Two chains, one family tree. Sui and Aptos both grew out of Meta’s abandoned Diem project, both run smart contracts written in Move, and both will settle a payment before you’ve finished reading this sentence.
Quick answer, since that’s probably why you clicked. Go with Sui if you like signing in with a Google account, a bridge operated by the chain’s own validators, and ordinary transfers that never bother consensus. Go with Aptos if accounts feel more natural to you than objects, if you want epochs turning over every couple of hours, and if getting back every last Octa of your storage fee sounds fair.
What follows covers the architecture, the security record, daily life on each chain, and the bill at the end of it. We pulled every figure from official documentation or from each network’s own public endpoint on September 8, 2026.
Table of contents
Sui vs Aptos, side by side
Strip away the shared Move branding and these two agree on very little. The chart below is the short version, and every number in it comes out of the chains’ own documentation or their live endpoints.
Sui vs Aptos: Comparison Chart | |
|---|---|
| <strong>How agreement is reached</strong> | Sui: Mysticeti, a DAG protocol needing 3 rounds of messages <br> Aptos: AptosBFT, safe while under a third of validators turn hostile |
| <strong>Where your stuff lives</strong> | Sui: in objects, since everything onchain is one <br> Aptos: in accounts, each keeping a sequence number |
| <strong>Running things at once</strong> | Sui: name your inputs first and unrelated work proceeds together <br> Aptos: Block-STM guesses, then redoes whatever collided |
| <strong>How quick it feels</strong> | Sui: roughly half a second to commit in benchmarks <br> Aptos: blocks arriving in tens of milliseconds on mainnet |
| <strong>What pays the gas</strong> | Sui: SUI, cut into MIST at 1,000,000,000 to the coin <br> Aptos: APT, cut into Octas at 100,000,000 to the coin |
| <strong>Gas price the day we looked</strong> | Sui: a reference price of 100 MIST during epoch 1244 <br> Aptos: an estimate of 100 Octas, or 150 to cut the line |
| <strong>Money back on storage</strong> | Sui: you see 99% of the storage fee again <br> Aptos: the whole storage fee finds its way back |
| <strong>How many coins exist</strong> | Sui: a hard ceiling of 10,000,000,000 SUI <br> Aptos: roughly 1,208,377,795 APT reported onchain |
| <strong>How long an epoch runs</strong> | Sui: a full day <br> Aptos: 2 hours |
| <strong>Who validates</strong> | Sui: upwards of 100 validators, with 2 more from Mysten Labs <br> Aptos: 84 of them, each holding 1M APT or more at stake |
| <strong>Skipping the seed phrase</strong> | Sui: zkLogin, baked into the protocol <br> Aptos: Keyless accounts riding on an OIDC provider |
| <strong>A bridge of its own</strong> | Sui: yes, Sui Bridge, staffed by the chain’s validators <br> Aptos: none that the documentation puts its name to |
| <strong>It suits you if</strong> | Sui: you use apps and send money around <br> Aptos: you write contracts and want blocks in a hurry |
Sui in plain English
Sui is a layer 1 chain that has been running on mainnet since May 3, 2023. The date went up on the official Sui Developer Forum a couple of weeks earlier, on April 19.
Everything unusual about it traces back to one decision: objects instead of accounts. As the Sui documentation says, “Every resource, asset, or piece of data onchain is an object”, and each one arrives with an ID, a version and an owner attached.
That’s a real break from how the rest of the industry builds. Rather than parking balances in an account’s key-value store, Sui gives you objects that belong to you and nobody else. An object can sit under one address, be shared with everyone, be frozen forever, or live wrapped inside another one.
Where it pays off is the fast path. Touch nothing but objects you own and your transaction never goes near full consensus, because a validator can lock the thing and sign it there and then. Making that work meant throwing global storage out of Move altogether, which isn’t a small thing to do to a language.
Comparing chains for the first time? The same arguments play out on two older networks in our piece on Polkadot vs Solana.
What Sui does well
- Mysticeti wraps a commit up in 3 rounds of messages, and benchmarks put the average around half a second.
- The same tests sustain 200,000 transactions per second, climbing to 400,000 on 50 nodes before latency finally slips past a second.
- With zkLogin you sign from a Sui address using a Google, Apple, Facebook or Twitch account, and the JWT never touches the chain.
- ETH, WETH, WBTC, LBTC and USDT all cross on Sui Bridge, which the chain’s own validators operate.
- Circle mints real USDC here, and describes Sui as the first Move-based chain it supported that way.
Aptos in plain English
Aptos got there first, by a decent margin. Its mainnet genesis file landed in the official aptos-networks repository on October 12, 2022, which makes it the elder sibling by roughly seven months.
Accounts survived the move to Move here. Every account keeps a sequence number, so anything you send from one address commits in the order you sent it, unless you reach for an orderless transaction and use a nonce instead. Sui wants your inputs declared in advance; Aptos would rather figure it out on its own.
