The Future of State Management: EVM Storage vs. Move's Global State

EVM's mutable, contract-isolated storage is the bedrock of permissionless composability. Protocols are built as independent, upgradeable state machines that others can freely integrate.

• Key Benefit: Enables the $50B+ DeFi Lego ecosystem where protocols like Yearn can trivially interact with Uniswap and Aave.
• Key Benefit: Allows for modular security and upgrade paths, where a bug in one contract doesn't inherently compromise the entire chain.

Move's global, typed object model treats assets as first-class citizens, attracting builders focused on high-throughput, secure digital property.

• Key Benefit: Native security guarantees prevent double-spends and unauthorized creation of assets at the VM level, reducing exploit surface.
• Key Benefit: Enables massively parallel execution (e.g., Sui's object-centric model) by identifying independent transactions on non-overlapping objects, targeting 100k+ TPS.

State model differences create a massive market for cross-VM communication layers. These protocols abstract away the complexity of bridging assets and logic between heterogeneous state environments.

• Key Benefit: Universal liquidity by enabling assets from Aptos/Sui's object model to be represented as ERC-20s on Ethereum, tapping into $100B+ of existing liquidity.
• Key Benefit: Intent-based bridging (e.g., Across, Socket) can optimize for cost and speed across chains, regardless of their underlying state architecture.

EVM's storage model is being decomposed. These projects treat state execution and availability as separate, opt-in layers, challenging both monolithic EVM and Move chains.

• Key Benefit: Sovereign rollups on Celestia can choose any VM (EVM, Move, SVM) while sharing data availability, creating a multi-VM ecosystem.
• Key Benefit: Restaking via EigenLayer allows Ethereum validators to secure new state layers ("Actively Validated Services"), potentially securing a Move-based chain with Ethereum's economic security.

Both EVM and Move ecosystems are racing for parallelization, but from opposite directions. This defines the next generation of high-performance L1s and L2s.

• Key Benefit: Monad is achieving parallelism within the EVM via optimistic execution and a parallelized state database, aiming for 10k+ TPS while maintaining full bytecode compatibility.
• Key Benefit: Si (and Aptos Block-STM) has parallelism baked into its state model, using Move's object semantics to avoid conflicts inherently, targeting even higher theoretical throughput.

Tooling ecosystems reflect philosophical differences: EVM prioritizes fast iteration, while Move prioritizes formal verification from day one.

• Key Benefit: EVM's tooling (Foundry, Hardhat) enables a rapid test-deploy-iterate loop, fueling the culture of fast-paced experimentation and forking that defines DeFi.
• Key Benefit: Move's built-in prover allows developers to specify and verify key invariants in their contracts mathematically, attracting builders in regulated asset and institutional finance where correctness is paramount.

EVM's contract-isolated storage model forces expensive state reads/writes across contract boundaries, creating systemic inefficiency.\n- Gas Costs: Cross-contract calls account for a dominant share of $1B+ in annual gas fees on Ethereum.\n- Fragmentation: State is siloed, preventing atomic composition and forcing complex, expensive approval flows.\n- Legacy Debt: This model is now a core scalability constraint for L2s like Arbitrum and Optimism, which inherit its overhead.

Move treats assets as typed resources stored in the global state, not within individual contract storage. This enables verifiable correctness by construction.\n- No Approvals: Secure direct transfers (like Aptos and Sui) eliminate the ERC-20 approval attack surface.\n- Atomic Composability: Operations across multiple resources (e.g., swap & bridge) are natively atomic, enabling UniswapX-like intents without extra infrastructure.\n- Formal Verification: The type system proves resource conservation at compile time, a >100x reduction in certain exploit classes.

The future isn't EVM vs. Move, but a synthesis. Emerging EVM chains and L2s are adopting global state abstractions to retain developer familiarity while gaining efficiency.\n- Intent-Based Architectures: Systems like UniswapX, CowSwap, and Across abstract state complexity into solver networks, a form of off-chain global state.\n- EVM++ Initiatives: Projects like Monad (parallel EVM) and Fuel (UTXO-based state) are redesigning state access at the VM level for ~10,000 TPS.\n- Investor Signal: Back protocols (e.g., Movement Labs) building bridges between these paradigms, not dogmatic implementations.