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. For context, most blockchains execute transactions sequentially, which means that a single failed transaction or high demand on the network could hold up the entire chain.
In the case of Aptos, all transactions are processed simultaneously and validated afterward. Failed transactions are either re-executed or aborted, thanks to the blockchain’s software transactional memory libraries, which spot and manage conflicts.
Aptos is built using Move, a new smart contract programming language that claims to offer advantages to Solidity, the EVM-based programming language. This includes blockchain commands that can be easily verified, modification of private key and modular design of Aptos.
New use cases can be realized through Aptos’ upgradeability and configurability, while horizontal throughput scalability — through the natively-implemented sharding feature — provides a better user experience.
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How Much Aptos is in Circulation?
APT is the native currency of the Aptos blockchain. It has an initial total supply of 1 billion and at the time of writing, its circulating supply is 130 million APT.
The distribution is as follows: Community (51.02%); Core Contributors (19.00%); Foundation (16.50%); Investors (13.48%).
Under the Community allocation, around 80% are held by the Aptos Foundation and the remaining by Aptos Labs. This will be used to support community growth and Aptos Foundation initiatives, and the remainder will be unlocked monthly over the next ten years.
Investors and core contributors are subjected to a four-year vesting schedule from mainnet launch. The Aptos team announced a token airdrop of 20 million APT tokens to early testnet users on Oct. 19, 2022.
For a summary of Aptos tokenomics, refer here.
Aptos Mainnet Launch
As already mentioned, despite raising millions of dollars from investors, Aptos did not launch its mainnet until October 2022. Prior to the mainnet launch, its testnet campaign called “Aptos Incentivized Testnet (AIT)” was running since May.
The testnet was divided into four stages – AIT1, AIT2, AIT3, and AIT4. The aim of the campaign was to invite and incentivize developers, node operators, and auditors to launch applications and stress-test the network, ahead of the mainnet launch.
On September 9, 2022, the network completed its AIT3 campaign, paving a way for the final testnet. Through the series of testnets, Aptos onboarded over 100 projects, including Solrise Finance, PayMagic, Pontem Network, and MartianDAO.
On Oct. 18, 2022, Aptos went live with its mainnet launch, making it the first blockchain to debut on Move technology. At the time this content was published, the mainnet was using the latest version of AptosBFT (version 4), which leverages a Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocol. However, the company is already working on AptosBFT (version 5).
What Is Aptos Bridge?
On-chain user application protocol called LayerZero Labs launched the Aptos Bridge on October 19, 2022.
The blockchain bridge will allow users to transfer ETH, USDC, and USDT from Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, and Optimism to Aptos.
How Is the Aptos Network Secured?
Aptos uses two consensus protocols – Proof-of-Stake and AptosBFT.
AptosBFT is quite similar to DiemBFT, originally developed for Diem. “BFT '' means ‘Byzantine Fault-Tolerant,’ and a network is said to be Byzantine fault-tolerant if it can continue to operate normally even if some of its members go offline or turn malicious.
AptosBFT is a custom-made consensus algorithm based on the HotStuff protocol. While there are a lot of background technicalities around how the protocol secures the network, the algorithm analyzes the on-chain state and automatically updates leader rotations to adjust for non-responsive validators without human intervention.
Where Can I Buy Aptos?
The APT token can be purchased and traded on a number of exchanges, including Binance, Huobi, KuCoin, Coinbase and more.