Why Parallel Execution Demands a Language Like Move

EVM's shared global state forces sequential execution to prevent non-determinism. Parallelizing it is like herding cats—you need complex, expensive dependency analyzers (like Solana's scheduler or Sei's parallelization) to guess which transactions conflict.

• Resource Contention: Every transaction is a potential conflict, limiting theoretical speedup.
• Wasted Cycles: Schedulers spend compute to detect conflicts that a better language could prevent.

Move's type system treats assets as non-copyable, non-double-spendable resources stored in user accounts. This enables compile-time guarantees.

• Ownership by Reference: The compiler statically enforces that a resource has one owner or a known number of immutable references, eliminating read/write conflicts.
• Deterministic Parallelism: A runtime (like Aptos Block-STM or Sui's object-centric model) can safely execute transactions in parallel if they touch different resources.

Both use Move but architect parallelism differently, showcasing the language's flexibility.

• Sui's Object-Centric: Parallelizes per independent object. Ideal for high-throughput simple transfers and gaming (~297k TPS in benchmarks).
• Aptos Block-STM: Uses Software Transactional Memory for optimistic parallel execution of any transactions, then reconciles. Better for complex, interdependent DeFi operations.

EVM L2s (Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync) are retrofitting parallelism, but face inherent language constraints. Their solutions are architectural workarounds.

• Monolithic vs. Modular: They offload execution to separate modules or use fraud/validity proofs over state diffs, adding latency and complexity.
• The Cost of Legacy: Achieving safe parallelism requires heavier client-side verification, moving further from the elegant 'static guarantee' model.

Parallel execution isn't just about more cores; it's about a language that makes concurrent access safe by construction. Move was designed for this from day one.

• EVM Parallelism: A complex, bolt-on optimization with diminishing returns.
• Move Parallelism: A fundamental property, enabling linear scaling with cores. This is why Aptos, Sui, and Linera are betting their stack on it.

The final boss is parallelizing complex user intents (like those in UniswapX or CowSwap). Move's model is uniquely suited for this.

• Composable Safety: Intents often involve multi-asset swaps across pools. Move's resource logic allows these composite operations to be broken into parallel sub-transactions safely.
• Beyond Simple Payments: This positions Move chains (Sui, Aptos) to capture the next wave of intent-based DeFi and on-chain gaming, where concurrency is the product.

Naive parallelization in dynamic languages like Solidity leads to non-deterministic state conflicts, forcing serial execution and killing performance.\n- Move's linear types ensure an asset can only have one owner at a time, making data dependencies explicit.\n- The compiler statically proves which transactions are independent, enabling safe parallelization without runtime guesswork.

These L1s demonstrate Move's production-scale advantage, achieving 160k+ TPS in controlled environments versus Ethereum's ~15 TPS.\n- Deterministic execution from the type system eliminates re-execution and complex conflict resolution seen in Solana's runtime.\n- Native resource-oriented model maps directly to parallel execution units, unlike EVM's shared global state.

Move shifts security guarantees from runtime to compile-time, which is critical for parallel systems where bugs are non-reproducible.\n- Bytecode verifier enforces resource rules before deployment, preventing entire classes of exploits (reentrancy, overflow).\n- This creates a hardened execution environment where parallel threads cannot corrupt each other's state, a foundational requirement for high-frequency DeFi.

The EVM's stack-based architecture and unlimited mutable storage were designed for a single-threaded world, creating insurmountable friction for parallelization.\n- Projects like Monad and Sei must build complex parallel EVMs with custom state access lists, a $100M+ engineering effort.\n- Move provides this natively, making Sui's object-centric and Aptos's fine-grained storage models trivial to implement.

Parallel execution can fragment liquidity and break atomic composability. Move's design turns this into a feature.\n- Explicit data declarations allow the runtime to identify composable transactions (touching same object) and execute them atomically.\n- This enables high-throughput, complex settlements (e.g., AMM swaps with staking rewards) that are impossible in serially-constrained systems without Layer 2 batching.

The end-state is multi-core, multi-machine execution. Move's abstraction is ready; most languages are not.\n- Resource-oriented programming cleanly maps to sharded and heterogeneous hardware architectures (GPUs, FPGAs).\n- Building on the EVM today means your $1B+ protocol will require a costly, insecure rewrite when parallel hardware becomes standard, as seen in traditional high-frequency trading.