Original author: Nianqing & Biscuits,chain catcher
Today, Aptos, a public chain project founded by former Meta employees, was revealed to be seeking a new round of financing at a valuation of US$2.75 billion. A few days earlier, Mysten Labs, the developer of another public chain project Sui, was also revealed to be seeking to raise funds at a valuation of US$2 billion. At least $200 million in financing.
At the end of June, a Layer1 blockchain called Linera also announced the completion of a $6 million seed round led by a16z. Why are a16z, FTX, Coinbase and other well-known institutions betting heavily on these new public chains today when the Layer1 track is heating up and the narrative is weakening? What are their special features?
The founders of these three public chains are not only former employees of Meta, but also the main creators and core developers of the company's cryptocurrency project Diem (formerly known as Libra) and encrypted wallet Novi.
In 2021, with Diem losing ground in regulation, a group of developers working on innovative projects in the Meta Encryption Department realized that in order to build new applications for the pioneering Web3 that are different from the past, they must jump from the original field to encryption field work. After leaving Meta, Evan Chang and Sam Blackshear founded Mysten Labs, an encryption infrastructure development company, and then launched the new public chain Sui; Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching built the new public chain Aptos based on the open source Diem codebase.
At the beginning of 2022, the crypto-friendly bank Silvergate confirmed the acquisition of Diem project technology and assets, and the project officially ended. Novi's chief researcher and engineer, Mathieu Baudet, founded Linera and decided to carry forward the FastPay and Zef protocols he had previously developed in Meta.
This is the initial story of the three new public chains. They all more or less inherited the innovative technology of the high-profile Diem project. Because of this, even if the encryption market is gradually attracted by L2, a16z, FTX and Top institutions such as Coinbase are still injecting large sums of money into these new public chains, and a16z has adopted a comprehensive betting strategy, leading investment rounds in all three projects.
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01 Diem and Move language
Diem is a blockchain-based permissioned stablecoin payment system. As an encryption project launched by the social giant Meta, Diem has attracted much attention since its debut.
The market has high hopes for Diem and believes that its launch will change the world's payment landscape. Super giants in social media, e-commerce, shared travel, music, travel, payment and other fields, such as Visa, Uber, eBay, Spotify, Coinbase and other companies have become partners of Diem.
However, the project has aroused strong opposition from government regulators in the European Union, the United States, and other countries based on issues such as currency sovereignty, financial stability, privacy, and antitrust. Diem, which was originally scheduled to be released in 2020, has undergone a name change and suspension. Unfortunately, the curtain call ended at the end of January this year.
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Move programming language
Move is a Rust-based programming language originally developed by Facebook for the Diem blockchain. Currently, Move's github code base is mainly managed by Mysten Labs. Aptos and Sui's team members are also the core development team of Move. Move wants to be the Javascript of Web3, allowing more developers to quickly build blockchain products.
Move semantics are inspired by linear logic. According to the introduction of the Linera team, Web2 did not have the scalability it has today. It is precisely because the transition from "horizontal expansion" to "linear expansion" was completed around 2000 that it achieved a large-scale speedup. Currently, blockchains prioritize a model of "sequential" execution, which allows accounts and smart contracts to interact arbitrarily in a series of transactions, but prevents linear scaling. Therefore, the name of Linera directly indicates that it inherits the characteristics of the Move programming language and will continue to develop and promote a new execution model suitable for "linear expansion".
In addition, this linear logic of Move can define digital assets. In this language, digital assets are like resources and satisfy some characteristics of linear logic: digital assets cannot be copied; digital assets cannot disappear out of thin air.
In short, Move is a smart contract language for operating digital assets. And Move's static type system enables the smart contract code to check out most resource usage errors through the compiler during compilation, that is, before deployment, ensuring that smart contracts are no longer as fragile as before.
When the Move contract is designed, security is also fully considered. We will not explain the specific technology here. In short, Move is different from Solidity. Move performs better in terms of security and verifiability, and is specially designed to represent digital assets and perform safe operations on them.
