Aptos, a repurposed blockchain initiative of Meta’s abandoned web3 project (formerly Facebook). Its mainnet and token launch were hugely anticipated owing to its revolutionary infrastructure that might just surpass all other layer-one protocols. All you need to know about Aptos is in this article, made simple to understand and updated in real time.
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Aptos also known as Aptos Labs is a web3 startup focused on building a scalable layer-1 blockchain. I know what you’re thinking, not another new smart-contract layer claiming to be more scalable than the others.
But Aptos is not a new entity of its own, in fact, the company was founded by developers who formerly worked on Diem, Meta’s blockchain initiative that was abandoned in January. This means that Aptos already has a solid foundation to build its products off of.
Aptos utilizes key elements of the former Diem blockchain and Move, a Rust-based programming language independently developed by Meta. The company also claims the network will be able to process over 130k transactions per second using its parallel execution engine (Block-STM), which results in low transaction costs for users.
For context, most blockchains either execute smart contracts sequentially or require a massive parallel workload for improved performance, which requires a lot of power. Aptos differs from other blockchains because a single failed transaction will not hold up the entire chain. Instead, all transactions are processed simultaneously and validated afterwards. The ones that failed are aborted and re-executed, thanks to their STM (software transactional memory) libraries which detect and manage conflicts.
As a result, the combination of these technologies streamlines the entire network’s throughput capacity, which has been a major bottleneck for other layer-1 blockchains. This is a short summary of Aptos’ smart contract execution according to their white paper published in August 2022. Their model is based on cloud infrastructure as a scalable and cost-efficient platform for building widely-used applications.
Aptos enables DeFi projects to be built on its blockchain. So far, there are over 30 DeFi projects on the Aptos ecosystem. These projects include decentralized exchanges, lending protocols, and liquid staking. An example of this is Aries Markets– a margin trading protocol.
