The Evolution of Meta’s Legacy: The Aptos and Sui Blockchains

Regulatory crackdowns on cryptocurrencies have already stifled several startups in their early stages, and the pressure shows no sign of easing. Even innovative projects from influential companies are not immune to these challenges.

In early 2022, Meta’s stablecoin project Diem, formerly known as Libra, was discontinued due to regulatory pressure. Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, believed that Diem had all the conditions for rapid success, including support from Facebook’s 2.5 billion users, solid funding, and progressive goals. However, regulators concluded that the project did not fit within the tightly controlled financial landscape. But did Zuckerberg give up? Not at all. Here’s how this globally recognized entrepreneur skillfully navigated this challenging situation.

The Unrealized Potential of Diem

After the announcement of Diem’s shutdown due to excessive regulatory pressure, all of the company’s financial and intellectual assets, including the Move programming language that was intended to underpin the entire project, were sold to Silvergate Capital for $182 million.

It’s important to note that, according to official documents, the Diem project did not violate any governmental policies or public regulations. Its primary aim was to create fast, low-cost, and secure cross-border transactions — a beneficial concept rather than something radically new. The developers intended to address the lack of banking services in economically underdeveloped regions, and Diem’s technology was well-suited for this purpose.

Faced with the threat of closure, the project’s creators attempted to relocate to the United States, but they were unsuccessful. Diem officially ceased operations in 2022, having lasted about three years.

“In the United States, a senior regulator informed us that Diem was the best-designed stablecoin project the US Government had seen,” said the project’s CEO, Stuart Levey.

The Birth of Aptos

Nearly immediately after Diem’s closure in 2022, former Meta employees Mo Shaikh, the former head of partnerships, and Avery Ching, the lead blockchain developer, teamed up to create the Aptos Labs blockchain. The project was well-received, attracting $350 million across two funding rounds and establishing a solid foothold in the market. Among its key investors were notable firms like Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), FTX Ventures, Jump Crypto, and Binance Labs.

So, what exactly is Aptos (APT)? Essentially, it represents an effort to achieve the same goals Diem had set out to accomplish. However, Aptos progressed more cautiously, gradually and methodically. By 2023, the developers had balanced the load on validators, increasing the network’s throughput to 30,000 TPS (transactions per second) and processing over 2 billion transactions daily. By 2024, these figures had further improved — by August 8, the blockchain’s peak speed reached 8,580 TPS with more than 3.5 million transactions processed daily.

What Makes Aptos Stand Out?

Aptos boasts several key features:

• Transparency. A transaction preview feature reduces phishing risks.
• Flexibility. Key management via multi-signature; in the event of a wallet breach, only the private key needs to be replaced, avoiding the hassle of transferring data to a new account.
• Keyless account creation. Users can sign in with familiar Web2 logins, such as Google, GitHub, or Apple.
• Passkey support. Transactions can be signed using Face ID and Touch ID.

Although Aptos became a worthy successor to Diem’s ideas, it wasn’t the only project Meta’s followers pursued. In 2021, work began on the Sui blockchain, which has since become a focus of greater attention.

The Sui Blockchain

Sui (SUI) was developed by Mysten Labs, a company founded in September 2021 by several former employees of Novi Research, a Meta subsidiary. The project launched in a test phase in August 2022, with the mainnet officially going live in May 2023.

Sui is known for its parallel processing, implemented through a modular architecture — similar to Aptos. Transactions in Sui are grouped based on their interactions, which enhances performance.

The project has undergone several significant updates. According to data from the analytics service DeFi Llama, Sui’s Total Value Locked (TVL) metric saw a sharp increase starting in September 2023. By August 2024, it had reached $496 million.

What Makes Sui Stand Out?

Sui distinguishes itself from other blockchains through several unique features:

1. Parallel processing. Transactions are grouped based on their interactions, which significantly enhances the blockchain’s performance and scalability.
2. Modular architecture. Sui’s architecture allows easier updates and improvements over time.
3. Ecosystem momentum. Since its launch, Sui has shown strong ecosystem growth, particularly evident in its rising TVL.

Comparison Between Aptos and Sui

Aptos and Sui are both cutting-edge blockchains that emerged from the ashes of Meta’s Diem project, sharing a common origin but diverging in their approaches and technical capabilities. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of their key technical specs:

Conclusion

Both Aptos and Sui are distinguished by their high transaction processing speeds. They are built on the high-level programming language Move — a technology initially developed for Diem but never fully realized. In the end, it’s clear that Meta’s leadership has achieved its goals — these new projects from former Meta developers have garnered significant reach and established a substantial user base. The enhanced decentralized architecture of the defunct Diem project allowed Aptos and Sui to come to fruition, achieving impressive levels of speed, scalability, and security.

It’s somewhat ironic that Diem, the grand vision that Meta once had to revolutionize global finance, crumbled under regulatory pressure, only to see its core ideas flourish in other forms. Aptos and Sui, both born from Diem’s ashes, are now thriving, proving that sometimes what seems like failure is just a dress rehearsal for success. Who would have thought that the remnants of a scrapped project could evolve into two of the most innovative blockchains in the industry? It seems Diem’s spirit lives on, just in a slightly different costume. After all, in the world of tech, a setback is just the universe’s way of saying, “Time for a new approach!”

Originally published on our Publish0x blog.

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