Block-STM is what does the figuring. The Aptos docs call it “a multi-threaded, in-memory engine that combines software transactional memory with a collaborative scheduler”, which is a mouthful for guessing well and cleaning up afterwards. Transactions run side by side, collisions surface as they happen, and only the losers get another turn.
On what that means for anyone writing code, the documentation wastes no words: “Developers do not declare access lists.”
What Aptos does well
- Measurements of Block-STM have gone past 160k transactions per second, and Polygon, Sei and Starknet all borrowed the idea afterwards.
- There’s no slot clock to wait on, so a new block turns up as soon as the network lets it, typically within tens of milliseconds.
- State gets a version per transaction rather than per block, which means a client can pull and prove exactly one version.
- A Keyless account hands you self-custody behind a Google or Apple login, and there’s nothing to copy onto paper.
- Delete a storage slot and the fee you paid for it comes back whole.
How safe is your money on Sui vs Aptos?
Proof of stake underpins both, so nothing commits until a supermajority of validators nods it through. AptosBFT keeps working while fewer than a third of validators misbehave. Mysticeti gets Sui to the same place by a different route.
Size and cost of entry are where the two sets diverge. Sui counts more than 100 validators plus the 2 that Mysten Labs runs itself. On the day we queried the chain, Aptos had 84 active, and a seat there costs at least 1M APT staked, with anything above 50M APT ignored.
Sui also has one episode on its record you should read before you commit anything serious. A Cetus smart contract was hacked in May 2025, and what the attacker took ended up frozen inside two accounts. Sui Foundation answered by shipping code for an onchain community vote that opened on May 27.
The proposal was blunt about it: “a protocol upgrade that reclaims all funds currently frozen in the two hacker accounts without a signature from the hackers”, with the money going into a multi-sig held in trust for people Cetus had let down. Stake weighing 90.9% voted in favor.
You can read that result two ways, and we think both are fair. Users got their money back. A validator set also moved coins that nobody with the keys had signed for, which is worth sitting with for a moment.
Over on Aptos, governance belongs to APT holders, who vote on network parameters, core code and upgrades to the Aptos Framework. None of that is unusual for proof of stake. It’s also, broadly, the same lever that made the Cetus reversal possible.
Then there’s the mistake that actually empties wallets, and it works identically on both. Pick the wrong network or paste the wrong address and the money is gone, with nobody anywhere able to undo it. Check the network selector twice, and if a long string of characters still means nothing to you, start with our explainer on what a wallet address is.
What using Sui vs Aptos actually feels like
Mysten Labs builds Slush for Sui, and you can have it as a browser extension, a phone app or a web app. The pitch on its own site is that you can “get started with just your google or twitch account”, which is zkLogin quietly doing the work behind the button.
Aptos Labs covers the same ground with Petra, again as a Chrome extension, a phone app and a web wallet. You get a choice of a private key or a Google or Apple login, APT staking without leaving the app, and perpetuals with long, short and market orders bolted on. That last one either delights you or worries you.
Call the hardware wallet question a draw. Sui’s docs point at Ledger and pair it with Slush, Petra tells you to “Connect your Ledger hardware wallet”, and Aptos throws in instructions for driving a Ledger straight from its command line tool.
Funding an address is where Sui gets ahead. Its bridge belongs to the network, run by the very validators securing it, and ETH, WETH, WBTC, LBTC and USDT all make the trip. Aptos names no bridge of its own anywhere in its documentation, so third-party code holds your money while it’s in flight.
Stablecoins are a wash, in the good sense. Circle issues the genuine article on both rather than leaving you with somebody’s wrapper. It doesn’t stay quiet about the lookalikes either, warning Sui holders that bridged wUSDC “may not be recoverable” once it reaches a Circle Mint account, and telling Aptos holders that lzUSDC isn’t the native token.
Anyone writing code against Sui needs to know one more thing. JSON-RPC on mainnet full nodes was switched off during the week of July 27, 2026, with gRPC and GraphQL taking over, and the last of it disappears from full nodes in mid-October 2026. Old integrations just stop.
Keeping either coin on a phone? Our roundup of the best mobile crypto wallets covers what to look for.
Sui vs Aptos: fees, and how fast it lands
Your bill arrives in two pieces on either chain: what the computation cost, and what the storage cost. Sui multiplies computation units by the reference gas price and adds storage units times the storage price. Aptos prices execution and IO in gas units, then bills storage separately in fixed APT.
Setting that reference price on Sui is a once-per-epoch ritual. Validators hand in reservation prices, the protocol takes the 2/3 percentile weighted by stake, and in epoch 1244 the answer came out at 100 MIST. Aptos leaves it to the market above a floor that governance sets, and its own estimator quoted us 100 Octas, or 150 if you want to cut ahead.
