Author: Wendy, Foresight News

"L2 has no value" - Although he affirmed the significance of Movement Labs in promoting the popularization of the Move language, Mysten Labs co-founder and chief product officer (CPO) Adeniyi Abiodun was blunt about the choice of L1 or L2. He told Foresight News: "I don't think L2 can solve the problem at all. In fact, they create more problems than they solve."
 
The choice of L1 and L2 is a long-standing topic in the public chain field. As one of the representative projects of high-performance public chains, Sui developed by Mysten Labs chose to build L1 using the Move language, but the relatively younger Movement Labs took a completely different path, which is to build L2 using the Move language on Ethereum.
 
This means that the Move language is gaining wider attention and has benefited the overall ecological construction. At the same time, the overall development of high-performance public chains still faces challenges. In this regard, Sui needs to enhance the popularity of Move as a basic language and also needs a large number of high-quality projects to emerge.
 
In the competitive high-performance public chain field, it is not easy to compete for high-quality developers and projects. Recently, Adeniyi Abiodun accepted an exclusive interview with Foresight News on Sui’s development in the past year and the competition in the high-performance field.
 
Foresight News: You have held many hackathons around the world in the past year. What achievements have you made? In which regions has Sui achieved the highest adoption rate?
 
Adeniyi Abiodun: We have a high adoption rate in Asia, which is our main market, and some of the largest projects and developers in the Asian market are using Sui. We also have projects that were previously built on Arbitrum and Solana, but because many things could not be achieved, they switched to Sui. In addition, some people want to develop in multiple channels, and some people just want to focus on one ecosystem. It is worth mentioning that the developer churn rate in our ecosystem is very low, especially those developers who have built on Sui from the beginning and are now very successful. This is a good phenomenon. They identified Sui from the beginning and now finally reaped the rewards, such as NAVI, Aftermath, Scallop and other protocols.
 
Now, we also have new entrants like Bluefin and Suilend, who are moving from the previous Arbitrum and Solana ecosystems to Sui.
 
I think Sui has been very successful in Asia, but now North America and Europe are starting to catch up, so it's a little more diverse, but our focus is still in Asia and continuing to increase our presence in Asia. Before the mainnet, we held hackathons in Vietnam, South Korea, Japan and other places, and also participated in Taipei Blockchain Week. We do a lot of things in Taiwan. So our user base has grown significantly there as well. But more importantly, we've seen the success of builders out there. If we enter a market, even if there are 10,000 developers there, but they all make copycat applications that no one cares about, it will be boring. What we want to see is developers delivering results, which is why developers are saying, "Look, Bluefin can succeed on Sui, Suilend can succeed on Sui, I'm going to see if Sui is worth considering." an agreement". Interestingly, many EVM projects consider Sui as the next chain to build on, which is a strong testament to its success.
 
Foresight News: In the public blockchain space, many projects offer a lot of bounties and rewards to developers. How do you attract more developers to your ecosystem?
 
Adeniyi Abiodun: First, the learning threshold for developers must be lowered. We believe Sui is the easiest blockchain to build on. It has been proven that most developers can fully understand and start building or moving (to Sui) within four days.
 
Secondly, we focus on the quality of projects rather than the number of builders. There are many projects on the chain that are copied and pasted from another chain, and there is no real innovation. Sui provides many primitives that cannot be built elsewhere, allowing builders to give full play to their creativity. For example, many projects now build decentralized limit order books directly on Sui instead of centralized mechanisms. Others build new bounty systems directly on the chain, which was impossible before. Others build random numbers on the chain, which used to require the services of Oracle, but now you don’t need it. In fact, on Sui, we support any cryptographic primitives.
 
Now you can log in to Sui with your Google account and Facebook account, and now Sui can help you build things that were not possible before.
 
Sui is the fastest growing non-EVM compatible chain for this reason. We have a lot of builders, and they are very high quality builders, who are able to take a lot of market share from other chains. In some Sui protocols, we have more transaction volume and TVL than other entire chains.
 
This is due to the success of the builders. So, we didn't have to spend too much effort to convince them to join. We have already had more than 2,000 developers in our hackathons. In the next few months, we will announce the winners of the global hackathon. We expect 200 builders and more than 200 projects to win. This shows that we can attract high-quality builders.
 
We have never tried to buy developers off or get them to sign exclusivity agreements. That doesn't work. Ultimately, developers are free to build where they want, and we agree with that. In fact, there have been competitors who have gotten developers to sign exclusivity agreements, promising not to build on other chains, specifically not on Sui. We have never done anything like that. In fact, most of these builders have come to Sui after the exclusivity agreement expired.
 
Therefore, building a convincing platform to help builders truly achieve their business goals is the way to win developers. We did it, not through shady incentives or means. In the long run, the latter simply does not work.
 
Foresight News: In the Sui ecosystem, which areas of projects are you more concerned about?
 
Adeniyi Abiodun: Games, finance, and commerce are the three categories we focus on at Sui. Games will be an opportunity to naturally bring millions or even hundreds of millions of users to Web3.
 
