Aptos is not a typical crypto startup. It was built by former Meta engineers who worked on the Diem (formerly Libra) blockchain for three years before growing as an independent network. Co-founders Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching took the Move programming language, parallel execution engine, and the research investment Meta put into its failed crypto project and used them to build a general-purpose Layer 1.
Now Aptos is narrowing its focus. After experimenting with web3 gaming, culture and other trends, the network is focusing on two areas where it sees the clearest opportunities: commerce and AI infrastructure.
Ash Pampati, SVP and Head of Ecosystem at the Aptos Foundation, sat down with TheStreet Roundtable to explain the pivot and why it’s important to the future of the network.
Trading is where there is product-market fit
Pampati says that after following every trend the crypto industry has spawned in recent years, one conclusion became inevitable: blockchains are the best at markets.
“Blockchains are really good for establishing the truth. Crypto is really good for markets, both traditional and unique, for finding users. We see this being where products fit into the market, especially within the trading space, whether it’s sending a stablecoin from point A to B or essentially trading highly leveraged commodities 24/7.
Aptos has been building towards this for years. The network provides instant, low-cost transactions for builders and users, allowing it to conquer the infrastructure layer among the next wave of on-chain exchanges, stablecoin payments and 24/7 derivatives markets.
Stablecoin transaction volume reached $33 trillion in 2025, up 72% year-over-year. On-chain perpetual futures markets are growing rapidly across multiple networks. For a chain built on sub-second execution and parallel processing, the merchant industry is a natural home.
The opportunity for AI agents
Beyond trading, Pampati sees AI as a broader, but equally important bet.
“We are very optimistic about this concept and we think that blockchains and permissionless and open networks are the only way agents can transact in the internet economy,” he said.
The use cases include AI agents coordinating sets of actions for humans and autonomously making microtransaction payments with each other.
There is also a deeper infrastructure play. In the first quarter of 2026, Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed that cloud revenue “would have been higher if we could have met that demand” as computing capacity still does not meet business needs.
“What we’re hearing in the market now is that cloud revenue at Google is being limited by the lack of computing power. All corporate investment will expand that capacity. What we’ll see, which crypto always does, is the need for a global network that actually efficiently transfers that value to everyone who needs it and everyone who uses it,” Pampati explains.
To this end, Aptos is building Shelby in collaboration with Jump Crypto. Shelby is a high-performance, decentralized hot storage network designed for continuous, high-frequency workloads. It connects a global network of nodes via a dedicated fiber backbone, allowing AI pipelines, streaming data, and real-time applications to operate at cloud-like speeds while maintaining full decentralization. Aptos acts as the original coordination layer, although Shelby is designed to be chain-agnostic, with support for Ethereum, Solana, and others.
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The technical advantage of Aptos
The reason Aptos can pursue this pivot without building it from scratch comes down to its smart contract language.
“One of the unique things about Aptos’ stacked infrastructure is that we have come up with our own native programming language for smart contracts, which is called Aptos Move. That gives us a strategic advantage to actually change the essence of the blockchain to suit use cases,” said Pampati.
Move was originally developed within Meta for the Diem blockchain. When Aptos was released, the language was evolved into Aptos Move, adding features such as higher order functions, signed integer typing, and lazy module loading via the Move 2.0 update. The next evolution, MonoMove, is a complete redesign of the Move VM, focusing on parallelism and single-thread performance improvements by 2026.
He explained how blockchains that rely on older smart contract languages are limited in their capabilities, locked into design decisions made years ago.
“If you use more archaic smart contract language, in many ways you limit developer experience of what that blockchain might have been used for eight years ago,” he said.
For AI, Aptos is building Shelby, a global data layer that connects distributed local computing capacity and functions as a dedicated coordination network for the AI infrastructure.
Aptos does not abandon its general roots, but focuses on them. Meta’s research investments have given it an architecture that can adapt, and Aptos Move gives it the flexibility to build purpose-built infrastructure without splitting the chain.