With a secret sauce conjured in the bowels of Meta, and a mission to provide "the safest and most scalable layer 1 blockchain," Aptos launched its mainnet today, the culmination of four years of technical development and a $1 billion valuation. Leading exchange FTX, an Aptos investor, hasĀ already announcedĀ that it will list Aptos' APT token on Wednesday.
Dubbed a potential "Solana killer" by many,Ā AptosĀ is the latest high-profile attempt to build the perfect blockchain for smart contracts, code that supports the sprawling world ofĀ NFTs,Ā DAOs, andĀ DeFi.
While Ethereum has taken a major leap forward following the merge, challengers likeĀ SolanaĀ are making inroads with much faster transaction speedsāalbeit withĀ occasional outagesĀ that left the door open to even newer players like Aptos.
In 2019, Meta (Facebook at the time) was working on its own blockchain project calledĀ Libra, later renamedĀ Diem. Pressure from government regulators (and plenty of criticism from the crypto community) prompted the tech giant toĀ shelve the project. But developers saw value in its key differentiator: āparallel execution," or a method of ordering and combining transactions to rapidly accelerate the process.
In testing, AptosĀ claimsĀ it has handled 130,000 transactions a second, compared to 30 per second on Ethereum.
Also key to the nascent Aptos ecosystem is the affiliatedĀ Move programming language, which prioritizes scarcityĀ andĀ access control.
In the run-up to its launch, Aptos has been quite a VC attraction: it closed aĀ $200 million strategic roundĀ from big players like Andreessen Horowitz back in March, and aĀ $150 million Series A roundĀ led by FTX earlier this summer. The large amount of venture money it raised in a short time created a narrative among some Web3 circles that investors were ditching Solana for Aptos.
Aptos also selected Anchorage Digital as one of itsĀ preferred institutional custodiansĀ last month, following years of collaboration. Anchorage Co-Founder and President Diogo MĆ³nica hadĀ previously servedĀ on the Diem technical steering committee.
Aptos called today's launch a milestone in a "movement aimed to bring the masses to Web3."
"We are proud to arrive here together, for the people," the projectĀ wroteĀ on Medium. "This is step one in a long journey to create universal and fair access to decentralized applications for billions of people through a safe, scalable, and upgradable blockchain."
Time will tell whether the Aptos approach to transaction execution will prove to be a silver bullet, or if it will attract a sufficient community of blockchain developers to build with it and its proprietary language.
Aspiring "Twitter VC ghostwriter"Ā @ParadigmEng420Ā was not impressed with today's launch, reporting aĀ breakdown in communications, lower transactions-per-second than promised, and raising questions about the allocations of Aptos tokens.
Singapore-based blockchain engineer and venture lead Siddhanjay Godre, however, praised the launch, saying Aptos' parallel execution model and very strong community "is likely to compete with ETH in [the] near future."
With today's Aptos launch, many developers are now waiting for the pending launch of theĀ Sui blockchain, which also uses the Move language and shares much of Aptos' DNA. But skeptics and Solana loyalists are already bracing for a battle.
