Comparison of the three major public chain upstarts: How do Aptos, Sui, and Caduceus accumulate power for the next market hotspot?

In the increasingly fast industry cycle, we have witnessed the entry and exit of new and old players one after another. Relying on the heat of the last bull market and the spillover effect of the Ethereum ecosystem, those public chain newcomers who have been ambushing for a round of bear market have been able to emerge and serve as the "landing point" for the market's ever-expanding expectations. But at the same time, the market is currently in the process of the bubble receding or bursting.

Although the overall market sentiment is low, all parties have not given up on finding new support points and ambush points for the next cycle. Among them, the Layer1 track with the largest market space and the longest value cycle has once again become the darling of the market hotspot "desert". Unlike the last public chain war, in addition to conquering the "impossible triangle" which is an unchanging direction, we also see some new explorations by the new generation in the Layer1 track.

Today, we will compare the three major public chain upstarts: Aptos, Sui, and Caduceus, which has extremely high popularity overseas, from multiple dimensions such as launch background, core features and advantages, market popularity, and current situation , and explore how the new generation of Web3 can complete a new round of value breakthrough.

Background

Sui/Aptos: These two public chain projects can be traced back to Libra, the super-sovereign digital currency project of Facebook (the predecessor of Meta) in 2019. Libra was eventually renamed Diem due to regulatory issues. It wanted to establish a global blockchain Stablecoin payment system, but in the end, the project was restricted by the regulatory framework of its parent company, and Diem's ​​development was still difficult and was eventually sold. In order to continue this project, the Aptos and Sui development teams decided to cut out the original Diem and Novi, and continue to develop new public chain projects based on the original Diem's ​​Move programming language framework. Although there are certain differences in the directions of the two, the core focus of both is to solve the performance and scalability problems of Layer1.

Caduceus: The difference between Caduceus and other blockchains is that, although they are both Layer 1 public chains, Caduceus is aimed at a business scenario rather than a technical problem in a certain industry. It hopes to combine decentralized solutions with edge computing, rendering, 3D technology, and XR hardware and software to provide strong infrastructure support for the Metaverse application layer scenario. When looking forward to the future development of Web3, Grayscale believes that the Metaverse is the scenario with the clearest future development prospects for the Web3 concept, but there is currently no blockchain infrastructure suitable for this scenario.

Core Goals

Aptos: Creating universal and equitable access to decentralized assets for billions of people.

Sui: Aims to handle lightweight payment transactions between a small number of hosted wallets (10 to 100+).

Caduceus: Aims to provide a highly adaptable and highly liberalized construction foundation for 3D NFT, Gamef i, AI, and the metaverse ecosystem, helping metaverse participants around the world lower the entry threshold.

Team Background

Aptos: Co-founder Avery Ching comes from Meta and is one of the world's leading experts in building distributed systems. In addition, there are Alden Hu, Alin Tomescu, Dahlia Malkhi, David Wolinsky, Greg Nazario, Jake Skinner, Josh Lind and many other team members consisting of PhDs, researchers, engineers, designers and strategists.

Sui: Still from the Meta system, founded Mysten Labs, and then launched Sui; CEO Evan Cheng is the former Novi R&D director and Meta engineering director (programming, language runtime), and worked at Apple for 10 years. CTO Sam Blackshear is the former Novi chief engineer, focusing on the Move language. CPO Adeniyi Abiodun was the head of Novi products and worked for VMware, Oracle, PeerNova, HSBC, and JPMorgan Chase. Chief Scientist George Danezis was a Novi research scientist and worked for Chainspace and Microsoft.