In addition, Move also draws lessons from the EVM smart contract language. At present, many smart contract languages of public chains are trying to replace Solidity, but in fact they do not take into account the network effect of Ethereum, they just want to replace EVM, not Solidity.
Public chains such as Aptos and Sui have developed additional frameworks and basic packages based on Move. Among them, Sui Move has made major changes to the original version of Core Move. The main differences include: Sui uses its own object-centric global storage, addresses represent object IDs, Sui objects have globally unique IDs, and Sui has module initializers (init), the Sui entry point takes an object reference as input. These changes inherit the security and flexibility of Move, and optimize the storage mechanism, address type, etc. to improve network performance and reduce transaction confirmation time.
In addition to the Move language, Diem has two technical features, namely:
1) Using a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus method: Compared to the proof-of-work mechanism used in some other blockchains, protocols using the BFT consensus method achieve high transaction throughput, low latency, and a more energy-efficient consensus method.
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02 Sui, Aptos and Linera: Who will emerge from L1 first?
Although it promises not to use any Diem intellectual property rights owned by Silvergate when building the blockchain, but comparing Diem's white paper, you will find that the three public chain projects, Sui, Aptos and Linera, all have certain differences in the development language or technical logic. Inheritance of some aspects and functions.
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1、Sui / Mysten Labs
Sui's development team comes from Mysten Labs. The founding team includes Evan Cheng, Adeniyi Abiodun, Sam Blackshear, George Danezis, and Kostas Kryptos, all of whom participated in the Novi and Diem projects in Meta. Among them, CEO Evan Cheng has served as the R&D Meta blockchain engineering technical director from 2018 to September this year.
In December last year, Mysten Labs received $36 million in financing led by a16z. Coinbase Ventures, NFX, Slow Ventures, Scribble Ventures, Samsung NEXT, Lux Capital and other institutions also participated in this round of financing.
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Sui network economic model
In July, Mysten Labs is seeking to raise at least US$200 million in Series B financing at a valuation of US$2 billion. This round of financing was led by FTX Ventures and has currently received US$140 million in funding support for this round of financing.
Currently, the Sui network has launched two encrypted wallets for testing: the official Chrome extension wallet Sui Wallet and the third-party wallet Ethos Wallet, users can experience the transfer and minting of NFT on the Sui network. Sui will launch an incentivized testnet in August.
The key to Sui's performance is transaction parallelization. In most blockchains, transactions must be ordered and put into blocks for sequential execution. Sequential execution unnecessarily limits throughput on these chains, since most transactions are independent of each other. Because Sui requires that transaction dependencies be explicitly stated, it is able to process them in parallel. In the case where a few transactions are intertwined, Sui can still sort them and execute them sequentially.
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2、Aptos
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Source: Aptos Blog
In March of this year, Aptos completed a US$200 million financing led by a16z, Tiger Global, Katie Haun, Multicoin Capital, Three Arrows Capital, FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and many other well-known VCs. Afterwards, Binance Labs announced its investment in Aptos Labs, and payment giant PayPal also stated that it had participated in the investment, and this is also the first Layer1 public chain project invested by PayPal Ventures.
In May, Aptos launched incentivized testnet registration. In the roadmap of Aptos, there are 4 rounds of incentive testnet, and it is currently in the second round of AIT-2 pledge testing.
Today, Aptos was revealed again that it is conducting a new round of financing at a valuation of US$2.75 billion.
Aptos said in a blog post that its testnet has reached more than 20,000 nodes, making it the largest known proof-of-stake node community today. At the same time, the test network can verify and synchronize more than 10,000 transactions per second (TPS), with sub-second latency, and is moving towards more than 100,000 TPS. Aptos expects to launch the Aptos mainnet by the end of September.
In terms of ecological incentives, Aptos held a hackathon and launched an ecological funding plan at the end of June to develop the ecology. According to Aptos, more than 100 projects in its ecology have been built on the network, with use cases covering DeFi, NFT, games etc. In addition, Austin, the former marketing director of Solana, recently announced that he will officially join Aptos in August as the ecosystem director. Most of his career in web3 has been focused on incubating and expanding the global community. Bring a lot of help.
