With the countdown to the launch of the mainnet, it is foreseeable that the new public chain Aptos will enter the field of view of the encryption circle more and more frequently.
This brand new Layer 1 public chain can be regarded as the sequel to the Meta (formerly Facebook) Libra (later renamed Diem) project that was stranded. At the end of January this year, Diem was sold by Meta, and some core members left to form a team to develop the Aptos public chain based on Diem's open source code.
In March of this year, Aptos received investment from top institutions such as a16z, FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and Binance Labs, which fully met the expectations of the outside world. Recently, another source revealed that Aptos has discussed a new round of financing with investors, which is regarded as a signal of its ecological construction.
Compared with the existing public chains on the market, the biggest feature of Aptos is that it adopts a new development language Move. This language was originally designed for the development of the Diem project, focusing on the security, scalability and Upgradability.
Since the launch of the testnet in March this year, Aptos has gone through multiple rounds of testing, and the testnet has more than 20,000 verification nodes. Data shows that currently Aptos can process more than 10,000 transactions per second. Ideally, the public chain can process 160,000 transactions per second in the future.
The main network of Aptos is expected to be launched at the end of September. At the current stage, many projects have been developed and deployed based on the test network, including the ultra-parallel CLOB protocol Econia, the mobile multi-signature wallet Hive, and the automatic market maker (AMM) model transaction application Pontem Network wait.
Can the luxury Aptos become the explosive point of the blockchain industry in the second half of the year? The answer will be revealed in September.
Top Backgrounds Raise Aptos Expectations
The last round of encrypted asset bull market gave birth to emerging Layer 1 public chains such as Solana, Avalanche, Fantom, and Harmony, presenting a scene where the underlying infrastructure of the blockchain is flourishing. During the peak period, the native tokens on these public chains rose dozens or even hundreds of times from their low points.
With the bull-bear rotation, the ecological activity and asset accumulation on these new public chains have declined significantly compared with the bull market period, and under the rapid pace of industry development, they have gradually become "front waves". In the crowded public chain track, "back waves" come one after another.
Aptos is the most eye-catching existence in Houlang, and its project background and capital matrix are among the top in the industry. According to the latest news, the Aptos mainnet is expected to be launched at the end of September this year. During the countdown to the mainnet launch, this Layer1 public chain has begun to frequently enter the field of vision of the encryption industry.
On July 22, according to sources, Aptos has discussed a new round of financing with investors. The company's valuation will be 2.75 billion US dollars, and as the negotiations progress, the valuation may increase. Seeking new financing implies that Aptos has begun to accumulate power for the growth of the ecosystem on the chain, which is a positive signal for Aptos followers.
Before formally introducing Aptos, it is necessary to describe its special background. Aptos was officially established in February this year, but before that, the Aptos team had accumulated a lot of technology.
In June 2019, the Libra white paper came out, planning to issue a global super-sovereign digital currency, but was eventually forced to give up due to regulatory restrictions. Subsequently, Libra changed its name to Diem, and its positioning became a stable currency similar to USDT. However, Diem still died without a problem under regulatory restrictions. At the end of January this year, Diem was sold by Meta for about $182 million.
However, some original members of the Diem project did not give up. They reorganized after leaving Meta and pinned their new careers on Aptos.
Aptos co-founder and chief technology officer Avery Ching has served as the chief software engineer at Meta for more than 10 years, and was the technical leader of the Novi team, an encryption wallet under the original Meta. In addition, most of the developers and researchers such as Alden Hu and Dahlia Malkhi in the Aptos team participated in the development of Diem and Novi.
With Diem's prequel story, Aptos quickly garnered some top-tier capital attention after its founding.
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Binance Labs invests in Aptos Labs
It should be noted that in order to ensure the independence of the project, Aptos deliberately keeps a distance from Meta. According to the official team, "Since leaving Meta, we have been able to put our ideas into practice, get rid of bureaucratic red tape, build a brand new network from scratch, and put them into practice." Therefore, although the outside world regards Aptos as As a "sequel" to Libra, but has nothing to do with Meta.
Multiple rounds of testing have accumulated more than 20,000 nodes
After receiving large-scale investment from top institutions, Aptos has started an intensive research and development process.
