of ecological projects. In contrast, Sui chose to build the Layer1 network from scratch, causing it to fall far behind Aptos in the development process. Therefore, in terms of attracting capital and investors' attention at the early stage, Aptos with rapid development was more attractive to investors than Sui with its underlying structure still being built. Secondly, both of them, as Layer1 public chains, are committed to improving the security and scalability of blockchain and creating a high-performance blockchain infrastructure network for billions of people. However, there are some differences in their strategies or priorities in achieving their goals.

Aptos focuses on marketing. Aptos is marketed as a unique product created by the best developers in the IT industry. Although it is exaggerated, it is effective. Last year Q4 started the main network and issued coins. Although the price is down more than 76%, it has been very strong since the beginning of the year and has recently pulled back, but the total market value is still $2.08 billion. Secondly, in terms of ecological project cooperation, Aptos pays attention to the cooperation with well-known enterprises, such as the acceleration plan launched with Google Cloud in the aspect of infrastructure; In terms of games, it reached cooperation with NPIXEL, a 3A game studio in South Korea; In terms of payment, it has cooperated with Web3 fintech company MoonPay to integrate ecosystem projects such as Petra. Partnerships with well-known companies have brought huge traffic and attention to Aptos, which has also contributed to the rapid development of its ecological projects.

Different from Aptos, Sui pays more attention to the innovative application of underlying technologies than marketing. For example, the Sui modified version of Move language can more clearly indicate the ownership, variability, and composability of objects, making it naturally suitable for building meta-cosmic facilities. In terms of ecological projects, Sui received far less attention than Aptos because the main network of Sui was not online and most of the projects were still in the test stage. As a result, Aptos was like a star in the spotlight a lot of the time, while Sui was more like a silent backstage cultivator.

Sui and Aptos were both Layer1 public chains with founding teams from Diem and the same Move track, so they had a competitive relationship from the very beginning. However, since Sui built Layer1 network from scratch, the development process lagged behind, and most of the attention of the early market focused on Aptos, so the competitive relationship between the two was not obvious at the beginning. It wasn't until the recent successful conclusion of Sui's Wave 2 testing and the announcement that Mainnet was coming online that Aptos became concerned and alarmed. Last month, Sui's CTO accused Aptos on Twitter of pressuring the Pontem team, the host of MOVECON (the first large-scale forum of Move Ecology), to cancel the Sui team's talk and even to remove the Sui Foundation from its list of event organizers. This indicated that Aptos had begun to regard Sui as its competitor, which also affirmed Sui's market position and potential from the side.

Compared with Aptos, Sui's underlying technology has obvious advantages    

Although Sui had many shortcomings compared with Aptos, for example, Sui was inferior to Aptos in terms of ecological projects and community scale, Sui had always been committed to the innovation and application of underlying technologies, and had accumulated rich technical advantages in the past year. From the Sui-Move language to the Narwhal-Tusk consensus mechanism to the storage-fund token economics, Sui has made significant innovations at every level of blockchain projects, and in this respect Sui is unique even when compared to other new Layer1 public chains such as Aptos.

Sui-Move

Both Aptos and Sui use the Move language, but they are different. Aptos basically followed the classic design ideas of Diem white paper in design, while Sui was upgraded and adjusted to form a unique sui-move language. The biggest difference with Move is that Sui adopts an object-centric model rather than an address-centric model. Therefore, on Sui, almost everything, such as tokens, smart contracts, NFT, etc., can be represented as "objects". Each object has a set of properties, including owner address, read and write properties, transferable properties, functional properties, and so on. Sui-Move clearly indicates the ownership, sharing, mutable or immutable characteristics of the object, while Aptos does not. In addition, Sui's ownership API is more concise than Aptos's because it shows blockchain design more clearly. In terms of function, compared with Move language, Sui-Move has certain advantages in terms of security, smart contract support, programming pattern flexibility and compatibility.

Narwhal & Tusk

Sui's consensus mechanisms all minimize the communication needed between verifiers to process transactions in order to achieve lower latency. The consensus mechanism of Sui was divided into two parts: Narwhal and Tusk. Narwhal is a memory pool protocol used to store unacknowledged blockchain transactions and broadcast those transactions before the consensus protocol validates them. The protocol's mission is to reach consensus while maintaining data availability, and it is independent of consensus protocol and can tolerate asynchronous or intermittent failures. Tusk is an asynchronous consensus protocol that takes care of transaction sequencing. This protocol uses shared randomness to eliminate additional communication between nodes and allows each node to determine the overall order of transactions. When used in combination with the Narwhal protocol, high performance is ensured in the event of failure.

Theoretically, there is no known upper limit to the throughput scalability of Sui's design. Moreover, in terms of security, compared with synchronous blockchains (that is, most blockchains based on proof-of-work), Sui's security attribute can withstand harsh network conditions, network partitions or DoS attacks on validators, because it does not impose any synchronization assumption on the network.

Developer experience

The core feature of Aptos is seamless upgrades that allow developers to focus on building without disrupting users. In contrast, the Sui Development Kit (SDK) is much more convenient for developers. The SDK provides open source, generic, and user-friendly tools and allows developers to save a lot of time debugging smart contracts, waiting for audits, and building basic technology stack elements. In addition, the SDK tries to connect to other ecosystems and non-cryptographic use cases, such as: the game API connects directly to generic Layer1 instead of side chains or game-focused L2; "SuiEcho" guides the community by facilitating the portability of digital assets from other ecosystems to Sui; "Handshake" is a front-end tool that can serve as a channel for users to distribute, claim/redeem Sui digital assets (e.g., payments, merchant coupons) to encrypted and non-encrypted users.

Sui token economics

In addition to a series of technological innovations designed to optimize the composability and scalability of the system, Sui implemented a unique economics model of tokens. Different from the traditional proof-of-interest chain token economic model, Sui's token economic model adds the function of "storage fund". As blockchain is a kind of data structure that only increases and does not decrease, more and more data need to be maintained on the chain over time, and the cost will also increase accordingly. As a result, the later users of Sui need to pay a higher fee than the early users. The "storage fund" is basically born to solve this problem, making the early users pay more fees. Make the network accessible to all households at a similar cost level.

In addition, Sui's storage fund pays a verifier in the system, or the person who actually stores the blockchain data and does its maintenance. As the maintenance work increases, so does the expense to the verifier, which also incentivize more people to become verifiers in the system, and as more people become verifiers, the total amount of available storage space increases, further leading to lower gas costs for writing to the blockchain. Sui's token economics model is a typical representative of a highly scalable chain economy model, which uses game theory to ensure that gas fees remain relatively constant throughout the life cycle of the blockchain.  

Review of Sui Ecological Project  

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