Refunds are the real difference. Delete data on Sui and 99% of the storage fee returns, with 1% kept back. Aptos hands over the whole storage fee paid across the life of the slot, which is the sort of small thing that nags at us.
Neither one will keep you waiting. Mysticeti averages about half a second to commit, while Aptos turns out blocks in tens of milliseconds and starts the next one the moment network delay permits.
| What you’re waiting on | On Sui | On Aptos |
|---|---|---|
| A commit | Roughly half a second in benchmarks | Blocks in tens of milliseconds |
| The throughput claim | 200,000 TPS held steady in tests | Block-STM measured past 160k TPS |
| Gas on the day we looked | A reference price of 100 MIST | 100 Octas quoted, 150 to skip ahead |
| The floor on a gas budget | 2,000 MIST, which is 0.000002 SUI | Whatever you set as max_gas_amount |
| Storage coming back | 99% of what you paid | All of what you paid |
| One epoch | A full day | 2 hours |
What your money buys on Sui vs Aptos
Gas is the whole charge on both networks, and it barely registers. The Sui fee documentation runs the arithmetic for you on a basic transaction that stores 10 bytes: at a reference gas price of 1,000 MIST and a storage price of 75 MIST, you end up paying 1,075,000 MIST. Today’s reference price happens to be a tenth of the one in that worked example.
Supply is a cleaner split. Sui stops at 10,000,000,000 SUI and says so. Aptos publishes no equivalent ceiling, and the figure we pulled from the chain came to about 1,208,377,795 APT.
Staking looks different too. Delegated proof of stake on Sui runs across 24-hour epochs, while Aptos cycles every 2 hours, locks stake on a rolling 14-day basis, and pays validators according to how many of their proposals actually succeeded out of how many they made.
Moving real size? Look at the bridge caps first.
Sui Bridge allows $16 million from Ethereum into Sui and $7 million back the other way inside any 24 hours, and it books each ETH against that ceiling at a fixed $2,600. Aptos hasn’t got a first-party equivalent to hold up against it.
Where each chain shines and where it doesn’t
Sui: the pros and the cons
Aptos: the pros and the cons
So which one should you pick?
Coming in from Ethereum with money to move, take Sui. The validators who secure the chain are the ones running the bridge, so no outside team sits on your funds mid-transfer, and Circle’s USDC is already there when you arrive.
Writing contracts and hoping never to think about parallelism? Aptos, then. Block-STM untangles the conflicts, and the Move you type stays plain Move.
Uneasy about a validator set that can take coins back? Go and read the Cetus vote in full before you park a large balance on Sui. We’d add that Aptos governance can rewrite framework modules too, so what you’re really weighing is history, not architecture.
Sui vs Aptos: your questions
Is Sui quicker than Aptos?
Depends on the stopwatch. Benchmarks put a Mysticeti commit near half a second, and Aptos turns out blocks inside tens of milliseconds. Inside a wallet, you won’t tell them apart.
Under the hood, are Sui and Aptos the same thing?
No. They share Move and little else. Sui keeps everything in objects and threw out global storage, while Aptos stuck with accounts, sequence numbers and Block-STM doing the parallel work.
Which chain costs less to use?
Very little separates them. Sui was quoting a reference price of 100 MIST when we looked, Aptos estimated 100 Octas, and the only meaningful gap is that Aptos gives your whole storage fee back while Sui holds on to 1%.
Does a Ledger work with Sui and Aptos?
Yes, on both. Sui’s documentation names Ledger and pairs the device with Slush, Petra asks you to connect your Ledger hardware wallet, and Aptos writes up Ledger use through its command line tool as well.
Can I skip the seed phrase on either chain?
You can. zkLogin does it on Sui with Google, Apple, Facebook or Twitch, and Aptos offers Keyless accounts through OIDC providers including Google and Apple.
Is the USDC on Sui and Aptos the genuine one?
Yes, Circle mints native USDC on each. Watch the ticker anyway, because bridged lookalikes such as wUSDC on Sui and lzUSDC on Aptos are a different thing entirely and Circle says so.
Could validators freeze what I hold?
On Sui that has already happened once. Following the Cetus hack, stake amounting to 90.9% voted to pull funds out of two attacker accounts with no signature from whoever held the keys.
The verdict: Sui or Aptos?
If your days are spent shifting coins and poking at apps, Sui is the more comfortable place to live. Between the native bridge, zkLogin and Circle’s USDC, there are fewer decisions to make and fewer strangers touching your money on the way through.
Building something? Aptos edges it. You declare nothing and Block-STM sorts the parallelism out, blocks land in tens of milliseconds, and every cent of storage cost comes home.
None of this locks a door behind you. Move runs on both, each has a wallet you can open with a social login, and a Ledger plugs into either.
Still not sure your coins belong off an exchange? Settle that first with our guide to crypto wallet vs exchange.
This article is for general information only and is not financial, legal, or investment advice. Prices and features change; check the vendor’s official page before buying.
