EVM vs Aptos: App Migration Cost

Massive Tooling Reuse: Leverage existing Solidity/Vyper code, battle-tested libraries (OpenZeppelin), and mature frameworks (Hardhat, Foundry). This reduces development time and audit costs significantly.

Established Talent Pool: Access to 10,000+ experienced EVM developers, lowering hiring and training expenses. Migration expertise is a commodity.

Variable & High Fees: Gas costs on leading EVM L1s (Ethereum) can exceed $50 per complex transaction during congestion. L2s offer relief but add bridging complexity.

Inefficient State Model: Legacy Merkle-Patricia Trie and storage opcodes lead to bloated gas fees for state-heavy applications, directly impacting end-user costs.

Language & Tooling Investment: Requires rewriting logic in Move, a paradigm shift from Solidity. While safer, it demands developer retraining. The toolchain (Move CLI, Aptos CLI) is less mature than EVM's.

Scarce Expertise: Fewer than 1,000 production-ready Move developers globally, increasing initial development and audit costs due to specialized demand.

Fixed & Low Gas Fees: Transaction fees are consistently sub-cent, priced in Aptos's native token (APT). No unpredictable spikes, enabling stable business models for high-frequency apps.

Efficient State Model: Move's resource-oriented programming and Aptos's parallel execution (Block-STM) optimize state access, making complex operations like NFT minting and AMM swaps fundamentally cheaper.

Tooling & Developer Familiarity: Leverage existing Solidity/Vyper codebases and battle-tested tools like Hardhat, Foundry, and OpenZeppelin. The pool of 500,000+ EVM developers reduces retraining costs and speeds up the porting process using transpilers like Move Prover for Solidity.

Parallel Execution & Fixed Fees: Aptos's Block-STM engine processes independent transactions in parallel, leading to higher throughput and more predictable gas costs. Unlike EVM's volatile auction model, Aptos uses a fixed gas unit price, simplifying cost forecasting for applications like high-frequency DEXs (e.g., Liquidswap) or gaming economies.

Established Liquidity & Composites: Immediate access to $50B+ in DeFi TVL across Ethereum L2s (Arbitrum, Optimism) and bridges like Wormhole. Integrating with money markets (Aave), oracles (Chainlink), and account abstraction (ERC-4337) is plug-and-play, avoiding costly custom integration work.

Move Language Safety: Move's resource model with built-in scarcity and linear types eliminates entire classes of EVM vulnerabilities like reentrancy and integer overflows. This can reduce pre-launch audit cycles and costs by 30-50% for complex protocols, as seen in audits for projects like Thala Labs.

Specific advantage: Aptos's parallel execution and efficient Move VM can reduce user transaction fees by 10-100x compared to Ethereum L1. This matters for high-frequency DeFi applications where gas costs directly impact user profitability and protocol volume.

Specific advantage: The Move language eliminates entire vulnerability classes (reentrancy, integer overflows) by design. This can reduce smart contract audit cycles and costs by 30-50% for new code, as auditors focus on business logic rather than foundational exploits. This matters for security-critical protocols like lending (Aave) or bridges.

Specific advantage: Rewriting Solidity/Vyper codebases in Move requires a specialized, scarce talent pool. Developer rates for Move can be 20-40% higher, and full migration of a complex dApp (e.g., a DEX like Uniswap V3) can take 3-6 months. This matters for teams with tight budgets or timelines who cannot afford a complete rewrite.

Specific advantage: Missing equivalents to battle-tested EVM tools like Hardhat, Foundry, Alchemy, and The Graph increase development time. Teams must build custom indexers and adapt to nascent SDKs (Aptos SDK vs. Ethers.js), adding 2-4 months to integration overhead. This matters for projects reliant on rich data pipelines or complex front-end interactions.