BL@_smbrian
A lot of things have been said about @SuiNetwork DX (developer experience) versus other chains lately. As a builder on Sui working on multiple projects, I wanted to share why I think Sui is the best place to build for people like me (will explain this in detail below). First, a bit of background. I’m not a trained developer in the academic sense. I don’t have a CS degree. My background is in music (classically-trained pianist) and my career before transitioning into tech full-time was at the intersection of music and technology, which probably explains why @_StudioMirai is building Coda.
As a musician, I spent most of my life thinking in object-centric fashion. At the meta level, the expression of music through musical notation is just a collection of objects. A musical composition is an object that specifies stuff like the title, time signature, key, tempo, and bars of notes. A bar is an object that contains temporal objects (notes), and a note is an object that stores a pitch identifier (C2, D3, F#4, etc.). Even something like a chord is just an object that contains a specific grouping of notes. The object centricity applies on the macro perspective as well – songs are objects, music streams are objects, licensing agreements are objects. Actually, most things in life are objects.
So when I first started out building Coda in 2019, I felt like I didn’t have the right tool for the job. I did some MVP work on ICON and Avalanche C-Chain, but didn’t feel like I could tangibly build what I wanted to build – that is what I had envisioned in my head (many different kinds of objects interacting with each other while following strictly-defined rules) was not really translating into the code. And after a lot of work and reflection, I realized the problem was not me. It was not a skill issue, it was 100% a “the underlying blockchain architecture is not designed for what I want to do” issue. Specifically what that means is C-Chain and almost every blockchain out there uses accounts/contracts as primitives, and “assets” and “tokens” are just abstractions that obscure the fact that they’re not actually digitally tangible. In simpler terms, on these chains, if you see a trading card NFT in your wallet, there’s not actually a trading card in your wallet. There’s a trading card contract somewhere that says you have that card, and the wallet abstracts that away and shows the card in your wallet anyways – it’s actually hugely misleading.
So I shelved developing Coda for a while – I continued thinking about the platform and working on frontend mockups, but didn’t do anymore smart contract work. That is… until Sui came along and I saw the word OBJECT on the homepage. I thought, wait objects is exactly what I’ve been looking for since 2019. So I started building again…
Sui’s DX is so good because of objects, and here’s why.
Let’s go back to the trading card example. On EVM, Solana, and other account-centric chains, NFTs (trading cards in this example), are just TOKEN_ID -> OWNER_ADDRESS mappings inside a contract. A reference to an asset is shown in a wallet, the actual assets themselves are not in the wallet. To describe how absurd this is, imaging how such an architecture would feel like in the real world. Let’s say you’re hanging out with your friend and you want to trade your Charizard for his Blastoise. In $SUI, you would hand him your card, and he’d hand you his card – easy. In EVM/Solana, it turns out you don’t even have your cards. Instead, you need to call up some card custody service and tell them to perform the trade for you. So this explains why Sui DX is so good. For someone like me who thinks in objects, Sui Move allows me to directly express those objects and the rules that those objects MUST follow.
The industry largely doesn’t realize this now because arguably most blockchain apps haven’t required granular object expression yet. At the same time, I 100% think this is because the technology up until now has been account-centric instead of object-centric. Now that Sui/Sui Move exists, I expect to see a lot more devs realize EVM/Solana’s critical flaw. With that said, I don’t think EVM/Solana will fail or lose adoption by any means. There are plenty of use cases where high-resolution object expression is not a requirement. But for blockchain startups in the creative industries (e.g. @_StudioMirai), having access to a native object expression layer is 100% a requirement.
If you’re interested in hearing more about our perspective, feel free to give me a follow. I’ll be starting a podcast with @_smkotaro soon to talk about Sui’s role in building the future of creative assets.
