Move based chains and their early programs: what airdrop farmers need to know

What “move-based” actually means

Move is a smart contract language originally built inside Meta’s Diem project (the payments network formerly known as Libra). When Diem was shut down in 2022, several of the engineers who built it left to start their own chains, taking the language and virtual machine with them. That’s how Aptos and Sui both ended up running on Move, despite being separate networks with separate teams, separate token economics, and different design choices for how accounts and assets work.

Move treats digital assets as typed resources that can’t be copied or silently deleted, only moved between owners. That’s a different mental model from Solidity on EVM chains, where a token balance is just a number in a mapping that a contract can edit. It matters for farming because it changes what an on-chain footprint actually looks like, which we’ll get into below.

Since Aptos and Sui launched, a second wave of Move-based projects has shown up: Movement Labs, building a Move execution environment that settles to Ethereum; Initia, an “interwoven rollup” ecosystem where individual app-chains run Move; Supra, a Move-based L1 built around an oracle and fast-finality pitch; and smaller projects like Rooch, which pairs Move with a Bitcoin-anchored settlement layer. Each of these ran or is running its own testnet, points system, or ecosystem grant program, and each has its own rules about what counts as legitimate participation.

Where this started: Aptos and Sui’s early programs

Aptos ran a series of incentivized testnets before its October 2022 mainnet launch. Participants completed defined tasks (running a validator, submitting transactions, reporting bugs) on testnet, and eligible wallets received an APT allocation at mainnet launch tied to that testnet activity. It was one of the clearer examples of a chain converting pre-launch technical participation into a token distribution, and it’s a big part of why “Move chain” and “testnet program” got linked together in farmers’ minds.

Sui’s mainnet, which launched in May 2023, didn’t run the same testnet-to-mainnet pipeline. Community rewards there were spread across different mechanisms over time, including community access and early ecosystem campaigns, rather than one clean “do X on testnet, get Y at launch” formula. The lesson for anyone tracking a new Move chain isn’t “expect an Aptos-style airdrop.” It’s that every chain sets its own criteria, publishes them (sometimes late, sometimes vaguely), and can change them before a token generation event actually happens. Treat any specific number or claim of “guaranteed” rewards you see repeated online as unverified until the project’s own docs say otherwise.

Why the account model changes how you farm

On Aptos, an account is a single address that holds resources directly, similar in spirit to how an EVM wallet holds balances, but each resource type (a coin, an NFT, a staking position) is stored as its own typed struct under that address. Interacting with a new app usually means registering a resource under your account first, which is itself a visible on-chain action before you’ve done anything else.

Sui is more different again. It’s object-centric: instead of a global ledger of balances, individual objects (a coin, an NFT, a game item) are owned by an address and get referenced directly in transactions. Sui also supports parallel execution because independent objects don’t need to be processed in a single global sequence the way EVM transactions do. That has a practical effect: transaction ordering and gas-payer patterns look different on Sui than what clustering tools built for Ethereum expect, which is one reason chain analysis vendors have had to build Move-specific tooling rather than reusing EVM heuristics wholesale.

For an operator, this means the “one wallet, one persona, one browser profile” discipline that works on EVM chains still applies, but the specific signals that give a cluster away shift. On Aptos and Sui, resource or object registration patterns, coin-store initialization order, and the specific contracts or dApps a wallet touches first after funding are all data points, on top of the usual funding-source and gas-payer analysis.

How chain analysis reads a Move chain

Clustering on any chain, Move-based or not, comes down to a small set of correlated signals: where the funding came from, what pays for gas, what times transactions happen, what sequence of contracts gets touched, and whether an off-chain fingerprint (IP address, browser, device) is shared across supposedly separate wallets.

On Aptos and Sui specifically, a few things stand out. Because both chains are still relatively new, the pool of active dApps at any given time is small, so wallets that touch the exact same handful of protocols in the exact same order look far more correlated than they would on a chain with thousands of active contracts. Sequence numbers (Aptos’s equivalent of a nonce) that start at zero and climb in lockstep across many addresses are an easy tell if those addresses were all created and funded from a script running on a loop. And because bridging into these ecosystems often goes through a small number of on-ramps and bridges, funding-source clustering is unusually effective early in a chain’s life, simply because there are fewer paths in.

None of that is unique to Move chains. It’s the same clustering logic that works on any young L1, just concentrated by the fact that the ecosystem is smaller and newer.

Running wallets without a shared fingerprint

Ops discipline here looks the same in principle as it does on any chain: each wallet’s funding, execution environment, and behavior pattern should be independent enough that a chain analyst (or a project’s own sybil filter) can’t tie it back to a shared source.

Practically, that means keeping funding paths separate rather than fanning out from one hot wallet to dozens of addresses in a single batch. It means not running every wallet through the same RPC endpoint with the same API key, since a shared endpoint is itself a correlatable signal that shows up in request patterns even when the on-chain transactions look clean. It means giving each wallet its own browser profile and device fingerprint rather than reusing one browser session for a dozen accounts, which is the whole reason anti-detect browsers exist as a category. And it means letting activity look like a person using the chain, with irregular timing and a plausible mix of interactions, rather than a script firing the same three transactions on the same schedule across every address.

It’s worth saying plainly: most airdrop and testnet programs, Move-based or not, explicitly prohibit sybil behavior in their terms, and disqualification is a real and common outcome even for setups that look careful. Good infrastructure reduces the odds of getting mechanically clustered with other wallets. It doesn’t override a project’s own rules about what counts as one participant.

Tools that actually matter here

For Move chains specifically, three categories of tooling matter more than people expect going in. RPC access is the first: public endpoints for Aptos and Sui get rate-limited and heavily shared, so a dedicated or private RPC provider isn’t a luxury once you’re running more than a handful of wallets, it’s what keeps requests from all funneling through the same visible chokepoint. Wallet software is the second: Aptos and Sui each have their own native wallet standards (separate from MetaMask-style EVM wallets), and not every multi-wallet management tool supports both well yet, so it’s worth checking compatibility before building a workflow around one. Airdrop trackers are the third, mainly as an early-warning layer: since criteria for these programs get published unevenly and sometimes change close to a token generation event, a tracker that surfaces primary-source announcements is more useful than one that just aggregates rumors.

We test and review tools in all three categories on this site, based on how they actually behave on Aptos and Sui specifically, not just on EVM chains where most reviews are written.

The honest limits

There’s no way to know in advance whether a given Move chain’s testnet or points program will convert into a token, what the criteria will be, or what an allocation might be worth if it does. Aptos ran one specific, well-documented model in 2022. Sui didn’t run the same one. Every newer Move chain is free to set its own rules, and those rules are the only source that matters, not secondhand claims about what “usually” happens. Nothing here is financial advice, and nothing about running clean, well-separated wallet infrastructure guarantees a payout.

If you want a closer look at how we test RPC providers, wallets, and anti-detect browsers for Move chains, or want to see how clustering shows up in practice on Aptos and Sui, head back to the homepage for the full set of guides and reviews.

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