A New Era of Scalability - Aptos and SUI Report

Introduction

Crypto has grown exponentially in the past years. After Bitcoin, developers found a way to use blockchain technology for new things, bringing decentralization to solve or improve real-world functionalities. All of that was through smart contracts built on Ethereum, the biggest Layer-1 blockchain.

In 2020, the DeFi sector gained a lot of traction, putting crypto in a different perspective for institutional investors, a period that was later called DeFi Summer. The following year, NFTs became popular, which ended up bringing many retail investors and new crypto enthusiasts to the space.

Although the rise of interest in blockchain is very positive for the sector, the growth of users has also brought some questions about crypto’s future. The Ethereum gas price reached all-time highs during the moments of large activity on the network, which is a problem for a technology that many believe will be used in the future by the entire world.

Because of the issues with Ethereum gas prices and low throughput during high activity periods, developers started building solutions to solve these problems, and that’s when new Layer-1 blockchains rose, like Solana and Avalanche. Even though these solutions actually brought better scalability, they suffered from other problems such as hacks, outages, and smart-contract bugs. With all of that, the blockchain trilemma became very famous, which assumes that blockchains have to “sacrifice” one of the three pieces of the trilemma: Decentralization, Security, or Scalability.

In 2022, as a way to bring blockchain to the real world where billions of people are expected to use it, two new projects with a lot of investment capital and experienced teams have arrived. In this report, we’ll dive into Aptos and Sui to see what they are doing differently and their potential growth.