آپتوس APT / Aptos

What Is Aptos?

Aptos is a Layer 1 Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain that employs a novel smart contract programming language called Move, a Rust-based programming language that was independently developed by Meta (formerly Facebook)’s Diem blockchain engineers.

Aptos’s vision is a blockchain that brings mainstream adoption to web3 and empowers an ecosystem of DApps to solve real-world user problems.

The PoS blockchain can achieve a theoretical transaction throughput of over 150,000 transactions per second (tps) through parallel execution.

In March 2022, Aptos raised $200 million in a seed round led by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Other crypto heavyweights like Tiger Global and Multicoin Capital took part in the funding round. Fast forward to July, the startup raised another $200 million in a Series A round with participation from Dragonfly, Apollo Global, Franklin Templeton, Animoca, Jump Crypto and others.

Two months later, Binance Labs made a strategic investment of an undisclosed amount in Aptos.

On Oct. 18, 2022, Aptos announced the mainnet launch, while the Aptos genesis occurred on Oct. 12, 2022.

Who Are the Founders of Aptos?

Aptos is the brainchild of Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, both former employees of Meta. Mo, who is the current CEO of the company, is a founder with years of multinational financial services and blockchain/crypto experience. According to his LinkedIn profile, he specializes in scaling products and has experience in the private equity and venture capital markets.

Ching, on the other hand, is the CTO of Aptos. He is a software engineer and was one of the principal software engineers at Meta.

The duo worked together on the Diem blockchain project at Meta. Shaikh and Ching decided to join forces to create Aptos Labs when the Diem project was discontinued in January 2022. It, therefore, comes as no surprise that Aptos employs some of the technicalities of Diem.

Other members of the Aptos team include researchers, designers, and engineers from Diem.

What Makes Aptos Unique?

For a start, the Aptos team claims that its network can process over 150,000 tps. By comparison, Ethereum’s mainnet tps is around 12 to 15.

This high transaction throughput is possible through a parallel execution engine (Block-STM) — a byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) PoS consensus mechanism.