What is Aptos? Within the new Move-Based Layer 1 Chain

Aptos is a scalable Proof-of-Stake Layer 1 blockchain that uses a new smart contract programming language called Move. The project was developed by Aptos Labs, a blockchain startup led by two former Meta employees.

Aptos unpacked

Aptos is a Proof-of-Stake based Layer 1 blockchain that combines parallel transaction processing with a new smart contract language called Move to provide a theoretical transaction throughput of more than 100,000 transactions per second. The project is the brainchild of two former Meta engineers, Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, and is considered the technological successor to Meta’s abandoned blockchain project Diem.

Aptos first made waves in the crypto industry in March this year after it emerged it had raised $200 million in a seed round led by renowned venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. In July, the startup raised another $150 million at a pre-money valuation of $1.9 billion in a Series A funding round led by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto before the valuation reached $4 billion two months later in a venture raise led by Binance Labs.

It is worth emphasizing that Aptos did all this before the launch of its blockchain, which only went live on the mainnet on October 17. To reward the early adopters of its testnet and distribute the initial token allocation fairly, Aptos has broadcast 150 APT tokens (worth approximately $1,237 at launch) to 110,235 eligible addresses. Per CoinGecko Data, Aptos currently has a fully diluted market cap of around $9.2 billion despite launching just a few days ago with little activity on the network. Aside from its provenance and links to Meta, the project’s valuation has raised questions.

What makes Aptos special?

From a technical perspective, the driving force behind Aptos can be boiled down to two things: Move, the Rust-based programming language independently developed by Meta, and the network’s unique parallel transaction processing capabilities.

Movement is a new smart contract programming language that emphasizes security and flexibility. The ecosystem contains a compiler, a virtual machine and many other developer tools that effectively serve as the backbone of the Aptos network. While Meta originally wanted Move to power the Diem blockchain, the language was designed to be cross-platform with aspirations to evolve into the “JavaScript of Web3” in terms of usage. In other words, Meta intended Move to become the developer’s language of choice for quickly writing secure code using digital assets.

Using Move, Aptos is built to theoretically achieve high transaction throughput and scalability without sacrificing security. It uses a pipelined and modular approach for the critical stages of transaction processing. For context, most blockchains, especially the best ones like Bitcoin and Ethereum, execute transactions and smart contracts sequentially. Simply put, this means that all transactions in the mempool – where all submitted transactions await confirmation from the network’s validators – must be verified individually and in a specific order. This means that the growth in the network’s computational power does not translate into faster transaction processing, as the entire network essentially does the same thing and acts as a single node.

Aptos differs from other blockchains in its parallel approach to transaction processing and execution, meaning that the network uses all available physical resources to process many transactions simultaneously. This leads to much greater network throughput and transaction speeds, resulting in significantly lower costs and a better user experience for blockchain users. Expanding on this problem in its technical white paperaptos says:

“To maximize throughput, increase concurrency and reduce technical complexity, transaction processing on the Aptos blockchain has been divided into separate phases. Each stage is completely independent and individually parallelizable, resembling modern superscalar processor architectures. Not only does this provide significant performance benefits, but it also enables the Aptos blockchain to offer new forms of validator-client interaction.”

While Aptos claims to have already reached 10,000 transactions per second on testnet and is aiming for 100,000 transactions per second as the next milestone, users should take its claims with a grain of salt as they are yet to be tested. Other Layer 1 networks and sidechains making similar claims, including Solana and Polygon, have suffered numerous network outages since their inception and have otherwise been criticized for being too centralized.

Dubious Tokenomics

On October 17, Aptos sparked outrage within the crypto community when it launched its blockchain and native governance and utility token APT without first disclosing its total delivery, distribution or issuance rate to the public. After the price of APT fell about 40% in the first hours of trading, Aptos tried to right its wrong and calm the community’s outrage by revealing are tokenomics.

Despite the generous airdrop to over 100,000 addresses, the move toward transparency was met with even more outrage after the community learned that the entire token supply had been allocated to early investors and the company. Namely, instead of giving the community the 51% of the tokens allegedly allocated directly to it, whether through airdrops, grants or staking rewards, Aptos allocated them to Aptos Labs and the Aptos Foundation. Additionally, according to the team’s blog post, “82% of tokens on the network are being staked across all categories,” meaning the company and early insiders will earn the most staking rewards that are not subject to lockups.

In addition, Aptos currently has a circulating supply of 130 million tokens, a total supply of 1,000,935,772 and an unlimited maximum supply. According to the official token delivery schedule, the inflation rate will start at 7% and decline at an annual rate of 1.5% until it reaches an annual delivery rate of 3.25% (expected in 50 years). Transaction fees will be burned initially, although this mechanism may be reviewed in the future through governance vote.

Is Aptos the next Solana killer?

Despite being active for less than a week, Aptos has already been heralded as a potential ‘Solana Killer’. This is mainly due to the stated processing capacity of 100,000 transactions per second. By comparison, Solana can only handle about 60,000, but regularly experiences network-wide outages.

In addition to its high scalability, Aptos shares other similarities with Solana, including its strong venture capital support and top-down approach to building ecosystems. With a multibillion-dollar war chest from the start and the allure of being the “shiny new thing,” Aptos could very well steal the spotlight from Solana in the future if it can grow a thriving ecosystem. Moreover, it should certainly contribute to that Austin Virtsthe former head of marketing at Solana, is now responsible for building ecosystems at Aptos.

All things considered, Solana is still miles ahead of Aptos in terms of ecosystem health and network adoption. By keeping its tokenomics opaque and allocating most of its supply to early investors and insiders, Aptos started its crypto journey on shaky terms with the crypto community, which could hurt it in the long run. However, if Aptos delivers even half of what it aims to achieve on the technology front, then it has a chance to capture significant market share from all other Layer 1 networks with smart contracts.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this post owned ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.