Original: https://medium.com/@state_xyz/mysten-labs-sui-vs-aptos-other-l1s-d046b598a914
Author: State io
About 2 weeks ago, the media broke the news of Mysten Labs’ upcoming Series B financing, which got a lot of people especially excited. This also led to a flood of posts about Mysten Labs' Sui native L1 blockchain. This happened when I published an article about Aptos. On the surface, the two share striking similarities — most notably, both were launched by teams of ex-Meta execs (fka Facebook). So I think it's easy to compare between the two.
The caveat here is that a like-for-like comparison is unlikely until both L1 blockchains have launched to mainnet. Each L1 disclosed different information, such as Aptos token economics will not be known until its mainnet launch; while Sui has released their token economics white paper.
start…
Mysten Labs & Sui Overview
Mysten Labs was founded by Meta's Novi research team - also working on the Diem blockchain. Like Aptos, Sui is not affiliated with Meta in any way, even though it was created by former Novi-Meta personnel.
Mysten Labs designed its own high-performance layer 1 (“L1”) proof-of-stake (“PoS”) blockchain, Sui. While Sui attempts to solve the blockchain trilemma, it centers on scaling composable and dynamic NFTs for a wide range of metaverse applications including gaming, social, and commerce. In contrast, Diem was originally designed to handle small payment traffic (10 seconds to 100 seconds) between a small number of hosted wallets. Diem's original architecture would not support mass adoption by any meaningful measure.
Additionally, the group has entered into a partnership with the protocol to apply its research on scalability and consensus improvements. The partnership entails open sourcing and deploying its Narwhal & Tusk consensus mechanism (discussed below) and the programmatic efficiency of Move. So far, there are two official partnerships — Celo (a mobile-first, EVM-compatible network) and Sommelier (a transaction coprocessor for Ethereum).
Team: Before founding Mysten Labs / Sui, the co-founders all worked at Novi:
Interestingly, the Mysten Labs team appears to have managed to recruit more of Meta's crypto human capital. Continuity and maturity of the team is a very attractive factor for any start-up, and Mysten Labs also benefited from it.
financing history
A round
Round B
It is estimated that the cumulative fundraising will be 236 million US dollars.
Token Economics
Similarities to Aptos
Apart from the fact that both teams were spun off from Meta, Sui and Aptos have some superficial and fundamental similarities, which can be summarized as follows:
Pros (deviations from Aptos)
According to today's public disclosure, further digging into the key differences hides behind it. They look like this:
Gas mechanism: Sui is able to keep gas prices low and predictable, while incentivizing validators to optimize transaction processing and prevent denial-of-service (“DoS”) attacks.
At the start of each epoch, validators vote on the network-wide gas price, which is used as a reference for users to anchor when submitting transactions for processing. Provide incentives for validators to keep gas around the reference price every epoch and respond. Those who submit high prices will be punished with discounted rewards. Likewise, non-responsive validators receive relatively little reward and risk reduced delegation stake as users expect transactions to be processed efficiently. Additionally, predictable gas results in predictable transactions being processed. Gas prices are kept low even during periods of high activity because its throughput scales linearly with more machines per validator; validators can correspondingly add more machines to meet increased network demand . Traditional blockchains are usually designed to run on a single machine (or even a single CPU) per validator.
A unique feature in Sui's design is that storage fees are paid separately from transaction execution. In principle, storage costs are denominated in off-chain dollars for storing arbitrary on-chain data. It is exogenously priced through governance polls. Its pricing is external and determined by governance votes. From the user's point of view, they do not differentiate between payments. However, when users submit data on-chain, they need to pay gas and storage fees. The storage portion of the fee goes into a "storage fund" that pays validators for storing user data. This fund is used to subsidize future storage costs as the network grows and matures. Instead, users can delete on-chain data in lieu of storage fee rebates, and they do so in an economically optimal way.
Here is an overview of the Sui token economics:
Transaction execution: The following transaction types are divided into two consensus paths:
Transaction dependencies need to be explicitly stated. The consensus subsystem is also scalable as it can order more transactions by adding more machines per validator. This allows Sui to be extended.
BFT consensus: called Narwhal & Tusk. Similar to Aptos, Sui’s consensus protocol is also a derivative of HotStuff. Both Sui’s and Aptos’ consensus mechanisms minimize the communication required between validators to process transactions to achieve lower latency. AptosBFT is partially asynchronous. Sui's design for achieving consensus separates the protocol's mempool from the consensus layer, whereas most PoS L1s have a single consensus protocol.
