Original source: Nansen

TL；DR

• Original source: Nansen

• secondary title

• Similar to Sui, Aptos was developed by former employees of Meta (Face Book), whose Diem Chain was Meta's original blockchain initiative, which was abandoned in January this year.

• Aptos focuses on maximizing network capacity in a similar way to Sui and Solana, with some key differences:

• Aptos parallelizes transactions by leveraging the Block-STM engine, which optimistically executes batches of transactions in parallel and validates them after execution, maximizing parallelism given a specific order.

Natively integrated with the Aptos blockchain and internally using the Move language, it is designed to enable fast and secure transaction execution, allowing developers to better protect their products from malicious entities.

Aptos claims that its redesigned state synchronization protocol allows clients to verify and sync with sub-second latency over 10,000 TPS, and Aptos is expected to reach 100,000 TPS soon. On August 19 this year, the third phase of the Aptos Incentive Testnet was launched.

OverviewOverview

Aptos is a new layer 1 blockchain founded by Mo Shaik and Avery Ching, both former Meta developers involved in the Diem project. It focuses on maximizing network capacity in a manner similar to Sui and Solana, but with some key differences.

Aptos Mission

• Delivering a blockchain that can achieve mass adoption and achieve mainstream adoption to web3 by leveraging decentralized applications to solve real world problems. Aptos focuses on blockchain reliability, security and performance through its flexible and modular architecture.

• key features

• Fast and secure execution through the Move smart contract programming language.

• Achieve high throughput and low latency through a parallelized transactional approach.

• New parallel transaction processing, supporting multiple operations in a single logical entity via Block-STM.

• The modular design is designed for proper threat modeling and seamless deployment to ensure the security and reliability of the operation, as well as the design principle of being scalable and configurable to be based on the latest technology through its modular architecture. With the development of the Aptos project develop and make progress.

language

The concept of sharding for horizontal throughput scalability while seeking to reduce the complexity of node operators.

language

Like Sui, Aptos uses Move as its programming language.

• Challenges of other existing blockchain languages, indirect representation of assets:

• Assets on other blockchains are encoded as integers, making it easy for developers to make mistakes when writing programs that interact with these assets.

• Scarcity is not scalable: Programmers find it difficult to create custom assets because these new custom assets need to be "scarce" so that no one can create new tokens out of thin air.

• Inflexible access control: Enabling owners to protect their assets through access control policies is quite complex. Move allows developers to define custom resource types with semantics inspired by linear logic, allowing the creation of flexible custom access controls and custom resources that follow the concept of scarcity. These resources are anything that can store value, such as tokens.

Move allows developers to define custom resource types with semantics inspired by linear logic, allowing the creation of flexible custom access controls and custom resources that follow the concept of scarcity. These resources are anything that can store value, such as tokens.

Move's resource safety is designed to ensure that resources are never copied, reused or lost, only moved between program storage locations. This prevents malicious individuals from copying existing assets or creating new ones without permission. Even Meta's now-defunct Libra currency is implemented as a custom resource with no special state in the Move language. With these safety guarantees in place, developers can more easily build without worrying about the need to ensure safety and scarcity, since it is already built into the Move language.

AptosBFT consensus mechanism

AptosBFT is the network's BFT consensus algorithm, a variant of the proven HotStuff consensus protocol (a leader-based BFT replication protocol). AptosBFT only needs 2 network round trips to verify transactions and submit blocks (faster than the multiple rounds of voting required by other consensus mechanisms to securely verify transactions). The protocol is also designed to achieve sub-second finality, coupled with Aptos' automatic leader rotation optimization that analyzes on-chain state and automatically updates the leader rotation to accommodate unresponsive validators without any human intervention. This makes it ideal for decentralized environments.

parallel transaction execution

Aptos uses parallel execution, allowing more transactions to be processed at any given time. The design is similar to Sui, also founded by former Meta employees.

Aptos' parallel execution utilizes the Block-STM engine, which optimistically executes batches of transactions in parallel and validates them after execution, maximizing parallelism given a specific order. When a conflict occurs, unsuccessful transactions are re-executed and all higher transactions are revalidated.

Block-STM is unique in its ability to optimize its parallel architecture for any workload, allowing it to simultaneously support more complex transactions. This design provides users with low latency and cost.

