Move Madness: Powering the Next Gen of DeFi Super Apps on Aptos 

That means giving developers the tools to move faster, write safer code, and launch more powerful applications—especially in high-performance verticals like DeFi. Over the past few months, contributors across the ecosystem have been enhancing the Move programming platform to better support the most demanding on-chain financial applications.

Now, a wave of major enhancements to Move on Aptos is rolling out bringing that vision closer to reality: 

• More expressiveness in the language and SDK to program DeFi apps. 

• More performance improvements to handle massive asset flows. 

• More reliability and security to protect high-value contracts. 

These updates make it easier than ever for developers to build powerful, scalable, and secure DeFi applications on Aptos. Here’s an overview of the next-gen Move features designed to take DeFi to new heights. 

Features

The Dynamic Script Composer allows developers to create complex DeFi experiences on client side, by chaining a series of calls in a single transaction. This means that users will be able to take out flash loans, perform multiple swaps across pools, and repay — atomically. 

Account Abstraction allows an account to authenticate through custom Move functions instead of relying on native Rust-based authenticators. This approach can be used to define a customized authentication scheme,  enabling advanced multisig experiences and delegated asset management. Join the discussion.

With Permissioned Signers, an account owner can set clear rules for who can authorize sensitive transactions. This means that users will be able to create and delegate keys with restricted account access and permissions. Permissioned Signers is going through final reviews, preview it here.  

Furthermore, Storable Function Values (higher-order functions) are ready and currently in security auditing (see AIP and documentation preview). Function values are a significant extension to the expressiveness of the Move language, enabling safe dynamic dispatch, which is important for making DeFi apps easier compositional.

Performance

DeFi apps need to manage data structures like order books. Ordered Maps and Big Ordered Maps are two new additions to the Aptos standard library which work significantly faster – that is less gas cost – than the existing collection implementations. Those data structures are implemented in Move, but leverage a few new high-performance native building blocks in the library.

The Move VM also comes with a re-designed code caching and loading infrastructure: Code Loader V2. It significantly improves performance of publishing and loading contracts. Stay tuned for the further loading enhancement for contracts with a larger number of dependencies, as it is common in DeFi apps: Lazy Loading that defers loading of Move modules until code in those modules is actually called, minimizing the execution footprint.

Reliability and Security

Earlier this year we shipped Aptos Workspace Alpha, an integrated environment which allows dApp developers to write powerful integration tests for Move packages. Aptos Workspace enables builders to deliver safer and more reliable apps to their users. In the future, Workspace aims to become a one-stop solution for the entire smart contract lifecycle — from development, testing, deployment and management. See the Github tutorial here.

The Move Mutation Tester also recently shipped. This advanced  tool in the Move toolset automatically finds blind spots in a test suite. Mutation testing complements the code coverage tool to gain insights into the quality of the unit tests. It can find blind spots in unit tests, thereby also potentially identifying bugs in source code.

Move Madness Is Here

Originally developed for the Diem Payment Network, Move was built with a security-first in mind, making it one of the safest and most efficient smart contract languages in the industry. Its full potential is only realized on Aptos. These latest upgrades reinforce why Move on Aptos is the industry standard for high-performance smart contracts—delivering greater expressiveness, optimized performance, and unmatched security. Move Madness is here and it’s a game‑changer.