Why Move Is the First Language Built for Digital Assets

In Solidity, your USDC is just a number in a shared ledger. This creates systemic risk.

• Re-entrancy: A single bug can drain the entire contract state.
• Approval Hell: Every dApp needs unlimited access, creating a $1B+ annual attack surface.
• Fungibility Assumption: All tokens are treated the same, making custom logic for securities/NFTs a security nightmare.

Move's resource type makes digital assets behave like physical objects. They can't be copied, double-spent, or deleted without explicit logic.

• Byzantine Fault Tolerance by Design: A resource exists in one place. No re-entrancy because you can't call into a moving asset.
• Scoped Capabilities: Ownership is a transferable capability, eliminating the need for blanket approve().
• Custom Asset Laws: Define scarcity, roles, and transfer rules directly in the asset's type, enabling native securities and composable NFTs.

EVM's global shared state is a bottleneck. Every transaction modifies a single ledger, causing network-wide congestion and high fees during peak demand.

• Gas Auction Dynamics: Users compete to update the same state, driving up costs for everyone.
• Parallelization Ceiling: Transactions must be processed sequentially to ensure consistency, capping throughput.

Move's strict, static typing and explicit resource ownership allow the runtime (like Sui, Aptos) to safely execute non-conflicting transactions in parallel.

• Deterministic Dependency: The runtime knows exactly which resources a tx touches before execution.
• Horizontal Scaling: Throughput scales with cores, not clock speed. Sui demonstrates >100k TPS for simple payments.
• Predictable Cost: Fees are based on computation, not volatile auction dynamics.

In EVM, code is immutable. Fixing a bug requires complex, risky proxy patterns or migrating liquidity to a new contract, fracturing the network effect.

• DeFi 'Too Big to Fail': Uniswap v1 is frozen in time. Upgrades require a hard fork of community and liquidity.
• Security Through Obscurity: Proxy patterns add complexity and have been the source of major exploits.

Move modules are published on-chain and can be upgraded by their owner, while preserving the immutability of the underlying resource types.

• Controlled Evolution: Developers can patch critical bugs without breaking existing asset holdings or integrations.
• Transparent Dependency Graph: All code is on-chain and versioned, enabling secure composition and eliminating 'rug pulls' from opaque dependencies.
• Ecosystem Cohesion: The entire network benefits from a security patch, preventing ecosystem fragmentation.

General-purpose languages like Solidity treat code and assets as arbitrary bytes, enabling catastrophic exploits. Move's resource model is the solution.

• Assets are typed resources, not integers, making them non-duplicable and non-destructible outside of module rules.
• Linear logic prevents assets from being double-spent or lost, eliminating entire exploit classes.
• Formal verification is built-in, enabling proofs of correctness for critical financial logic.

Sequential execution (EVM, Solana) is a bottleneck. Move's data model enables deterministic concurrency.

• Resources are stored in user accounts, not a shared global state, minimizing conflicts.
• Aptos Block-STM speculatively executes all transactions, achieving ~160k TPS in benchmarks.
• Sui uses object-centric model for even finer-grained parallelism, targeting >100k TPS for simple payments.

Move enables financial primitives impossible on the EVM due to its security and performance guarantees.

• First-class assets allow native integration of complex derivatives and cross-margin accounts.
• Pontem Network (Move on Aptos) is building a Uniswap V3-style DEX with lower fees and MEV resistance.
• Econia is creating a hyper-parallelized limit order book, a structure that cripples EVM chains.

Move was built by Facebook/Diem for a global payment system. Its design reflects that mandate.

• Module/script separation enforces a clean separation between publishable code (libraries) and one-off transactions.
• Bytecode verifier runs on-chain, preventing invalid states before execution (unlike EVM's runtime checks).
• Standard library defines core types like Coin, forcing asset issuers to comply with secure patterns.

Move's biggest hurdle isn't tech—it's network effects. Multiple L1s (Aptos, Sui, Linera) use different flavors.

• Aptos Move and Sui Move have diverging object models, complicating cross-chain tooling.
• Developer mindshare is dominated by Solidity; the tooling (Hardhat, Foundry) is years ahead.
• Bridge liquidity is nascent compared to LayerZero or Wormhole-connected EVM chains.

If your protocol is a simple NFT mint or meme coin, use Solidity. If it's a complex financial engine, Move is mandatory.

• Capital efficiency from secure, parallelized state changes unlocks new DeFi yields.
• Regulatory clarity is easier when asset behavior is provable and constrained.
• Long-term bet: The chain that best mirrors TradFi performance will capture its $10T+ market.