Why I think Move will eventually overtake Solidity

Author: Flex, founder of 3NJOY Lab (which operates Wav3 and Souffl3), published by Odaily with authorization

Recently, the new upsurge of Aptos and Sui has ignited the ecological concept related to Move. Our team has been engaged in Move-related work for more than a year. It is one of the most experienced and most pitted developer teams in the world. Let me share my views and understanding of Move.

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Born for asset security

Nowadays, the concept of digital assets is constantly expanding, the attributes of "digital" are constantly being weakened, and the attributes of "assets" are constantly being strengthened. Almost every encrypted project will have encrypted assets, and the continuous appreciation of encrypted assets often becomes the driving force for project development, but the appreciation of assets and the development of projects are inseparable from asset security.

Asset security seems to be the basic guarantee that all platforms should give, but the reality is discouraging. We have seen theft again and again.

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resource-oriented programming

In addition to safety, what attracts me most is Move's more expressive resource-oriented programming concept. Of course, this concept is also one of the features that make it safer.

In Move, resource ( Resource ) is a first-class citizen, and it is the programmed object that must be considered first when programming.

Resource can correspond to the physical objects in our physical world. To create it, you need to have certain permissions or consume other Resources, and after it is created, it cannot be copied or disappear out of thin air. Just like a cup of coffee, you can only choose to drink it or throw it away (drop), not copy (copy).

When we write a contract, the most important thing is to think about how to define the attributes of Resource. The Move programming language abstracts four attributes of resources, which can be copied ( copy ), indexed ( key ), destructible ( drop ), and storable ( store ), through different combinations of these four attributes, users can easily define any type of resource. This design for Resource naturally guarantees that some common security problems such as replication and additional issuance will not appear again.

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Improve composability

We have been talking about the composability of smart contracts in the past, but the composability of smart contracts in the Solidity ecosystem is more like a combination based on message passing between interfaces. In Move, it is based on the combination of Modules and interacts through the transfer of resources.

How to understand the difference between them? Take the construction of an automobile factory as an example. Solidity defines the production standards and processes of the factory. Everyone who wants to build a car needs to build a factory that meets the production standards and processes before creating a car. The way of Move is that there is only one factory, and those who want to build cars can use this factory to make cars that everyone recognizes.

The advantage of this is that on the one hand, it saves the block space occupied by the contract, and we don’t need to create factories repeatedly. On the other hand, the advantage is that optimization and upgrading become easier, and we will not be tied down.

For example, on Ethereum, when we want to extend some new behaviors or do some implementation optimizations, then we need to redefine the previous interfaces, which will also affect the old methods, such as ERC 721 and ERC 721A, ERC 4907 these optimizations With the new definition, there is no way to directly upgrade and iterate all contracts that used ERC 721 in the past.

However, Move only needs to upgrade and optimize the Module based on the combination of Modules, and all other contracts that have used this Module will automatically use the latest version.

This kind of contract-level composability and resource-oriented programming bring expressiveness and scalability that cannot be brought by other languages. At the same time, the definition of resources is closer to the combination of various resources in the real world, such as Lego, various accessories for assembling the mainframe of the computer.

A key benefit of these features of Move is that it can clearly separate resource definition and resource-related behaviors.

Just like an item, the definition of the item itself only determines what form it is displayed in, what attributes it has, and how it can be destroyed. And his ownership, whether it can be transferred and other related behaviors are completely determined by the owner or user of the item.

Summarize

Summarize

Asset security, resource abstraction, and composability are all features of Move at the language level. Generally speaking, I think it is the most suitable language for on-chain application development. Its features are highly compatible with the needs of DeFi, NFT and other products , and there are gaps in the market for new public chains such as Aptos, Sui, and Starcoin, and NFT, DeFi and other formats are not yet mature. I think the rise of new public chains represented by Aptos will be a huge opportunity for all teams who master the Move language.

This is also why Souffl3 and Wav3, two products under 3NJOY Lab, will be all in Move ecology for the first time to work on infrastructure in the NFT field.

With the launch of Aptos and Sui's testnet and the growing developer community, Move has entered the field of vision of more people. Our team also looks forward to seeing that more and more people can take advantage of the features and advantages of these languages. Build more interesting application scenarios.

When the network was upgraded from 3G to 4G, most people didn't know what the faster mobile bandwidth was, but the speed of the network gave birth to the mobile Internet explosion.

When public chains such as Move and Aptos appear, most people don’t know what the combination of lower GAS, higher TPS blockchain and this new contract language will do—we don’t know, but we believe that Technological advances will drive product innovation—as history has shown.

In 2022, we can expect that Aptos and other public chains that use Move as the contract language will have a wealth of applications springing up like mushrooms, just like a rumbling steam locomotive, which will take the encrypted network to the next decentralized, The future of composability and security is on the way.