Sui, Aptos vie for ‘next Solana’ status

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As SOL reached new all-time highs yesterday, Crypto Twitter’s search for the “next Solana” is on.

There is no shortage of mega fast alt-L1s to pick from, but in the spotlight are two contenders: MoveVM-based chains Sui and Aptos. Both chains were born in the previous crypto cycle, and built by teams with backgrounds in Facebook, which developed the Move programming language as part of its Libra (later renamed Diem) project.

In terms of price action, SUI has outperformed APT by a large margin on a YTD basis after overtaking Aptos in market cap in mid-September.

Despite suffering a brief two-hour outage yesterday, SUI’s price has bounced back above its pre-outage price levels, ironically reinforcing the mimetic perception of Sui as the next Solana due to the latter’s history of outages.

In terms of TVL, Sui and Aptos are running fairly neck to neck (see below chart), no doubt thanks to ongoing liquidity incentive campaigns. As far as active dapps on the L1s, both are also fairly even — Sui has 44, Aptos has 49 — based on DefiLlama’s numbers.

Zooming into onchain activity, Sui’s DEX trading volumes saw a 3x jump since September, overtaking Aptos by a long shot in the last month.

In terms of fees, Sui is also far outpacing Aptos, with $1.1 million generated in October alone, vs. $196k for Aptos.

In the TradFi arena, both chains are pursuing real-world assets. Ondo has deployed its USDY tokenized Treausurys product on both chains, with about $8.3 million on Sui and $15.7 million on Aptos. 

Aptos also announced last week BlackRock’s deployment of its tokenized RWA BUIDL fund, while Sui announced today a partnership with the digital assets arm of Franklin Templeton to support ecosystem growth.

Finally, both Sui and Aptos are attempting their own hardware plays. Sui is leaning hard into the gaming sector with its handheld console SuiPlay0x1, and earlier this month struck up a partnership with the global esports team Team Liquid, while Aptos has taken the route of a budget-priced JamboPhone smartphone.

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