• In an age when rollup convolutions and sharding are all hype, people often forget about the second-order problems associated with these methods, such as higher transaction latencies and lack of composability. This is where Aptos can shine, providing most of the functionality that rollup and sharding should bring without issues like higher latency and lack of composability.

• Advantages of Block-STM:

• No need to commit transactions separately: avoids the synchronization cost of committing transactions separately. Block-STM just lazily commits all transactions in a block in a lightly synchronous manner.

VM provides safety for optimistic memory access: transactions are specified in smart contract languages ​​like Move and Solidity, and run in a virtual machine that encapsulates their execution and ensures safe behavior. This nicely separates abstractions and allows Block-STM to avoid the consequences of dealing with inconsistent state during parallel speculative execution.

Predefined order reduces synchronization: The final result is guaranteed to match transactions executed in a fixed, preset order sequence, which reduces the amount of synchronization required during execution.

• Looking at the test results above comparing Block-STM performance to sequential execution of blocks, with 32 threads working in parallel, the network was able to handle an astonishing 160,000 TPS with low latency and low latency. So now the question is, how does Aptos achieve this performance? This is really thanks to its cooperative scheduler and its multi-version control technology, which helps the network to be more efficient.

• The cooperative scheduler helps in the following ways:

• Prevents duplication of work: Although each aborted transaction is re-executed, the same transaction is never executed concurrently by multiple threads.

Ensuring safety: If a transaction is re-executed, all higher-level transactions must be revalidated. As a result, the same transaction execution may be verified concurrently by different threads, but at most it can be aborted.

Proper ordering: Transactions encountering dependencies are resumed after the dependencies are resolved.

Aptos' parallel execution engine may change existing MEV technology, as transactions are now ordered, or reordered in one or more blocks to optimize the concurrency of parallel execution.

Move vs Solidity language security comparison

• Blockchains using the programming language Solidity have many hacks and vulnerabilities. Solidity is vulnerable to vulnerabilities such as reentrancy, computation over/under, etc.

• Move is built for safe resource management and modularity. The Move programming language supports security features such as:

A Move Prover capable of verifying functional correctness

Defined custom resources that cannot be forked or discarded

Data Storage and Ownership

Since data storage and ownership are stored in the Aptos Move owner's account, the owner can ensure that malicious programming modules cannot modify the owner's assets. Standard order book structures and interfaces do not allow applications built on top of Aptos to gain backdoor access to accounts and their assets.

state synchronization

For high-throughput networks like Aptos, state synchronization between nodes can be CPU-intensive. This factor is often overlooked in blockchain design and is rarely discussed by projects.

In order to improve the performance of the network, Aptos has redesigned its latest state synchronization protocol, which the team claims can verify and synchronize over 10,000 TPS with sub-second latency, and the network is expected to reach 100,000 TPS soon.

• Given that validators have already executed transactions and attested to the resulting blockchain state via Merkle proofs, nodes can rely on validator-produced state increments and skip transaction execution (the heavy lifting), allowing them to directly update the ledger state. However, this approach does come at the cost of increased network usage (approximately 2.5x).

• A key feature that enables Aptos to achieve such results is that it uses Merkle accumulators for synchronization. This accumulator provides proof that a particular transaction is included in the chain, preventing nodes from having to download the entire transaction ledger. Trusted waypoints also allow nodes to sync faster to catch up. Obviously, as an off-chain mechanism, there is no way to "prove" a waypoint, and nodes must trust the waypoint in order to start quickly. Now... why is state synchronization important?

• Affects time to finalization (TTF): The faster blockchain data is replicated across the network, the lower the TTF.

• Get validators up to speed: If state sync can't process transactions as fast as consensus can enforce them, crashed validators will never recover.

Decentralization: Yes, this still exists. Faster state synchronization provides more rotation between validator sets, which allows the network to choose from more validator sets. More validator sets = less centralization.

• Data correctness: state synchronization helps avoid malicious entities manipulating the network (e.g. censorship, modification, etc.).

• Building blocks of the Aptos state synchronization protocol

• Persistent Storage: Aptos uses RocksDB to ensure data is safe during unexpected machine crashes and failures.

