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A couple of months ago we announced that we would be taking part in Aptos Labs’ $200 million funding round led by a16z. Aptos is a Layer 1 built on Move, a blockchain language designed around safe resource management. At the helm of Aptos is Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, two of the leads on Meta’s Libra/Diem blockchain project. Using parts of the open-source Diem codebase, they have launched Aptos and they aim to become the safest and most production-ready Layer 1 blockchain. Over the last couple of months Aptos Labs has continued to build, innovate, and excite us with their recently launched incentivized testnet rollout.
At Aptos’ core is Move, a language built originally for the Diem Blockchain that prioritizes resource scarcity, safety, and control. Contrary to how Ethereum and Solana store data in owner accounts that are publishers of smart contracts or programs, Move operates with the belief that data should be stored within the account that owns it, not the account that publishes it. In Move, transactions are metered, which means that any execution of a Move program has an associated transaction cost. Another key feature of Move is the ability to declare multiple custom resource types within a module (smart contract equivalent). Resources on Move cannot be copied or discarded, only moved amongst the different storage locations.
Scaling is a problem that all L1s must face. While Ethereum can currently only handle ~15 transactions per second (TPS), alternative networks like Solana boast a possible 65k TPS while a non-crypto network like Visa handles peaks of ~45k TPS. Aptos has recently shed light into how they have adopted an approach led by Software Transactional Material (STM) to implement a multi-threaded, highly efficient engine that is able to handle 160k Move TPS.
To bootstrap on a fully decentralized vision, Aptos Labs has recently announced a partnership with Google Cloud, allowing developers to easily build on top of the network. This enables anyone with a Google Cloud account to power a node on the Aptos network in less than 15 minutes. Aptos CEO Mo Shaikh says he wants Aptos to be a part of his vision to provide “fair access to decentralized assets for billions of people”, and partnering with Google Cloud is a massive step in that direction. By building a safe ecosystem without any hardware requirements, developers can build on an L1 with little to no barrier to entry, a problem they often face getting started on other networks.
Since the announcement of their funding round, Aptos has launched their incentivized testnet and roadmap. This roadmap spans 4 months and has their growing community being established and ready to launch a production-grade mainnet as the main priority. The incentivized testnet recently opened with a limited amount of validator nodes. Between now and August, Aptos plans to, amongst other things, implement staking and a staking reward system using test coins, on-chain voting and governance, and perform a fully decentralized network upgrade from on-chain voting. All of this is evidence of a team that is willing to keep delivering and building out their tech and community to create the safest, most scalable, and most upgradable L1.
About StreamingFast
StreamingFast is an employee-owned company made up of some of the best Web3 builders in the space. We are Core Developers of The Graph and the masterminds behind the Firehose, a files-based and streaming-first approach to processing blockchain data. We are making strategic investments in projects building core components of the Web3 stack that we can also accelerate through our unique expertise.