Narwhal & Tusk can be composed with other Byzantine Fault Tolerant (“BFT”) consensus protocols. The team open-sourced this code to allow the wider crypto community to benefit from their research (starting with their Celo and Sommelier partnership).
In theory, there is no known upper limit to the throughput scalability of this design. Since there are no testnet results, it will be interesting to see how it performs in practice.
Sui's security features are resistant to adverse network conditions, network partitions, or DoS attacks on validators because it does not impose any synchronization assumptions on the network. In contrast, a sustained network attack on a synchronized blockchain (i.e., most proof-of-work-based blockchains) can lead to double spending of resources and deadlocks.
Hardware requirements: The call requirements to operate a full node can provide a sense of the degree of decentralization, although it is too early to determine at this stage. The requirements for Sui, Aptos and other L1s are summarized below:
As of June 30, 2022, over 5,000 Sui nodes are operating in 65 countries. Other factors driving decentralization will be discussed at a later stage when both Sui and Aptos launch their mainnets.
Sui Development Kit (“SDK”): While Aptos also has an SDK for improving DX/UX, Sui’s SDK is an interesting attempt to connect to other ecosystems and non-crypto use cases.
Performance: Sui has only started its incentivized testnet since June 29th. I will update this benchmark again once more testnet data becomes available. Otherwise, the following reference points for available throughput include:
However, Aptos’ Avery Ching said that these throughput numbers do not represent end-to-end blockchain throughput, as they only take into account consensus, network, and partial storage considerations. They do not take into account other important factors such as transaction execution times, account access patterns, or authenticated data structures (such as Merkle trees) in the production blockchain. In terms of finality, block time is often mistaken for finality, when in fact block time is an input factor for finality.
Sui dApp:
Aptos dApps:
final thoughts
It’s still early days for L1, and the smart contract market is undoubtedly highly competitive. Both launch around the same time. Likewise, the L1 projects themselves are several months apart. While there is a lot of overlap between Aptos and Sui, there are also some interesting technical differences.
Technology is fascinating, but it ultimately needs to solve meaningful problems for people to justify paying for it; a technological innovation must be an improvement that is significant enough that people can afford the switching costs of existing technologies. It’s not the only single determinant of success either — Jason Choi says technical superiority alone almost never wins — success also depends on business development, going to market. Technology needs to translate into performance and then results.
When considering multiple aspects of each ecosystem, Aptos stands out compared to Sui as well as other L1s. In the short time since launch, despite having a few months of first-mover advantage over Sui, it has a much larger ecosystem:
Overall, at the time of writing, Aptos appears to represent relative value based on its latest round of valuations. Note that Aptos just raised a total of $150 million in Series A funding at a valuation of at least $2 billion ($350 million in cumulative funding). For a $2 billion valuation, Aptos offers more of a strong community, developer activity, dApp ecosystem while being more advanced in its testnet. Mysten Labs/Sui needs to close the gap between itself and Aptos on every metric to justify its valuation. This will come down to the first principles of attracting quality developers.
Having said that, the team is credible and I have no doubt they will be able to execute on their vision. From a pedigree, skill and resource standpoint, they are well equipped. While this post is more of a comparison between Sui and Aptos, Sui's enhancements certainly fill a void in the current L1 smart contract market. If they succeed in executing their plans, they are likely to be competitive after mainnet.
Some industry players are frustrated with new L1 entrants such as Aptos and Sui. However, the reality is that no chain capable of mass adoption exists today. While existing chains (L1s and L2s) will certainly benefit from first movers, the gap will close as new entrants (Aptos, Sui) close the gap - assuming they can solve substantial scalability pain points and provide a strong DX/UX. Nonetheless, the market may be large enough to support a multi-chain future. The key question is what would that look like, and how many?
Sui's testnet results should provide better performance relative to other L1s. Again, it will be interesting to revisit this comparison again after mainnet launch to analyze L1 performance/properties across more metrics including their token economics, vesting schedule, allocation among stakeholders. Time will tell how the underlying technology will drive overall DX/UX and who will attract more users/liquidity.
In this market cycle, various L2 Rollup public chains have sprung up, as well as emerging high-performance Move VM public chains that are favored by capital, such as Sui and Aptos, which are the public chains with current market potential.
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