VC-Backed Blockchain Project Aptos Reveals Protocol’s ‘Mainnet Has Arrived’

A new layer one blockchain network called Aptos announced the launch of its mainnet on Monday, following a slew of capital injections from a number of venture capital (VC) firms. The blockchain protocol, crafted with a Rust-centric programming language dubbed Move, is backed by VC companies such as Parafi, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), FTX, and Multicoin Capital. The Aptos project stems from two developers from Meta’s Diem project, and the network boasts parallel processing, a technology that reportedly allows the chain to process 130,000 transactions per second (TPS).

For some time now, a proposed layer one (L1) blockchain network called Aptos has been a discussion among crypto and distributed ledger supporters, after the capital the project managed to raise this year. In mid-March 2022, the Aptos team disclosed to Techcrunch that it raised $200 million from a funding round led by a16z.

Furthermore, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Three Arrows Capital (3AC), Tiger Global, and FTX Ventures participated. In July, Aptos managed to raise $150 million in financing from FTX Ventures, Jump Crypto, Griffin Gaming Partners, Franklin Templeton, Circle Ventures, Superscrypt, a16z, and Multicoin.

Mainnet has arrived.https://t.co/wZajVZMa5Q

— Aptos (@AptosLabs) October 17, 2022

The Aptos network was created by Aptos Labs, a team that was co-founded by Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, two former Diem blockchain and Novi wallet developers. When the team disclosed the $200 million capital raise in mid-March, Techcrunch reporters Lucas Matney, and Manish Singh wrote that “the Aptos team swears they will not be licensing or utilizing any of the Diem IP that Silvergate owns as they build out their blockchain.”

Discussions on social media and crypto-centric forums say the project is an Ethereum, Avalanche, Cosmos, or Solana competitor. The Aptos L1 is created with the programming language called Move, a Rust-based computer programming language.

The Move language was created by Meta developers in order to make Diem’s transaction logic customizable and interact with smart contracts. “The Move language also facilitates automatic proofs that transactions satisfy specific properties, such as the requirement that payment transactions only change the balances of the payer and receiver,” the Diem white paper notes.

“The Move language has been built, tested, and co-designed alongside the Aptos blockchain over four years,” the Aptos team said on Monday.

Furthermore, on the smart contract side of things, Aptos employs an engine called Block-STM technology. The technology is a “parallel execution engine for smart contracts” and “this means faster transaction processing due to a novel approach that is core to Aptos,” the team detailed on Monday.

Similar to Solana, Aptos employs parallel processing which makes it able to process a lot more transactions than an L1 like Ethereum. Solana, on the other hand, has been dealing with constant downtimes since the blockchain network was launched.

Aptos Labs announced the project’s mainnet launched on Monday, October 17, 2022, in a blog post called “Aptos Autumn is Here.” At the time of writing, the Aptos blockchain explorer says the chain has conducted roughly 1,769,380 transactions to date, and the site says there’s a total supply of around 1,000,739,234 tokens.

The native crypto asset aptos (APT) is listed on crypto market aggregation web portals like coingecko.com and coinmarketcap.com, but the websites show no price data and note the “project is featured as an ‘Untracked Listing.’” There are no crypto asset exchanges that list the APT token, so traders will have to wait for support to be announced by the crypto industry’s trading platforms.

In addition to scaling, the team’s blog post published on Monday notes that Aptos is “aimed to bring the masses to Web3.” The Aptos team explains that the chain will support non-fungible token (NFT) technology, social networks, gaming, decentralized finance (defi) and commerce.

“Aptos supports rapid evolution of the blockchain to provide optimized user experiences for current and future use cases and allow for the integration of next-generation technological advancements,” Aptos Labs wrote on Monday. “The user experience continuously improves and developers will be able to build without infrastructure constraints.”

According to Coindesk reporters Danny Nelson and Elizabeth Napolitano, while Aptos Labs “declared its network ‘live,’ its ecosystem is far from completed.” Moreover, the reporters said that they spoke with “people building within Aptos” who noted the Genesis transaction was initiated on October 12 and also said the mainnet launch was “rushed.”

What do you think about the Aptos mainnet announcement on Monday and the project backed by a number of venture capital firms? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.