Move vs Plutus for Cardano Smart Contracts

Specific advantage: Assets are custom types with built-in scarcity and ownership rules, preventing accidental duplication or loss. This matters for high-value DeFi and NFTs, where asset integrity is non-negotiable. The borrow checker enforces strict ownership semantics at the VM level, eliminating entire classes of reentrancy and double-spend bugs common in Solidity.

Specific advantage: Aptos Block-STM and Sui's object-centric model enable parallel transaction processing, achieving 10k+ TPS in benchmarks. This matters for high-throughput applications like order-book DEXs, gaming, and social feeds where latency and cost per transaction are critical. It's a fundamental architectural advantage over sequential blockchains.

Specific advantage: Contracts are written in Haskell/Plutus, a functional language enabling mathematical proof of correctness. This matters for institutional-grade financial protocols where bug bounties are insufficient and correctness must be provable before deployment. The extended UTXO (EUTXO) model also provides predictable fee and execution outcomes.

Specific advantage: Cardano's 2,900+ stake pool operators and conservative, peer-reviewed upgrade path (Alonzo, Vasil). This matters for long-term, mission-critical dApps that prioritize network resilience and predictable, non-breaking changes over raw speed. The settled security model attracts projects like World Mobile Token and IOG's Atala PRISM.

High-performance consumer dApps. If your roadmap requires sub-second finality, massive scale, and low transaction fees (<$0.01), Move on Aptos or Sui is the clear choice.

• Examples: Gaming economies (Sui), CLOB DEXs (Econia on Aptos), high-frequency trading.
• Trade-off: You accept a younger, evolving ecosystem and less battle-tested security models compared to Ethereum.

Institutional DeFi and identity protocols. If your primary constraint is risk mitigation and regulatory compliance, Cardano's methodical approach and EUTXO model provide superior auditability and predictable cost structures.

• Examples: Sovereign identity (Atala PRISM), stablecoin issuance (Mehen Finance), government-backed projects.
• Trade-off: You accept higher development complexity, slower transaction speeds (~250 TPS), and a less mature DeFi toolkit.

Functional, Haskell-based design enables mathematical proof of contract behavior. This drastically reduces the risk of reentrancy, overflow, and unexpected state bugs common in EVM. Critical for DeFi protocols handling high-value assets where a single bug can mean total loss. The trade-off is a steeper learning curve and more verbose code.

Built-in resource semantics treat assets as non-copyable, non-droppable types enforced at the VM level. This prevents double-spending and accidental loss by design, a core advantage for native asset management and NFTs. Unlike Plutus, which models this in logic, Move bakes it into the type system, offering robust safety with potentially more intuitive asset handling.

Fee calculation is predictable before execution, based on script size and complexity (measured in "ExUnits"). This eliminates gas estimation races and unpredictable costs, a major advantage for enterprise-grade financial applications requiring precise cost forecasting. However, it can lead to over-estimation and less granular optimization compared to gas metering.

Native support for parallel transaction processing via the Block-STM engine (Aptos) or object-centric model (Sui). This allows for theoretical throughput of 10k-100k+ TPS for non-conflicting transactions. Essential for high-frequency trading, gaming, or social apps where Plutus's current single-threaded EUTxO model is a bottleneck.

Deterministic concurrency where transactions specify exact inputs and outputs. This makes complex multi-step swaps and batch transactions easier to reason about and compose, as state transitions are explicit. However, it requires more upfront design for dApp architecture compared to Move's shared global state, which can be simpler for some use cases.

First-class support for module upgrades and dependency management via on-chain package publishing. This allows protocols like Aptos DeFi (e.g., Pontem Network) to patch bugs or add features without complex migration paths. Contrasts with Plutus's immutable script hashes, which prioritize long-term stability but can hinder rapid iteration.