At present, in order to be compatible with Ethereum, most public chains are developed in Solidity language. Aptos is different. It is based on Diem's open source code base, uses a new Move language as the development language, and adopts an iterative Byzantine consensus protocol, known as the "proof-of-stake DiemBFT" consensus. This consensus mechanism enables high transaction throughput, low latency, and is more energy efficient than the proof-of-work mechanism used in some other blockchains.
As a programming language originally designed for Diem, Move is designed to take into account the shortcomings of existing languages and make corrections. According to reports, at present, the blockchain prioritizes the "sequential" execution model, which allows accounts and smart contracts to interact arbitrarily in a series of transactions, but prevents linear expansion.
Move is inspired by linear logic - which defines digital assets as "resources" that cannot be copied or disappeared. In the eyes of industry insiders, Move is a smart contract language for operating digital assets. Its static type system can also allow smart contract code to check most errors through the compiler during compilation, making smart contracts more reliable.
The main goal of Aptos, which uses a new language design, is to take into account the security, scalability and upgradeability of the blockchain.
Aptos believes that Layer 1 blockchains should take on more scalability responsibilities to simplify and mainstream the user experience. Therefore, it does not intend to need Layer 2 to improve scalability like Ethereum, but to improve network scalability as much as possible in the underlying design. According to its test network data, Aptos can currently process more than 10,000 transactions per second. Ideally, Aptos can process 160,000 transactions per second after the mainnet goes live.
With the emergence of new blockchain application scenarios such as NFT and DAO, the upgradeability of blockchain has been emphasized by the industry. However, many current blockchains struggle to make major protocol improvements after launch, so events such as downtime and network forks occur from time to time. Therefore, Aptos paid full attention to upgradeability when designing and building the blockchain. The management and configuration of its block validators are managed through the on-chain state to facilitate community voting and fast execution of upgrades. According to reports, Aptos has successfully performed several major upgrades during the development process without downtime.
From the perspective of development progress, in March this year, Aptos launched the developer testnet, cooperated with strategic partners and the web3 developer community, collected feedback, and improved the Move developer experience and Move language. In May, Aptos launched an incentivized testnet registration, during which Aptos will provide incentives to all participants who help ensure network security.
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Aptos is in the incentivized testnet phase
According to a blog post by Aptos, its test network has reached over 20,000 nodes, making it the largest known proof-of-stake node community today. Aptos bluntly stated that the development of the community has far exceeded their wildest expectations. According to the plan, the remaining two phases of the Aptos incentive test network are expected to be completed in the next two months, and by the end of September, Aptos will launch the main network.
Aptos testnet has assembled hundreds of applications
As the date of the mainnet launch is getting closer, Aptos is currently allocating more energy to the early ecological construction.
Aptos Launches Ecosystem Grant Program
Aptos Launches Ecosystem Grant Program
According to Aptos, the funds for this ecological grant will be distributed in US dollars, although in the future there may be an option to distribute tokens to help incentivize long-term ecosystem growth.
Compared with EOS, ETH and other networks that issue Tokens for public fundraising before the mainnet goes live, Aptos has not yet announced the economic model and distribution of its mainnet tokens. From this point of view, Aptos's priority for public chain development is much higher than that of token issuance.
According to Aptos’ blog post, its ecology currently has more than 100 projects built on the network, with use cases covering DeFi, NFT, games, etc.
On July 21, Aptos announced some specific early ecosystem projects on Twitter, including the ultra-parallel CLOB protocol Econia, the mobile multi-signature wallet hive, the encrypted wallet Martian that can integrate applications, the lending protocol NjordFinance, and the transaction aggregator Hippo Labs, AMM trading application Pontem Network, etc.
In addition, known projects on Aptos include the blockchain browser Aptosscan, the NFT market Topaz.so, the project indicator dashboard platform Dapptos View, the NFT casting project Aptos Crown Masks, and the decentralized cross-chain wallet ONTO Wallet wait.
From the perspective of ecological layout, Aptos still focuses on infrastructure construction, and the deployment scenarios are mostly products such as wallets, DEX and lending agreements.
It is worth noting that since Aptos adopts the Move smart contract language, it is not compatible with the mainstream DApp based on the Solidity language in the market. Therefore, developers need to rewrite the code to build applications on Aptos. This may slow down the establishment of Aptos ecological applications.
However, Austin, former head of marketing at Solana, recently announced that he will officially join Aptos next month as Director of Ecosystem. Judging from Austin's past experience, most of his career in the Web3 field has focused on incubating and expanding the global community, and his experience may bring some help to Aptos' ecological expansion.
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