Caduceus: Compared with the single attributes of the executive and technical departments of the first two project teams, the Caduceus team is very diverse, including talents from various backgrounds such as blockchain, DeFi, software development, finance, retail, music, art, media and entertainment. For example: Tim Bullman, head of foundation management, is the former MD Europe and senior managing director of BGC Partners. He founded Mint Partners in 2005 and served as CEO. Alex Tung, head of consensus algorithm technology, has more than 20 years of experience in advanced technology development and has expertise in games, mining, blockchain and consensus algorithms. Matt McGuire, head of edge rendering technology, is a technical expert with extensive experience in digital innovation fields such as mobile telecommunications, advertising and e-commerce. Giulio Pezzulli, head of application expansion, is an entrepreneur and software engineer in the blockchain field. He is the founder of AITutor and Voltaire Labs and has experience in cryptocurrency companies such as Circle and Trustology. Jamie Khurshid, the head of the incubator, was named one of the "Top 40 Under 40 in Trading and Technology" and "1,000 Most Influential People in Global Financial Markets" by Financial News in 2014. Ander Tsui, the head of strategy, is an early participant in the crypto field and has extensive experience in investment and incubation, as well as a deep understanding and judgment of the industry. From the perspective of the development needs of a Layer1 public chain project with a specific business scenario, the overall team configuration of Caduceus is more in line with development needs, so that the project can achieve high-quality parallel development in multiple "threads" such as ecology, core technology, underlying layer, commercialization, and financing.

Project start time

Aptos: February this year.

Sui: In March this year

Caduceus: Last December

Core positioning differences

Sui/Aptos: Focuses on high-performance general-purpose Layer 1 blockchain, using the PoS consensus mechanism. Asset security and performance improvement are the core points that Aptos and Sui focus on.

Caduceus: An infrastructure-level open blockchain platform built specifically for the Metaverse and decentralized digital world, using the Metagraph consensus mechanism. Compared to most public chains that only care about the trade-offs between the "impossible triangle", Caduceus considers more application-level issues while maintaining high performance, providing edge rendering and many modular tools and incubation platforms for Web3 Metaverse developers and creators. It aims to provide a highly adaptable and highly liberalized construction foundation for 3D NFT, Gamef i, AI, and Metaverse ecosystems, helping Metaverse participants around the world lower the entry threshold.

Highlights and core technical features

Aptos: The first innovations include key rotation and recovery technology, which makes the wallet more friendly. Aptos and Sui both adopted parallel execution solutions to improve network performance and business throughput. The core parallel computing technology is called Block STM. Its logic is that multiple threads in parallel modify data independently. If there is no conflict, the online rate is extremely high. If there is a conflict, the single transaction is rolled back and executed after the conflicting transaction is updated. In other words, the Aptos network does not need to execute transactions in sequence. The nodes execute in parallel first. If a transaction has a problem in this process, the transaction can be terminated and re-executed or discarded. The consensus mechanism is an advanced version of HotStuff based on the concept of Byzantine fault tolerance. The relevant technical details will not be explained in detail.

Sui: In order to deal with the problem of full node state explosion, users need to pay a storage fee in addition to transaction fees. Sui's smallest storage unit is called Object, which is defined as an asset, including immutable assets, single assets that can only be modified by their specific owners, and shared assets that can be modified by multiple owners. The direct exchange of a single asset does not require consensus and is directly confirmed by the client. Only when shared assets are exchanged will consensus be called. In other words, Sui "filters" some small and unimportant transactions to prevent them from taking up more resources.

Caduceus: The core logic of consensus is that after a node verifies the transaction result set, it periodically shares information with neighboring nodes in the hypercube P2P network, and the nodes that receive the information will do the same thing. The information is finalized when it is confirmed by an absolute number of witnesses in the hypercube P2P network. It innovatively combines the hypercube high-speed P2P network structure with the directed acyclic graph DAG multi-chain transaction data structure, and can execute a large number of transactions in parallel through asynchronous consensus between large-scale decentralized nodes. The core of its business is to integrate decentralized GPU computing resources through incentive protocols, and use edge computing to provide the computing power required for image rendering for the metaverse, games, AI, and film and television industries.

Respective advantages

Aptos: You can use multiple currencies to pay for gas, thus avoiding the embarrassment of being unable to trade because there is only one non-gas token in the wallet.