Verifiable blockchain data: Aptos uses Merkle trees for submitted transactions and resulting chain states, and has validators sign Merkle roots for identity verification.

Root of Trust: Given that Aptos supports dynamic validator sets, nodes need to be able to identify the current validator set from the verified history of the Aptos blockchain. Aptos does this by using (i) the Aptos-certified genesis blob, which identifies the first validator set and initial blockchain state S⁰; (ii) the closest trusted waypoint (e.g., the current validator set and the hash of the blockchain state Sⱽ). Together, the Genesis Blob and Waypoint form the root of trust, allowing peers to sync the true Aptos blockchain and prevent attacks. Aptos provides a series of proofs in a simple form, making it obvious to peers to identify the real chain.

function call

Not your keys, not your coins.

Move uses static scheduling, which is supported by both value types and reference types, while EVM uses dynamic scheduling, which is only supported by reference types. This means that for dynamic dispatch, the implementation is chosen at runtime rather than compile time, which makes it more expensive. On the other hand, a statically dispatched compiler knows which implementation to call at compile time, so the compiler can perform fast while optimizing. This gives Move an advantage over EVM, as transactions can be completed faster and more efficiently.

key management

Aptos accounts support key rotation and hybrid custody models. For example, a user may delegate the ability to rotate account private keys to one or more custodians and other trusted entities.

Users can set this up by rotating the key in specific situations using the mobile module. Such key recovery services can significantly reduce private key compromise or loss. This feature would have been great during the Fireblocks-Stakehound controversy, when Fireblocks reportedly failed to back up customers' private keys, resulting in a $75 million loss in ETH.

State Sharding — Horizontal Throughput Scaling

Aptos will start with a single ledger state; however, in the future, to improve scalability, it will transition to multiple sharded ledger states while remaining decentralized. Each of these shards will provide a homogenous API and treat sharding as a first-class concept.

Data can be transferred between shards via bridges, somewhat similar to how the beacon chain in Ethereum facilitates communication between shards by sharing transaction data. With this scheme, each node only needs to store the state data assigned to it, and can obtain other state data it needs from other nodes. Developers are free to choose the sharding method that best suits their needs. To maximize the effectiveness of connections within a shard, for example, a developer could suggest creating a new shard or grouping users into a shard.

This design allows developers to program with a single common state across shards and enables wallets to easily consolidate shard data for their users.

• Ongoing Aptos testnet

• As of May 19, registration for the Aptos Incentive Testnet 2 (AIT2) has closed. Aptos Incentivized Testnet 3 (AIT3) registration will open on August 19th. AIT2's 225 community nodes are located in 44 countries and 110 cities around the world. The requirements to run a node are as follows:

• Execute required goals on time, such as joining the validator set within 24 hours and exiting after completion

• Node activity defined by indicator push data >= 95%

One consensus proposal per hour defines participation >= 95%

Vote in at least 25% of consensus rounds

Selected participants who meet all of the above criteria will receive 500 Aptos Tokens, and those who achieve at least 50% activity and participation and other criteria will receive 300. The top 10% of nodes who upgrade at least once, operators who keep nodes in remote locations, and operators who help identify critical issues and make significant contributions will be rewarded with 200 tokens. Note that only non-US participants will be able to earn Aptos tokens, and tokens will have a one-year lock-up period.

Thanks to a partnership between Aptos Labs and Google Cloud, anyone can now run a node on Aptos in under 15 minutes. It is important to note this as it shows that the network can grow without being limited by onerous hardware requirements. However, this also introduces a possible single point of failure if Google Cloud goes down. The increased centralized nature of Google and its mandatory compliance requirements in the US are also notable points.

DApps and airdrops

Similar to other decentralized applications, it is rumored that the airdrop may be based on activity during various testnets. In addition to being an incentivized validator, in order to have a chance to receive airdrops of APTOS tokens or other tokens in the Aptos ecosystem, users should try the following various applications and all their functions, the following cannot include all applications in the Aptos network.

Wallets Wallets

Fewcha Wallet is a web3 wallet that unlocks a range of applications on the Aptos blockchain. It allows users to securely store, send and exchange tokens and NFTs. It also allows web3 connectivity for dApps builders to integrate into the Aptos ecosystem. Fewcha is audited by Verichains Lab for safety and security, they focus on privacy and users are always in control of their wallets and funds.

