Aptos unveils MonoMove, claiming up to 55x faster smart contract execution

Aptos has introduced MonoMove, a new execution engine it says can run smart contracts up to 55 times faster for onchain markets. Blockchains usually market speed through transactions-per-second figures. MonoMove targets a quieter bottleneck: how fast the virtual machine actually processes the code inside each transaction. What MonoMove actually changes MonoMove is a complete redesign of the Move virtual machine (VM) and the execution stack around it. Aptos is building a new one rather than tuning the old one. The redesign has two goals. The first is better single-thread performance, meaning how fast one processor core gets through a job. The second is parallelism, meaning how many jobs can run side by side without stepping on each other. Two technical choices drive the design. MonoMove uses monomorphized micro-ops and a register-based interpreter. Monomorphization means generating specialized versions of code ahead of time. The engine then avoids figuring out data types on the fly while a transaction runs. A register-based interpreter works with values held in named slots instead of constantly pushing and popping them from a stack. Both approaches aim to cut wasted work from every ...