Solidity vs Move for Smart Contract Wallet Gas Efficiency

Solidity excels at predictable gas optimization within a mature ecosystem because of its direct access to EVM opcodes and extensive tooling like Hardhat and Foundry. For example, developers can manually pack storage slots and use immutable variables to reduce SSTORE and SLOAD costs, a critical factor for wallet operations like batched transactions. The success of protocols like Safe (with over $40B TVL) demonstrates that meticulous Solidity engineering can achieve significant efficiency, though it requires deep expertise.

Move takes a fundamentally different approach by enforcing resource-oriented programming and bytecode verification at the virtual machine level. This results in a trade-off: upfront design rigidity for guaranteed runtime efficiency. Move's struct-as-resource model prevents accidental copying and ensures assets are stored only once, directly translating to lower intrinsic gas costs for asset transfers and module interactions, as seen in Aptos and Sui wallets. However, this comes with a steeper learning curve and a less mature toolchain.

The key trade-off: If your priority is deploying within the vast Ethereum ecosystem with maximal composability and proven patterns, choose Solidity and invest in expert optimization. If you prioritize architectural safety and intrinsic gas efficiency from the ground up for a new application chain, choose Move to leverage its built-in guarantees.

Solidity excels at leveraging the mature EVM ecosystem for gas optimization because of its extensive tooling and established patterns. For example, protocols like Safe (Gnosis Safe) and Argent have refined gas-efficient patterns—such as meta-transactions and signature aggregation via EIP-4337 (Account Abstraction)—that can reduce user transaction costs by 20-40% on L2s like Arbitrum and Optimism. Its dominance on Ethereum, with over $50B in DeFi TVL, means optimizations are battle-tested and widely supported by infrastructure like Alchemy and Infura.

Move takes a fundamentally different approach by enforcing resource-oriented programming and bytecode verification at the virtual machine level. This results in a trade-off: while it prevents entire classes of reentrancy and overflow bugs that can lead to catastrophic gas waste (as seen in historical Solidity exploits), it requires building within newer, less saturated ecosystems like Aptos and Sui. Their parallel execution models can offer superior throughput (Sui: 297K TPS peak), but wallet-specific gas optimizations are less proven at scale compared to the EVM's decade of refinement.

The key trade-off: If your priority is immediate deployment within a vast ecosystem with proven gas-saving patterns and tools, choose Solidity on an EVM L2. If you prioritize long-term security and performance at the protocol level and are building a wallet as a core component of a new Aptos or Sui application, choose Move. For most CTOs integrating wallets into existing Ethereum-based stacks, Solidity's EIP-4337 standard offers the pragmatic path. For protocol architects building the next generation of high-throughput, secure dApps from the ground up, Move's inherent safety provides a foundational advantage.