The promise of a perfect blockchain and a 20 million tokens airdrop may have contributed to its popularity.
What Is Aptos?
Aptos is a new Layer 1 blockchain built for safe development and good user experience.
It was designed to provide safe, scalable, and upgradeable web3 infrastructure started working on the project in 2018 but the mainnet launched was last year in October 2022.
The goal is to create a perfect blockchain i.e. a blockchain that is decentralized, highly secure, very fast, and charges low fees.
As much as we know, there is no existing perfect blockchain. Thus, many crypto folks looked forward to the launch of the Aptos blockchain.
Here is a little background story…
Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching are former Meta employees.
They built Aptos to serve the crypto community with an excellent user experience. Interestingly, they’ve raised up to $350 million in funding from a series of investor campaigns and Before Aptos, Mark Zuckerberg (Meta founder) and his team attempted something similar.
Do you remember Libra? Yes, that was the project. The name was later changed to Diem. It was designed to be a decentralized payment system.
However, Diem didn’t suit the crypto community because of financial regulations, slow speed, centralization, and the stablecoin nature of Diem (the token). And the founders of Aptos were part of the team that created Diem.
Little wonder many assume that Aptos is a successor of Diem. But it is not. They only have similar founding team members.
Besides, Aptos is a smart contract blockchain powered by a cryptocurrency, APT, unlike Diem which is a stablecoin.
How Aptos Works
As mentioned, the Aptos blockchain was intended to develop products and applications that will improve user experience.
Here are the different components that make it work:
a) The Move programming language – an advanced yet flexible language.
It was developed from the Rust programming language (by Diem’s team).
And the core of the Aptos blockchain was designed with Move-inspired protocols.
b) Move Virtual Machine (MVM) – a state machine that simplifies Move modules for the Aptos blockchain.
It works like the popular Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
Note that the Move modules are smart contracts. They are used to approve transactions.
Interestingly, transactions are completed in batches and not individually.
Also, inaccurate transactions are fished out so that accurate transactions will be completed faster.
Inaccurate transactions are the ones that fail to meet given thresholds like fee amount.
c) PoS Consensus Mechanism – this system uses the Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism to achieve scalability
Therefore, validators on the network verify the integrity of blocks added to the chain and screen out malicious blocks.
Note: there are two types of validator nodes – Full nodes and Light nodes.
Full nodes validate the entire network transactions. Thus, they can affect changes in the network’s history.
For example, they can remove a string of data from the memory of the chain to keep the block size within scalable limits.
Gratefully, the removed data aren’t lost and can be synchronized with the rest of the blockchain when needed.
On the other hand, Light nodes play maintenance roles, keeping the system in check.
d) Sharding – Aptos employs data-sharding technology to maintain scalable block sizes.
This explains why it maintains two types of validators and executes transactions in batches.
For clarification, Sharding means spreading out computational/storage workload across different partitions of a network so that each node isn’t responsible for processing the entire network’s transactions, rather, it focuses on the information related to its partition, or shard.
In summary
The Aptos blockchain works by combining batch transactions, an advanced programming language, an efficient consensus mechanism, and sharding technology, among others. #edu
APT Tokenomics
The Aptos coin (APT) powers the Aptos blockchain and its ecosystem. It serves as both a utility and governance token. Therefore, builders on the platform will pay gas fees in APT.
Also, the coin is used to incentivize community contributions and reward validators for securing the network.
Additionally, APT holders can submit improvement proposals for community deliberation or vote for existing proposals.
One billion APT tokens were minted at launch (October 12, 2022) They will be distributed to investors, community members, and the project team.
Have a look
Therefore, 51% of the token supply is reserved for the Aptos community which will be managed by the Aptos foundation. Then, 19% is allocated to the core team which is vested for a year and will be gradually released over time and Also, 16% is for the Aptos foundation to provide grants, community incentives, and fund growth initiatives.Lastly, seed and funding round investors will receive 13% of the token supply.
Furthermore, on October 19, 2022, the Aptos foundation allocated an estimated 20 million APT tokens, to about 110,235 eligible participants.
The recipients were “users who completed an application for an Aptos Incentivized Testnet” and users who minted “an APTOS: ZERO NFT.”
Customer Support And Public Opinion
Aptos has a Developer documentthat enables developers to learn how to build on it.
Also, users can join its discussion forum to get involved in projects building on Aptos.
Additionally, they can stay updated via these channels:
What Does The Future Hold For Aptos?
Based on its purpose and framework, the future looks bright for Aptos.
It offers a scalable web3 infrastructure for developers to build on.
And using data-sharding technology, it maintains data blocks at scalable sizes.
Additionally, the commitment of the Aptos Foundation to the growth of Aptos is encouraging.
Little wonder that top crypto exchanges like Binance and FTX did not waste time listing the APT token on the day of launch. 