Aptos, a PoS L1 blockchain, has gained attention on crypto twitter for their mainnet launch yesterday, which was criticized by some for falling below expectations. In addition to this, many have criticized the protocol’s tokenomics and large valuation compared to other crypto protocols.
In this event from Messari Mainnet, Ryan Selkis welcomes Mo Shaikh to explain the origin of Aptos, the reason for its high valuation, and how it compares to other blockchains.
Read our notes below to learn more.
Blockchain Infrastructure and Mo’s Journey
Same problems in 2017 cycle are the same problems today.
ETH experienced success attracting developers but has scaling problems.
L2s and scaling solutions created a fragmented environment for developers.
Other networks were sacrificing security and safety for speed.
Scalability is very difficult to build, Aptos team thinks building from scratch is the best move.
Facebook’s Web3 Experience
Mo joined facebook while ETH was having issues scaling.
This was challenging for Mo when he was building Meridio, a tokenization platform.
Facebook built Libra/ Diem, a stablecoin cryptocurrency, and Move, a smart contract language.
Faebook realized if they wanted to build in Web3 it would have to be permissionless and open source.
There were challenges involving Facebook stakeholders and regulators: this conflicts with the open spirit of Web3.
Origin of Aptos
Aptos Co-founder and CTO Avery Ching has 10 years of experience at facebook, a PhD in high performance computing, and has installed half a million servers across the world with synced time.
Aptos team includes 10 PhDs, who are experts in cryptography, are referenced by Vitalik, and have contributed to Verkle trees (an advanced ETH data scaling solution).
Aptos was able to tap into resources that most in Web3 don’t have access to, an unfair advantage.
They had safety and security in mind, for both users and developers.
Removing bureaucracy from development process sped up innovation.
Existing L1s helped Aptos build out their infrastructure, which they plan to use to onboard the next one billion users.
Aptos Experience So Far
Aptos has launched 4 testnets.
The first testnet included 20,000 nodes.
Every testnet allowed the team to analyze developer feedback: one issue was that Aptos was upgrading it’s network too quickly for developers to keep up.
Aptos was able to mint 2 million NFTs in an hour.
Advantage of Aptos
Even though Aptos is open source, it requires a lot of resources to fork.
The Move smart contract language will be very efficient and will reduce the number of hours it takes developers to create a product.
The Move prover feature allows a smart contract to be tested in a safe environment before it hits mainnet.
Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder of Solana, has expressed his approval of the Move language.
Aptos will allow transactions to be pre-verified in a human-readable way. Users will be able to see outcomes of transactions before they go through.
This gives more confidence to users and sets up developers for success.
Aptos has high throughput and low latency.
Aptos’ features make it very close to solving the blockchain trilemma (the idea that blockchains can only prioritize 2 of the following: decentralization, security, and scalability).
Aptos Ecosystem
Very talented developers are beginning to build on Aptos.
Jump’s crypto trading division has been spending a lot of time in Aptos ecosystem.
Jump announced code completion for Wormhole (bridging solution) and Pyth (oracle solution).
Aptos will bring one of the largest games in the world on chain.
Aptos vs Sui
(Sui is another Move-based blockchain.)
Aptos team is excited about next generation of blockchains.
They want Aptos to be the home for Move developers.
The next generation of PoS networks that are safe, reliable, and secure will be a major catalyst.
People should pay attention to infrastructure that upgrades aggressively, and guarantees end users assurance and security.
The world will probably be a convergence between Web2 and Web3.