Coming from Solidity, the First Thing I Noticed Was Ownership
Having previous experience with Solidity, I was already familiar with building smart contracts. What I immediately noticed on Sui Move was the simplicity and convenience of development: its object-oriented nature makes contract writing faster and more convenient, and it also allows for effective control over object ownership.
That last part is the difference that stuck. The workshop’s curriculum walked from the fundamental concepts and logic of Sui, through writing and deploying Sui Move contracts, up to NFT creation and purchase contracts, and then handed teams the task of building their own project and showing it to potential investors. Along that path, the recurring question was less “what does this function do” and more “who owns this object”.
A Problem Where Ownership Is the Whole Point
Our team’s project was an on-chain crowdfunding platform — SuiGive, with the code in the SuiGive repository. We chose it because the problem is one that on-chain data is unusually well suited to.
Many existing public fundraising projects suffer from a lack of transparency regarding fund allocation and actual project outcomes, and it’s difficult for the public to effectively monitor a project’s progress. The transparent nature of on-chain data addresses exactly that. Beyond transparency, using on-chain smart contracts we can manage fund flows efficiently, controlling the movement of funds through strict, consensus-verified code. We can issue NFTs to provide unique verification for donors, which could in turn link to other services such as tax deductions. And on-chain transactions can effectively lower transaction costs, improving on the high costs associated with traditional financial transactions.
The project is currently in the early stages of development; the GitHub repository has the detailed progress.
The Language Is Only Half the Argument
A language is only as good as the chain under it. Sui’s fast block verification speed and low cost make it a highly competitive Layer 1 blockchain, and the unique programming language also makes this chain stand out. For an application like a crowdfunding platform — many small donations, each of which has to be cheap and fast to be worth making on-chain at all — those two properties are not a footnote.
What I Take Away
The workshop replaced a vague sense that Sui Move was “another smart contract language” with a concrete reason to prefer it for certain problems: when what you are modelling is ownership of discrete things, an object model is a better fit than account-based contract state. I plan to continue developing and exploring Sui Move, and I’m excited about its future potential — that continued exploration is what eventually led to SuiAudit, an AI audit tool for Sui Move contracts.