Martian Wallet is a test wallet based on the Aptos blockchain. It allows users to create and import wallets, deposit and send transactions, view wallet history, and view NFTs. It is backed by Aptos, Mo Shaikh (co-founder of Aptos) and Toy Ventures.

Pontem Wallet is the bridge to Aptos and the rest of web3. Users can access Aptos web3 applications directly from their browser extensions. Users can create and manage their private keys to access their cryptocurrency tokens such as APTOS tokens and USDC. Pontem is backed by Aptos, Mechanism Capital, Alameda Research, Delphi Digital, Animoca Brands, Kenetic, and others.

Onto is a multi-chain wallet that allows users to manage all their assets with a single private key. Onto has a built-in native cross-chain bridge and multi-chain swap, allowing users to swap and bridge at low fees.

Decentralized exchange DEX, AMM and limit order book

Empo aims to build the most secure decentralized exchange on Aptos. No other information has been released.

Laminar marketplace is building a spot DEX on Aptos.

browser

Pontem Network is building a decentralized exchange on the Aptos blockchain. Its Liquidswap DEX is modeled after Uniswap and Curve for both stable and volatile trading pairs. To interact with Pontem, simply swap tokens on their Liquidswap DEX and use their Pontem wallet.

browser

Aptos Explorer is the equivalent of Etherscan on the Aptos blockchain. It's currently very simple, with limited functionality beyond having simple transactional data.

aggregator

Hippo Labs is building an aggregation layer for the Aptos ecosystem. It provides users with direct access to the best pricing and lending rates across multiple DEXs and money markets by utilizing a user-friendly front-end optimized aggregation mechanism.

lending market

The Vial protocol (Potential Airdrop) is built on the Aptos blockchain and allows users to deposit collateral and borrow assets permissionlessly. Vial is an autonomous algorithmic liquidity protocol utilizing consolidated rates. Users can participate in the Vial protocol by lending/borrowing assets and obtaining WBTC and USDC testnet tokens for possible airdrops in the future.

Aries Market is a margin trading protocol on Aptos. It allows users to borrow and trade through a fully on-chain order book.

NFT trading market

Tsunami Finance is a derivatives platform that allows users to trade spot and perpetual contracts with 0 slippage and up to 30x leverage. It also allows users to earn liquid sustainable earnings.

NFT trading market

Topaz Market (Potential Airdrop) is an NFT marketplace built on the Aptos blockchain. It allows users to discover art, culture and digital expression. In order to fully explore the NFT market, users can buy or create NFTs on the platform for higher participation and the possibility of air investment qualifications.

Financial Smart Pool and Liquidity Staking

Seam Money is a multi-chain distributed income solution for stablecoins. It is designed in a simple ETF style to provide returns in a risk-adjusted yield frame.

DAO and Payment Methods

domain name service

domain name service

Oracle

Aptos Name Service (Potential Airdrop) Aptos Name Service is Aptos' composable identity layer. This is a smart contract that maps names to Aptos addresses. Just tokenize an aptos name to your wallet for possible airdrops in the future.

Oracle

Switchboard is a customizable oracle protocol for general purpose and high performance data push oracles from any API.

Investors behind Aptos

While venture capital investment in the space has been cooling, leading projects to raise money at lower valuations, Aptos has more than doubled its valuation from its seed round in March. Many of the same investors, including a16z and FTX Ventures, invested in Sui and Aptos. Interestingly, FTX Ventures has investments in both projects, as one could argue that Sui and Aptos effectively compete with Solana. The high-throughput and highly-optimized layer-1 world may not be zero-sum, and there may be a niche where few highly-optimized L1 public chains satisfy their niche.

Aptos Seed Round

Raised $200M at >$2B valuation, led by a16z, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, FTX Ventures, Tiger Global, Multicoin, 3 Arrows Capital, ParaFi.

Aptos' Series A round

$150M raised Valuation: >$4B, round led by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto with participation from a16z, Apollo, Griffin Gaming Partners, Temasek, Franklin Templeton, Multicoin and Circle Ventures.

The team behind Aptos

Similar to Sui, Aptos has also attracted attention for its "all-star" team. The Aptos team consists of ex-Meta employees who worked in Meta's crypto R&D department (Novi, developing the Diem stablecoin and the bytecode language Move) as well as an impressive group of PhDs, researchers, engineers, designers.

