VC-backed Layer 1, developed by some of Meta’s alums, boasts a breakthrough algorithm for resolving transactions that has never been seen before. Aptos’ mainnet was launched todawith a secret sauce created within Meta.
This is the culmination of four years of technical development, a valuation of $1 billion, and the culmination of four year of technical development. The leading exchange FTX has already announced that Aptos’ APT token will be listed on Wednesday.
Aptos has been dubbed the “Solana killer”, and is the latest high-profile effort to create the definitive blockchain for smart contract code. The code supports the vast array of NFTs, AAOs, and DeFi.
Mainnet has arrived.https://t.co/wZajVZMa5Q
— Aptos (@AptosLabs) October 17, 2022
Although Ethereum has made a significant leap forward since the merger, Solana and other challengers are making inroads with faster transaction speeds. However, occasionally outages have left the door open for newer players such as Aptos.
Meta (Facebook) started working on a blockchain project in 2019, Libra. Later, it was renamed Derm. The tech giant abandoned the project due to pressure from regulators and criticism from the crypto community. Developers saw the value in its key difference: ” Parallel Execution”, which is a way to order and combine transactions quickly to accelerate the process.
Aptos claimed that it handled 130,000 transactions per second in testing, compared with 30 transactions per second on Ethereum.
The Move programming language is also key to the Aptos ecosystem. It prioritizes scarcity over access control.
Aptos was a VC magnet in the months leading up to its launch. It closed a \$200m strategic round from large players such as Andreessen Horowitz in March and a \$150m Series A round by FTX earlier in summer. Some Web3 circles believed that Solana was being replaced by Aptos because of the large amount it raised in venture capital.
After years of cooperation, Aptos selected Anchorage Digital to be one of its preferred institution custodians. Anchorage President Diogo Monica, Co-Founder of Anchorage Digital, was a member of the Diem technical steering group.
Aptos called today’s launch a landmark in a movement aimed at bringing the masses to Web3.
“We are proud that we have arrived here together, for people,” the project wrote on Medium. This is the first step in a long journey to provide universal and fair access to decentralized applications to billions of people using a secure, scalable and extensible blockchain.
The future will show whether Aptos’ approach to transaction execution is a success or not. In addition, it will show if there will be enough blockchain developers willing to work with it and its proprietary language.
Aspiring “Twitter VC ghostwriter” @ParadigmEng420 was not impressed with today’s launch, reporting a breakdown in communications, lower transactions-per-second than promised, and raising questions about the allocation of Aptos tokens.
Siddhanjay, a Singapore-based blockchain engineer, and venture leader, praised Aptos’ launch and said Aptos’ parallel execution model, and strong community, “is likely to rival ETH in the near future.”
Many developers now await the launch of the Sui Blockchain. This Sui cryptocurrency also uses the Move language, and shares much of Aptos’ DNA. Skeptics and loyalists of Solana are already preparing for a fight.