Sui: The Gas mechanism can provide low and predictable Gas prices while incentivizing validators to optimize transaction processing and prevent DoS attacks.

Caduceus: It adopts a revolutionary multi-level distributed Metagragh structure, which has unlimited expansion and large-scale parallel processing capabilities beyond ordinary blockchain table data structures. With BigBang's fully hardware programmable accelerated blockchain consensus system, StarRing transaction parallel execution engine, and Nebula's horizontal unlimited expansion block database, Caduceus can withstand the task processing capacity requirements in high-concurrency and complex environments, while seamlessly providing edge rendering solutions.

Basic performance comparison

Developer Support

Aptos: A formal tool “Move Prover” that allows developers to quickly verify and test that their code executes as expected, securely storing important information (tokens, smart contracts) through its native data type “resource”.

Sui: The Developer Kit (SDK) is designed to optimize the developer user experience and provide developers with open source, versatile and user-friendly tools. In addition, the SDK will reduce the time a large number of developers spend debugging smart contracts, waiting for audits, and building basic technology stack elements. However, the common problem of Aptos and Sui in terms of developer introduction is that although the Move language and related programming frameworks have advantages in one way or another, they are not compatible with the mainstream Solidity language in the market. Developers need to rewrite the code to deploy applications on Aptos and Sui. One is the learning cost, and the other is the opportunity cost of the huge original accumulation behind the Solidity language.

Caduceus: Due to the more complex development of public chain ecological projects in the metaverse business scenario, in order to lower the entry threshold for developers, Caduceus needs to provide more comprehensive and powerful support for developers. First of all, it is deeply modularized, supporting the rapid plug-in and assembly of various underlying and development modules, and can quickly customize the blockchain system of assembly projects. Another important point is the high degree of standardization, including support for developer-friendly open source protocols and software source code, and promoting the standardization of multiple technical systems. Caduceus provides creative tools that support 3D game materials/models and related NFT casting transactions and splitting tools. At the same time, an open source software and hardware platform Caduceus Creation Platform, including display terminals, computing centers, operating systems and interfaces, is built to support large screens, charts, and various forms of interface interaction management, monitoring, and operation and maintenance. With a full set of XR algorithm packages and XR development kits, it seamlessly connects mainstream productivity tools such as Unity3D VR, UE4/UE5, and Omniverse engines. More importantly, considering the strong foundation and developer scale of Ethereum in the public chain ecosystem in the current market, Caduceus supports seamless migration of EVM and Solidity contracts, and seamlessly connects to multiple asset protocols including ERC-20, ERC-721, ERC-1155, and ERC-998, and can quickly undertake the transfer of developers from Ethereum and the same ecosystem.

Community size

Aptos: 225,000 Twitter followers 123,000 Discord members

Sui: 85,000 Twitter followers 132,000 Discord members

Caduceus: 126,000 Twitter followers 58,000 Discord members

Investment institutions

Aptos: a16z, Multicoin, FTX Ventures, Jump Crypto, Tiger Capital, Katie Haun, Circle Ventures, Apollo.ParaF iCapital Oak HC/FT, Franklin Templeton, Superskrypt, GriffinGamingPartners.

Sui: a16z, Redpoint, Coinbase Ventures, Standard Crypto, Slow Ventures, Scribble Ventures, Samsung NEXT, Electric Capital, NFX, Lightspeed VenturePartners.

Caduceus: SIG (Susquehanna International Group), Bin Zayed Group, BlockFills, Qredo, TokenInsight, Nukkleus, Digital RFQ, Luna Venture Capital, SuperChainCapital, JackdawCapital, Luna VC. Individual investors include legendary football star John Terry, British sports legend Lord Ian Botham, British Rugby World Cup champion, former England captain, World Rugby Hall of Fame legend Lawrence Dallaglio, Hollywood film and television production company One Van Films founded by Ivan Atkinson, etc.