We signed 50 gaming partners before we officially launched Sui, and now we have over 70 gaming partners. These partners include NCSoft, a Korean gaming company with a market value of tens of billions, gaming studios with decades of development experience, and startup gaming studios. We believe that gaming is a good way to attract users to Web3. In fact, we believe that DeFi will further develop with the growth of gaming, because now hundreds of millions of video game players can freely exchange between native game tokens and stable assets.
 
this is our target. If you purchase an NFT or purchase an asset within a game, you will be using some form of decentralized finance. Therefore, it is not enough to just target the existing Web3 user market, the market piece of cake must be further expanded. In fact, we are already starting to see the signs. For example, one wallet in our ecosystem, WaveWallet, has attracted more than one million users to Web3, and at the same time the use of DeFi has increased significantly, and transaction volume has increased accordingly, and users do not even know they are using DeFi. As we focus on bringing a larger market to Web3, we are confident that Sui will have more daily active users than any other chain.
 
In addition to games, finance is also a growing field. Games need to use finance to implement all transactions and exchanges.
 
Business means being able to check deposits and withdrawals on-chain, whether using your existing assets as a sales terminal or redeeming points, rewards, memberships and fan engagement, which were not possible before. Companies building on Sui are working to make all of this possible. A large number of gaming companies will bring millions of daily active users to Sui. We also have a large number of DeFi protocols and financial applications being built that will be used by this user group.
 
There are a lot of companies building fan engagement tools on Sui. For example, we're working with Red Bull Racing. Red Bull Racing is the top Formula 1 team in the world today. We're building a lot of tools around fan engagement for that brand. We're also working with other sports brands like the NBA. We see this as an opportunity for companies to engage with their fan base in a more interesting way on Sui than they currently do.
 
So, we’re going to be announcing a bunch of big Korean gaming partnerships at Token 2049. There’s also going to be some exciting news about SuiPlay0x1, which is a gaming console that we announced at Basecamp a few weeks ago.
 
SuiPlay0x1 is a game console that allows both Web2 and Web3 players to enjoy the fun of playing games. You can play PC games at high resolution and high frame rate on a portable device, and get rewards in both Web2 and Web3 games. We think this completely subverts the game.
 
It's not a phone, it's a low-barrier gaming console that everyone can buy. We'll have more announcements about stablecoins soon. But overall, we're very excited about the progress we've made so far in the ecosystem.
 
The number of developers in the ecosystem that I just announced, and the fact that we just mentioned that we have over 2,000 developers signed up for our hackathon, we think there's going to be a constant stream of developers in the Sui ecosystem coming up with new, wonderful, and exciting things. I'm really excited about that.
 
From day one, Sui was listed on every major exchange, Binance, OKEx, Kucoin, any exchange you can think of. So actually from the beginning, Sui had the most exchange support in history.
 
Foresight News: Previously, Movement Labs, based on the Move language, announced a new round of financing and received a lot of attention. You also chose the Move language, but chose to do the basic layer L1. Aptos also made a similar choice. From today's perspective, how do you view the two different development models of choosing L1 and L2?
 
Adeniyi Abiodun: Fundamentally, I think the more developers that use the Move language, the better it will be for the ecosystem.
 
Solidity is a very difficult language to learn, which is holding the ecosystem back. Even if you are a great developer, there are still some headaches and pitfalls. We have seen even the best developers in the EVM struggle with it, and there have been a number of hacks. Move eliminates many of the issues that are often encountered in smart contract security. It is a safer way to program, and we are very happy to see Movement Labs pushing the Move language and Aptos helping to promote Move. Over time, Avalanche, Solana, and other ecosystems will adopt Move and make the pie bigger. That way, everyone gets a bigger piece of the pie.
 
There are only 20,000 developers in Web3, but there are 9 million JavaScript developers. If we can get 9 million JavaScript developers writing code in Move, then Move will become the JavaScript of Web3. If they have a language that is easy to learn and error-free, we will have better applications, better users, and an overall safer ecosystem. This means more developers can enter Web3, and the number of bugs and hacks will decrease. Ultimately, we believe that better architecture and infrastructure will make our (Move) ecosystem win.
 
I think we will have a world with multiple chains, but I believe we will be the best. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here. Because we feel strongly about having an object-oriented language that works for most developers. It's designed from the ground up to take advantage of the object model. This means we have unparalleled scalability. It also means that Move on Sui will be more scalable than Move on any other chain.
 
In short, Sui is more scalable, more secure, faster, and enables you to build basic components that were previously impossible. The creator of the Move language is Sam Blackshear, a top engineer at Facebook and our CTO. So in terms of innovation in Move, we will always be ahead of anyone in the ecosystem.
 
Foresight News: But which path is better, L1 or L2?
 
Adeniyi Abiodun: I don’t think L2 will work. I’m a big believer in this - that instead of building a fast chain, building another complex thing on top of a chain is not feasible. Because it doesn’t scale, that’s why we have L2 and now L3. The fundamental reason is that each layer doesn’t scale, and they make up for it by building another layer.
 
