On the evening of January 16th, Aptos held a new year AMA. The theme of this event is "Set Sail 2022, Sail 2023". HC, the head of Aptos Asia Pacific, and Zekun Li, the core developer of Aptos, participated in this AMA, and reviewed the progress of Aptos in the past year to the community, and revealed the future of Aptos The key construction direction of the year.

According to Zekun Li, the focus of Aptos development this year will be on improving performance, improving the developer experience, and enhancing decentralization. The gas fee will be further reduced, and is expected to be reduced to one-tenth of the current level. This year will be dedicated to iterating and upgrading performance, improving composability, including lowering the threshold, improving developer experience, and more.

The following is a transcript of the community conversation:

The following is a transcript of the community conversation:

Odaily: 2022 is a very important year for Aptos, how to review Aptos' 2022?

HC：At the beginning of 2022, Aptos began to form a team, and was actively preparing for the launch of the mainnet throughout last year. In the past year, there have been some milestones.

The testnet started in May, and tens of thousands of nodes signed up. On the first day of the mainnet launch, 102 verification nodes located in 22 countries and about 40 cities went online.

At present, more than 50 ecological projects have been launched, and more than 200 projects are in the testnet and audit stages. The TVL of the Aptos ecosystem exceeds US$50 million.

In terms of developer support, more than 500 projects have applied for Aptos Grant. Aptos Grant is a long-term funding plan for early projects in the Aptos ecosystem, which aims to fund high-quality projects of early Aptos start-up teams and developers to further enrich the Aptos ecosystem.

Odaily: Any big plans for Aptos in 2023?

Zekun：Aptos had a lot of challenges when it started. From the need for permission (Meta period) to the permissionless blockchain transformation, there are many technical challenges, including PoS mechanism, settlement layer and so on. The parallel execution framework (Block-STM) is also recognized, and a paper is ready to be released at the summit.

Aptos development this year will focus on improving performance, improving the developer experience, and enhancing decentralization. In terms of performance, the focus is on enhancing horizontal expansion, and the MOVE virtual machine will also be transformed. In addition, the user experience of Aptos will be further optimized and the gas fee will be reduced. The preliminary plan is to split the calculation gas fee and storage gas fee, and change the storage gas fee to a "deposit model", which can be refunded after the storage is released, which can reduce the gas fee to one-tenth of the current one.

On the toolchain side, there are also some planned developments that will enrich the tool support and development experience. Regarding nodes, it will also better support decentralization. Let full nodes better synchronize data and light nodes better verify. This year will be dedicated to iterating and upgrading performance, improving composability, including lowering the threshold, improving developer experience, and more.

In 2023, we will mainly focus on how to safely and smoothly bring Aptos to all places around the world, and will continue to help in terms of ecology and cooperation.

Aptos' mission is to create a blockchain that serves everyone in the world, "build a blockchain for everyone". We posted this link at the time, hoping to solve the problem that Web3 has not yet completely broken into the mainstream. The current number of Web3 users is actually several orders of magnitude behind many successful web2 products.

In my own words, if one day my mother can use the application created on Aptos, then my mission will be completed.

We hope to provide the industry with the best service and support for the ecology. Aptos has just officially announced its 2023 global tour, and the first stop will be in Seoul, South Korea. On February 1st, Aptos will hold an offline hackathon in South Korea. We hope to support developers to innovate and create business models or products that have not yet appeared in Web3.

After Seoul, there are three more global tours still in preparation. Where the community wants us to go, you can reply to our official Twitter. We will determine the final location of our event based on the input of the community.

On the other hand, Aptos has officially announced many partners from the East or the West, including Google Cloud. There is still a lot of communication in progress, and I can't share it with you publicly for the time being. You can follow the official Aptos Twitter, so stay tuned.

Rhythm BlockBeats: Do you have any plans for a global tour or hackathon in China this year?

HC：There are no plans for offline hackathons in China in the near future. We are also preparing for opportunities to get better interaction and support with Chinese developers online. Events like meet ups may be held in China in the future. Aptos wants to connect the world

Rhythm BlockBeats: What potential heavyweight projects does Aptos have?

Zekun：Many ecological projects are currently in the hidden development stage, so we will share them with you after they can be made public.

At present, many ecological projects have played a leading role on Aptos. For example, Hippo recently officially announced that the transaction volume exceeded 100 million US dollars. For example, Econia, which is a parallel order book-style DEX decentralized exchange, executes transactions and matching in parallel, which greatly improves efficiency. There is also Momentum Safe, a multi-signature solution built on Aptos.

Odaily: FTX Venture is an investor in Aptos. Has the FTX incident affected Aptos?

HC：As far as Aptos is concerned, not only have we not been greatly affected, but we are stronger than before after such a tragedy happened.

First of all, our treasury is not placed on FTX, so there is no loss in this regard. Second, after such a tragedy, many other projects contacted us, hoping to seek help from Aptos, and we are actively looking for ways to support developers. In addition, we also participate in the Binance Recovery Fund, hoping to do our best to support developers and entrepreneurs in the industry.

Rhythm BlockBeats: What plans does Aptos have for ecological incentives, and is there any new way?

HC：Aptos Grant will continue to support you. At the same time, we also have an ecological fund. The ecological fund will support some projects that have the ability to realize cash or have the potential to become unicorn companies in the future. We are also willing to support everyone through investment.

In terms of developer support, more than 500 projects have applied for Aptos Grant. Aptos Grant is a long-term funding plan for early projects in the Aptos ecosystem, which aims to fund high-quality projects of early Aptos start-up teams and developers to further enrich the Aptos ecosystem.

In 2023, Aptos will also give more support to the ecology, giving entrepreneurs more market resources or capital resources, or BD, partner resources, or even technical resources. This week, Aptos will have a new partner join in charge of developer relations in the Asia-Pacific region, hoping to give developers in the Asia-Pacific region the best development experience.

Odaily: Which aspect is more focused on in the current construction of the Aptos ecosystem?

HC：Our next focus is to break the circle. Bring millions or tens of millions of users to the Web3 world. In addition to doing a good job in Aptos performance, TPS, gas experience, etc., we are also looking for killer applications. We hope to find a project that can truly carry millions of MAU or even DAU, and cooperate with Aptos to welcome more users into Web3.

Web3 applications must first be user-oriented and truly focus on products. At present, many Web3 applications are not as smooth as Web2 in terms of user experience or product functions.

Rhythm BlockBeats: How should developers get started with Aptos development?

Zekun：We have several active communities, including official discord and telegram communities, and recently created a Chinese official community. If you have any questions, welcome to contact us through the community.

In addition to official documents, we also have a lot of strength from the community and ecology. They have produced more than 40 Chinese courses based on move, which can train a move novice into a developer who can write contracts.

If you are a project party or organization, you are welcome to DM us directly on our Aptos Twitter. We can help connect our best internal colleagues to answer your questions and give us the support we can provide.