Written by: Alex Liu, Foresight News

DX is very important

On October 22, EigenLayer's DevRel (Developer Relations Lead) Nader Dabit posted a tweet on X featuring screenshots of four different people complaining about the Solana developer experience, which sparked a huge discussion in the community.

Helius CEO and prominent Solana figure Mert publicly refuted two of the points, but had to admit that 'writing smart contracts on Solana is not easy.'

This brings up a current shortcoming of Solana—the developer experience (DX). Unlike user experience (UX), users cannot directly perceive the DX of the underlying blockchain, but it is a core factor that leads me to choose to bet on the Move public chain, given Solana's dominant ecological position in high-performance public chains. (The author also has a positive outlook on and holds SOL, SUI, APT.)

The logic is simple: in the long run, for general-purpose L1, DX is more important than UX.

Is DX important? DX affects developer onboarding, and developers are the moat of the EVM ecosystem.

According to developer report data, in terms of the number of monthly active developers, Ethereum still leads among blockchains. As of July 1, there are 2,788 full-time developers, and the total number of developers exceeds 8,865. Since 2019, the number of Ethereum research teams has surged by 2,100%.

The top three blockchain platforms with the most full-time developers all come from the EVM ecosystem. This is related to the simplicity of the EVM smart contract development language Solidity (which is similar in syntax to the most commonly used web development programming language, JavaScript) and the maturity of development frameworks (Hardhat, Foundry).

Does this have any impact? Users have no perception of developer experience but can notice that 'Solana's token price significantly outperformed Ethereum last year.'

The problem is: in reality, developers are the customers of general-purpose L1. Users need to use apps, not the chain. Good DX can attract good devs, create good apps, and lead to large-scale adoption. Under the premise that all underlying chains are high-performance public chains, in a future where chain abstraction tracks develop vigorously, users' perception of the differences between public chains will approach 0, focusing only on the UX of apps.

Users may not have a need to use blockchain but do have a need to use apps. Polymarket's election prediction market brought many new users to Polygon, and these users may not necessarily understand 'what is blockchain?', while Moonshot is another typical example—users pay with credit cards, and the on-chain behavior is so wrapped that it hardly has a presence.

Ethereum and EVM have the largest developer ecosystem, the most talent reserves, and the greatest mindshare in people's minds, so it remains the largest smart contract platform by market capitalization. The user-friendly and easy-to-use DX somewhat supports ETH's valuation.

DX Ranking

In terms of DX, the current ranking is roughly: Move public chain > EVM (Solidity) > Solana.

Here, DX refers not only to user experience but also to the difficulty of getting started. Solana's smart contracts primarily use Rust, which has a relatively complex syntax and is not specifically designed for blockchain, often resulting in situations where developers need to 'reinvent the wheel.' The Anchor framework launched by Backpack founder Armani has greatly improved this situation, but it still cannot compete with the resources and expenses that Facebook invested to create a Rust-based language specifically designed for blockchain, Move. (This perspective is based on the author's survey of several Sui, EVM, and Solana developers.)

Future Prospects of Move

If DX is so good, why hasn't a killer application emerged on the Move public chain?

The author believes this is related to the industry's development stage. The current blockchain industry is still in the 'infrastructure' stage—paving the way for potential large-scale adoption, with funding and attention not yet focused on the application layer. Solana's DX still needs improvement but has achieved undeniable success because most users are genuinely 'using the chain' to speculate on memes, leveraging the most primitive and core asset issuance functions of blockchain, leaning more toward crypto-native PvP, without users entering the market on a large scale because of a certain app. The author is optimistic about Solana in the long run, believing its DX will improve in the future, but currently, it is not the best.

I believe that 'for general-purpose L1, DX is more important than UX'; industries where applications dominate value will emerge in the future. I bet on the better DX of the Move public chain.