EVM vs Sui VM: Object Execution

Dominant developer network: 4,000+ monthly active devs (Electric Capital). This matters for protocols needing immediate liquidity and composability with established DeFi giants like Aave, Uniswap, and Lido. The Solidity/Vyper language standard and battle-tested tools (Hardhat, Foundry, MetaMask) drastically reduce development risk and time-to-market.

Object-centric, Move-based architecture enables parallel processing of independent transactions. This matters for high-throughput applications like gaming, order-book DEXs, or mass NFT mints where transactions don't conflict. Benchmarks show 297,000 TPS for simple payments (Sui Testnet). Reduces latency and maximizes hardware utilization.

Massive developer advantage: 4,000+ monthly active devs and a $50B+ DeFi TVL ecosystem. This matters for protocols prioritizing liquidity access and developer onboarding speed, leveraging battle-tested tools like Hardhat, Foundry, and MetaMask.

Account-based model creates a single, shared state, enabling seamless inter-protocol composability. This is critical for complex DeFi lego (e.g., Yearn, Aave integrations) where contracts interact atomically across a unified ledger.

Move language & owned objects enable massive parallelism, achieving 297,000 TPS in benchmarks. This matters for high-frequency applications like gaming or order-book DEXs where independent transactions (e.g., NFT mints, swaps) don't compete for global state.

Single-writer objects and consensus-free simple transactions provide sub-second finality for owned assets. This is essential for consumer-scale applications requiring instant, gas-efficient interactions, unlike Ethereum's variable block times and gas auctions.

Serialized execution of all transactions creates congestion, leading to high/variable gas fees during peak demand. This is a critical weakness for mass-market dApps where user experience depends on cost and speed predictability.

Object-centric model can fragment liquidity and complicate cross-contract calls, requiring explicit object passing. This presents a challenge for building deeply integrated DeFi systems compared to EVM's native shared-state composability.

Ownership-based parallelism: Transactions touching independent objects are executed simultaneously. This enables horizontal scaling, achieving 297,000 TPS in controlled benchmarks. This matters for high-throughput applications like gaming or order-book DEXs where user actions are independent.

First-class objects: Assets are explicit, typed objects with globally unique IDs, enabling direct ownership transfer and rich on-chain attributes. This matters for representing complex digital assets (NFTs with dynamic properties) and simplifying logic for applications like dynamic NFTs or supply chain tracking.

Network effect dominance: Over 4,000+ active monthly devs and a mature stack including Foundry, Hardhat, OpenZeppelin, and The Graph. This matters for teams prioritizing speed to market, needing battle-tested libraries (ERC-20, ERC-721), and accessing the largest pool of Solidity talent.

Single-state shared memory: All contracts interact with a shared global state, enabling seamless composability (e.g., Uniswap + Aave). This is critical for DeFi protocols where money legos depend on atomic cross-contract calls. Supported by a vast cross-chain infrastructure (LayerZero, Axelar).

Early-stage tooling: While growing, the ecosystem lacks the depth of EVM. Key gaps include fewer production-ready oracles (Pyth vs. Chainlink's breadth), less mature indexing solutions, and a smaller pool of auditors familiar with Move's security model. This increases initial development overhead.

Inherent serial execution: All transactions are processed in a single lane, capping throughput and causing volatile gas fees during congestion (e.g., Ethereum base fees > 150 gwei). This matters for mass-market applications where predictable, low-cost transactions are non-negotiable.