Co-founder and CEO of Mo Shaikh: Former director of Meta, Consensys, BlackRock, Boston Consulting Group.

Avery Ching Co-Founder & CTO Chief Technology Officer: Former Chief Software Engineer who led Meta's internal blockchain solutions, Apache GIraph, Yahoo.

The Aptos team has been on an aggressive hiring spree lately, most notably bringing in some Solana employees, including Austin Virts, Solana's former head of marketing. This says a lot, as these employees find it more attractive and promising to leave Solana for Aptos.

Aptos Roadmap

In AIT3, Aptos plans to provide on-chain voting and governance and lightweight state synchronization through backup and recovery technology. Achieving this is critical as it will allow Aptos to execute decentralized network upgrades through on-chain governance and support new validators joining the network through backup and recovery techniques.

In AIT4, Aptos plans to support as many validators as possible and provide validator DDoS protection. This is critical for greater decentralization and validator evaluation to prevent malicious attacks.

Advantages of Aptos

There has been a lot of developer activity, and since Aptos launched their devnet in March, over 100 projects including Potem Network, Martian Wallet, and Solrise Finance have joined and started building and testing on the network. Like any other fledgling project, the grants Aptos offers will likely attract more projects and development to its ecosystem.

Note that quite a few Solana projects like Solrise Finance and Saber Protocol are also built on Aptos.

Better to keep an eye on the growth rates of Aptos and Sui to see which one has the upper hand, keeping in mind how comparable they are in terms of base product and testnet/launch schedule.

Sassal from Ethereum, who revealed in a tweet that he firmly believes that the Solana builder community is one of the strongest in the space, second only to Ethereum, which is clearly number one. However, he acknowledged that in recent weeks, this "strong community" has begun moving its Solana to Aptos.

Aptos block

Intense competition in the L1s public chain market:

Competition in the L1 space is fierce, with existing strong players such as Solana and Ethereum. Also, upcoming projects with strong teams and backers like Sui & Celestia are also major bets for the future of L1. Since Sui has similar technology and similar investors, it was crucial for Aptos to build a community to attract developers/builders as well as retail users.

As mentioned earlier, there are many projects and dApps being built on the ecosystem, many of which have already been announced and tested during their incentivized testnets. Aptos has launched more than 100 projects, and with the launch of the Aptos Grants Program in late June, it is likely that many more projects will be established in the Aptos ecosystem.

Additionally, Aptos has been very successful in building a community through its Discord, Twitter, and GitHub. This can be seen in the chart below with social metrics for early/new L1 competitors.

Many VCs are known to be investing in Aptos and Sui as a strategy to cover the high throughput/maximize network capacity segment. That's why Sui, Aptos and Solana all have co-investors. Big-name investors like a16z, Multicoin, ParaFi, Tiger Global and others have a long and successful history in crypto investing and often pick the big winners in the space. Their reach and added value can help these projects.

However, there is also growing online discussion about whether investors are just jumping on the bandwagon for a quick buck. This refers to how often large venture-backed projects fail.

• It's also worth noting that Aptos is valued at a much higher valuation than competitors such as Solana at the same funding stage. For example, Solana raised $3.17M at only $0.04/SOL (approx. 15.9% of initial supply) in its seed round, giving it an April 2018 valuation of ~$20M, while Aptos sold at >2 USD 200 million B valuation raised. Aptos' seed round valuation is already higher than the public auction crowdfunding, which provided Solana with $110 million in FDV in March 2020. Given Aptos' high valuation, there could be a risk-off event as early investors dump their vested tokens to lock in profits. Much depends on the valuation of the public offering, and based on previous projects, the price will initially be propped up higher in order to generate higher returns for early investors.

• How can you get involved with Aptos?

• Spend 15 minutes setting up a node to participate in the Incentivized Testnet.

Create an Aptos wallet to interact with Dapps

As builders and developers, apply for the Grants program: to accelerate and encourage building applications on the Aptos blockchain. Various funding categories such as developer tools, SDKs, open source and public products, applications (DeFi, NFTs, games, DAOs, etc.), and more. Various standards and proposal guidelines can be found.

final point