Ecological Development

In general, the ecological development trajectories of Aptos and Sui are closer to the traditional public chain scenarios, and it is obvious that Caduceus focuses on developing applications with rendering requirements, such as film and television, 3DNFT, game entertainment, etc. At the same time, Caduceus has also established its own incubator M4TTER to further reduce the time developers stay in the "front desk" when they settle in. Currently, there are nearly 250,000 active addresses on the Caduceus chain, and the number of projects in the ecosystem exceeds 60, and the expansion speed is increasing.

Comparison of Token Economic Models

Aptos:

Token: APT

Supply: The initial total supply is 1 billion, with the distribution ratio being: 51.02% for the community, 19% for core contributors, 16.5% for the foundation, and 13.48% for investors. The dominant part of the community foundation’s tokens is mainly used for Grants, incentives, and other community development programs. Currently, these tokens are mainly held by the Aptos Foundation and Aptos Labs. Some of them have been allocated to projects in the Aptos ecosystem, but have not yet been released. Overall, this part of the tokens will be released in 10 years. It is worth noting that the community’s tokens are not for the general user community. Except for trading and airdrops, users and ordinary investors have no channels to obtain APT.

The tokens of core contributors and investors will not be released in the first twelve months. 1/16 of the tokens will be unlocked every month after the 13th month after the mainnet is launched, and the release will be completed in 6 months. The remaining tokens will be released starting from the 19th month and will be released in 29 months. The application scenarios and value explanations of APT Token have not yet been announced.

Sui:

Token: SUI

Supply: Fixed supply of 10 billion; no tokens released. A portion of the total supply of SUI will be released when the mainnet is launched, and the remaining tokens will be distributed as equity reward subsidies in the next few years. No deflation/burning mechanism

Caduceus:

Token: CMP

Supply: Fixed supply of 1 billion: 9% for core contributors, 15% for investors, 20% for labs, 6% for foundations, and the rest from mining. No deflation/burning mechanism

Development Trends

Aptos: The developer testnet was released on March 15. There are 4 rounds of incentive testnets. AIT1 (decentralized launch) was launched in May, AIT2 (staking) started in July, AIT3 (governance and upgrade) started on August 30, and AIT4 (dynamic validator topology) is pending. The mainnet is now online and the first round of community airdrops has been launched simultaneously.

Sui: The incentive testnet was just launched in August. According to the roadmap, the testnet will be divided into 4 waves, of which three waves have confirmed themes, namely: network, staking and upgrade.

Caduceus: The public testnet was launched in December last year; the blockchain and distributed rendering and edge cloud computing hackathon was held in March; the mainnet was officially launched in April; in May, it cooperated with the 3D NFT fashion brand HAPE, and the internationally renowned lawyer Sir Alan Kitchin served as a strategic advisor; in June, it cooperated with Bin Zayed Group, a leader in the fields of architecture, real estate and commercial experience, to build a dual-city metaverse, using VR technology to bring Dubai into people's homes; in July, the native Token CMP was launched on top exchanges Bybit and Gate, and it cooperated with Lord Botham to bring cricket into the metaverse, and the World Cup champion rugby legend Lawrence Dallaglio officially joined as a strategic advisor. In August, it reached a strategic cooperation with One Van Films, a famous film production company of The Gentlemenvan Atkinson, to bring movies into the metaverse. In September, the native Token CMP was launched on the top transaction kucoin, and the top liquidity provider Wintemute officially joined to provide long-term services for caduceus;

Summarize

Compared with Sui and Aptos, who focus on solving the impossible triangle problem faced by the main chain, Caduceus chooses to fully support various facilities in the future metaverse. Other tools and public chains can upgrade products in the same direction, and fundamental iteration is an inevitable trend for the upgrade of the public chain track. Aptos and Sui's luxurious team background and capital endorsement have supported the current market's expected inflation to a certain extent, but we don't know how long the narrative around performance and scalability can last, especially under the premise that Ethereum has completed the switch to the PoS network. Finding more subdivided directions or larger markets for the development of public chains may be one of the solutions to refresh the value ceiling of public chains, which is also the core anchor point of Caduceus' future development expectations.