Aptos: The Future of Blockchain Platforms?

Diem, also known as Libra, was a blockchain initiative run by Meta Corporation that was discontinued in the early part of 2022. A number of individuals who had previously worked on Diem went on to form the Aptos project. In particular, Diem was the original target audience for Move’s development.

The developers claim that the utilization of technology that allows for the concurrent execution of processes makes it possible to increase the speed of Aptos to more than 160,000 transactions per second.

The project team was successful in luring investments to the tune of 350 million dollars during the year 2022. The final round of testing for the Aptos blockchain is now taking place, and the launch of the primary network is scheduled to take place by the end of 2022.

Aptos’s History

Former employees of Meta are the driving force behind the project. In 2018, they began working on the creation of the Libra project, which was then renamed the Diem project in 2020. The blockchain technology and the Diem cryptocurrency were going to be integrated into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, according to Meta’s plans. Despite this, the project was unable to survive the pressure from the regulators. He was purchased by Silvergate Capital Corporation in February 2022, and the transaction is estimated to have been worth $200 million.

Soon after that, Mo Sheikh, who had previously worked as head of partnerships at Meta, and Iveri Ching, who had previously worked as head of blockchain development, established Aptos Labs. Diem was worked on by a large number of other persons that were part of the Aptos team.

Aptos, a blockchain-based business, successfully raised a total of $350 million over two separate funding rounds in 2022. The amount of money raised in the seed round, which took place in March of 2022, was two hundred million dollars. It was run by the Andreessen Horowitz venture capital fund, and it included participation from other investors such as Multicoin Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Tiger Global, FTX Ventures, and Paxos. In July of 2022, FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto were the ones to lead a Series A funding round that was worth $150 million. Aptos received funding from Binance Labs in the month of September 2022. It was not possible to determine the whole amount of investments.

At this time, Aptos is participating in a testing procedure that is broken up into various stages. The launch of the mainnet is anticipated to take place on December 22, 2022, according to an announcement made by the team on Discord.

Aptos Blockchain Capabilities and Features

Aptos was developed to be a platform that can easily adapt to the shifting nature of the Web 3 market and is also very easy to upgrade. Aptos presents an innovative blend of consensus, a novel smart contract design, security, performance, and decentralization, as the developers explain in the whitepaper on the project.

The Move VM virtual computer, which should compete with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) “monopoly,” is what enables users, applications, and smart contracts on the network to interact with one another. According to the Pontem team that was responsible for Move, the Aptos virtual machine has the potential to become the standard for integrating apps from Cosmos, Solana, Polkadot, and even Ethereum. This was said by the team that was responsible for Move.

An implementation of the Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) protocol that was developed expressly for Diem is referred to as HotStuff. This implementation is used by the Aptos blockchain as its consensus mechanism.

BFT offers a high level of protection against malicious behavior, making it possible for the network to continue operating normally even if a third of the validators are corrupted or fail to authenticate transactions. Blockchains like Hedera Hashgraph, Cosmos, Solana, and Everscale all make use of the same consensus method.

According to Joshua Lind, an engineer at Aptos Labs, the results of the tests showed that Aptos is able to process more than 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) thanks to its modular design and parallel execution of operations. This is achieved without compromising the blockchain’s decentralization or security. And the time it takes to finish a transaction, that is, the amount of time that passes between transmission and execution, is significantly less than one second.

Aptos Cryptocurrency

The native coin for Aptos will have the same name as the platform itself. At the time that this content was being prepared, the Aptos blockchain had not yet been released to the public, and there was no data available in the public domain regarding the tokenomics of the project. Nevertheless, the documentation for Aptos identifies numerous significant applications for the coin, which are as follows:

Transactions requiring a payment. To pay for transaction costs, cryptocurrency is required, just like it is with other blockchains.

Vote. Voting on upgrades and other matters pertaining to the governance of protocols will be done via APTOS.

Staking. Through the process of staking, it is possible to supplement one’s income using Aptos coin.

How the environment of Aptos is Progressing Through Time

A close engagement with the Google Cloud service in April 2022 was one of the first steps taken at the beginning of Aptos blockchain testing. This helped set up the capability to establish network nodes in the cloud within 15 minutes.

At the end of June 2022, there were more than one hundred projects in development within the Aptos ecosystem. These projects were being developed in popular fields such as blockchain games, decentralized finance, and non-fungible tokens. The Aptos team also mentioned the developer communities that were participating in the process of developing the ecosystem. These communities include Pontem Network, Nutrios, PayMagic, MartianDAO, and Solrise.

The integration of the cross-chain protocol with the Aptos platform has been announced by the LayerZero team. This connection will serve as a bridge for DeFi applications and will improve the user experience while interacting with the Web3 market.

Scale3 Labs, a firm that was created by individuals who formerly worked for Coinbase, recently made public their intentions to develop infrastructure solutions for the Aptos blockchain. This project is going to give solutions that will make it easier for node operators to run their services smoothly.