Solana doesn’t believe in L2 because they think the way to solve the problem is to build a very fast L1. We agree that just build the fastest possible L1 to scale.
 
Sui happens to be the only chain that allows you to scale infinitely. If you need higher performance, you just put more hardware in - double the hardware, double the TPS; triple the hardware, triple the TPS - without increasing latency and with horizontal scalability like the Internet. No need to build additional layers of complexity, which we think is a step backwards.
 
I don't think L2s solve problems at all. In fact, they create more problems than they solve. Since Ethereum will never scale, you can't do without L2s for Ethereum. But Sui doesn't need L2s at all because Sui scales on its own. So, you don't need to build another layer to get higher performance because the base layer already does it. I think there will always be different types of L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem. L2s will always have their value in the Ethereum ecosystem and low-bandwidth, low-scale chains. But for high-bandwidth, high-scale chains, this is not a problem and L2s have no value.
 
But Move is open source, and the more builders the better.
 
Foresight News: Can you elaborate on how Sui’s self-scalability is achieved?
 
Adeniyi Abiodun: In Sui, and in most programming languages, you have a contract, and the bytes in the contract represent who owns what. But because of the data structure, it is impossible to know if your transactions have any relationship with each other. This means that I have to line up everything one by one and execute only one transaction at a time, which becomes a bottleneck. Because there is no way to know if your transaction will trigger other transactions, we can only process one thing at a time.
 
And because Sui is an object-oriented system—your phone and his pen are two different transactions—I can process them separately. So the more CPUs we have, the more tasks we can process in parallel. Sui lets us know if one transaction is related to another. Knowing this in advance, we can process all transactions in parallel, which means we have no throughput limit.
 
Other blockchains have the fundamental problem of not being able to tell if transactions collide, like Solana, Aptos, and the EVM. But they also can't scale beyond a single machine. Because we have an object model, not only can we know that two objects are different, but we can also put that object into another machine and process it faster. So this is a new type of scalability model. In fact, this model is used every day by companies that scale their businesses. Our team has a technical background in building Facebook and Google infrastructure and understands how to scale infrastructure. So this approach is unique to Sui. The problem with Solana is that there is an upper limit on CPU. Then you have to get bigger and bigger CPUs. One day you will run out of CPU processing power. For Sui, this is not a problem. We just throw more hardware at the CPU. Increase the amount of hardware, and you can increase the amount of TPS. If you double the amount of hardware, you double the amount of TPS. There is no upper limit.
 
In other words, we have already solved the scalability problem. There are also hardware issues, such as how to verify signatures faster.
 
But signature verification is not our bottleneck. So this doesn't help us. Other chains may need it. But they may still hit some other bottleneck eventually.
 
Foresihgt News: Speaking of hardware issues, the current development of generative AI has also put forward a lot of new demands on hardware. How do you view the potential impact this may have on Sui?
 
Adeniyi Abiodun: AI and blockchain will definitely interact. But I think it will be inter-agent communication. My agent needs to negotiate with your agent and there will be a fee.
 
That's where AI is important. In fact, today we announced a partnership with Atoma Network, who are a network building disruptive technology directly on Sui. So we think AI and blockchain are going to be a great combination.
 
I think a lot of what's being said about AI and blockchain right now is hype. People are buying tokens, but it's not going to work. What really interests us is working with partners who are solving fundamental problems for consumers and businesses.
 
So we are looking forward to the future.
 
Foresight News: Recently, some researchers in the Ethereum ecosystem, such as Justin Drake, have been controversial for accepting valuable coins from EigenLayer. Some people regard this as "corruption" because it may affect the direction of Ethereum's construction. Sui is also L1 and needs to maintain the fairness and health of the ecosystem. What do you think about this?
 
Adeniyi Abiodun: Sui is a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) network that serves anyone with enough stake. In fact, even the rules on the Sui blockchain can be decided by community voting. Since the launch of the mainnet, we have received several community-requested changes that were adopted by the community and improved the protocol. So, Sui is completely decentralized.
 
As time goes by and more developers join, Sui will become more and more decentralized. This way, not only we have the ability to promote change, but the community also has the ability to promote change. This is very important to us. We encourage a safe ecosystem where people can have the freedom to build.
 
This is not just a theory, it is also a reality, as evidenced by the proposals submitted. The proposal to launch DeepBook was done externally. The proposal to change the specified stake amount for validators was also done by the community.
 
The community will also gradually propose more proposals to change the fundamental direction of the Sui protocol. This is the meaning of delegated proof of stake, isn’t it? Moreover, Sui has only been established for a year, and in the future, more and more governance mechanisms will enter the ecosystem, allowing everyone to participate.
 
But the problem with delegated proof of stake is that you have to make sure everyone is interested in voting. That's always been hard. We haven't found the right answers to all of these problems yet. In the future, delegation is the solution. It makes sense for me to delegate my stake to someone and have them vote on my behalf. We certainly want every user in the world to be able to vote, but not everyone understands the nuances of the technology.