At a Glance
- In this series, we take a look at the latest news & developments across the up-and-coming L1 & L2 ecosystems in the industry, backed by data-driven analyses of on-chain data from network activity and bridge volumes to DeFi and TVL.
- This week, we take a look at a recently announced Layer 1 blockchain, Aptos. We give a brief overview of the project and take a look at its incentivized testnet and development roadmap.
What is Aptos?
Move-based blockchains have recently been widely discussed on Twitter, namely Aptos and Sui. We covered Sui in an earlier article here. Since Ethereum, there have been many new Layer 1 blockchains aiming to solve various issues that its predecessors struggled to solve. Blockchains struggle to balance the trilemma of decentralization, scalability, and security, with most aiming for scalability in order to facilitate adoption.
Aptos is a Layer 1 blockchain that aims to solve reliability, scalability, and usability issues that have plagued existing Layer 1s, whilst possessing security features lacking in EVM-based blockchains. Aptos uses Move, a Rust-based programming language created for Diem, a now abandoned blockchain project by Meta (formerly Facebook).
The Aptos network can achieve over 130k transactions per second thanks to its parallel execution engine (Block-STM). This high throughput naturally results in low transaction costs for users on the network.
With the Aptos whitepaper yet to be released, we will give a brief overview of the network based on publicly available information.
The Team: Aptos Labs
Aptos is founded by Aptos Labs, co-founded by Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching. Both co-founders, along with a few other team members worked together at Meta on the Diem blockchain project and founded Aptos Labs together to continue building on the technology they had originally developed for Diem.
The rest of the Aptos Labs team consists of PhDs, researchers, engineers, designers, and strategists, a full list of which can be found here.
It is evident that the team at Aptos Labs are highly experienced, and confident in their ability to build Aptos to be a safe, scalable, and accessible network.
Backers
Source: Bybit
Aptos closed their first raise in March 2022, in a $200 million round led by a16z Crypto, with participation from big-name VCs such as Multicoin Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Hashed, Tiger Global, FTX Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures, among others. According to a report by CoinDesk, the round was closed at a valuation of $2 billion.
On July 25, 2022, Aptos announced a $150 million funding round led by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto, with participation from Apollo, Griffin Gaming Partners, Franklin Templeton, Circle Ventures, Superscrypt, and continued support from a16z crypto and Multicoin.
This brings the total funding raised by Aptos to $350 million.
Architecture
Aptos is currently able to achieve up to 130k transactions per second (TPS) with 32 cores in an execution-only (without consensus) benchmark on devnet. This is made possible by leveraging on a couple of key factors.
Decoupling of the Consensus Protocol and Execution Pipeline
The first and major step was to decouple the consensus protocol from transaction execution. Typically, a consensus protocol agrees on transactions and their order of execution and results. Aptos decouples the process, allowing both to run in parallel, removing their co-dependency and thus increasing throughput and lowering latency.
Block-STM
Using Block-STM technology, which is a parallel execution engine for smart contracts, Aptos is able to further increase throughput. Block-STM comprises of the following core techniques:
Optimistic Concurrency Control
Transactions are executed optimistically in parallel and validated post-execution, while unsuccessful validations are re-executed.
Multi-Version Data Structure
A multi-version data structure is used to avoid replicated transaction conflicts. This means that when a transaction reads a memory location, it obtains the value written by the previous transaction, along with its associated version.
Validation
During a transaction execution, a read-set and write-set is recorded. During validation, all memory locations in the read-set are read and the results compared to corresponding versions stored in the read-set.
Collaborative Schedule
A collaborative scheduler coordinates validation and execution tasks among threads. Since transactions have a preset order, successful validation of a transaction execution does not guarantee that it can be completed — for example if a previous transaction was aborted and re-executed. Thus, the collaborative scheduler prioritizes execution and mitigates this issue.
Dynamic Dependency Estimation
When a validation fails, the values of the transaction’s last execution are used to estimate dependencies. This results in estimates being generated only when needed and are generally based on a state much fresher than at the beginning of the block.
BFT Consensus Protocol
Aptos’ fourth iteration of their Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) engine is able to achieve sub-second finality through their parallel execution engine. The BFT protocol analyzes on-chain states, and automatically updates validator rotations in order to adjust for non-responsive validators without human intervention, maintaining decentralization of the network.
Move
We talked about Move in our article about Sui. The Move programming language makes parallel execution of transactions possible, which is what makes both Aptos and Sui unique from most other Layer 1s.
Unlike Sui, which uses a novel implementation of Move, Aptos uses Move’s original object model for global storage. Sui’s documentation explains how their implementation of Move differs from Core Move.
Security
The overall security of the Aptos network relies on the correct implementation of its validators, Move modules, and the Move VM. Therefore, Aptos has implemented a strict process to ensure quality of development, and can enforce strict requirements for code reviews and testing.
The following aspects of the protocol also ensure improved security of the network.
Move
The Move programming language was designed for safer resource management, as well as deterministic and hermetic transaction execution. This means that transaction execution results are completely predictable, and based only on information contained in the transaction. Move is also robust against denial of service (DOS) attacks at the transaction execution level.
BFT Consensus Protocol
The BFT protocol ensures that if the network is unreachable or compromised, the chain will not fork as long as the BFT honesty guarantees remain true. Furthermore, the BFT consensus protocol is both audited and formally verified.
The Aptos team has made further extensions that increase resistance of the BFT protocol, as detailed in this study.
Incentivized Testnet
The Aptos incentivized testnet roadmap is as follows:
IT1: Decentralized Startup (May 2022)
IT2: Staking (June 2022)
IT3: Governance and Upgrades (July 2022)
IT4: Dynamic Validator Topology (August 2022)
Update: As of October 18, 2022, Aptos has successfully launched its mainnet.
Aptos Grant Program
Source: Aptos Labs
On June 29, 2022, Aptos announced their grant program. With over 100 projects already building on the network, the grant program aims to offer project teams and individuals non-dilutive funding in order to further develop the Aptos ecosystem.
A detailed breakdown of the application and review process, as well as the criteria can be found here.
Mainnet Launch, Tokenomics, APT Token Listing
Mainnet Launch and Ecosystem Update
Source: Token Pocket
On October 17, 2022 Aptos announced the launch of its mainnet, which had been producing blocks since October 12, 2022. With over 300 projects (unverified) currently building on Aptos, the ecosystem looks to be buzzing and primed to take off.
Tokenomics
The Aptos token (APT) has an initial supply of 1 billion tokens and will be distributed into four pots at launch:
- Community — 510,217,359.77 (51.02%)
- Core Contributors — 190,000,000 (19%)
- Foundation — 165,000,000 (16.5%)
- Investors — 134,782,640.23 (13.48%)
Community
A majority of the community tokens (80.4%) will be held by the Aptos Foundation at launch, with the remainder held by Aptos Labs.
- 125,000,000 APT will be available at launch to support ecosystem projects, grants, and other community growth initiatives
- 0.83% of the remaining tokens to be unlocked each month for a period of 10 years
Foundation
As mentioned earlier, the Aptos Foundation will control 80.4% of the community allocation in addition to its own allocation of 165,000,000 APT. Of its own portion:
- 5,000,000 will be available at launch to support Aptos Foundation initiatives
- 0.83% of the remaining tokens to be unlocked each month for a period of 10 years
Core Contributors and Investors
All investors and core contributors are subject to a one-year cliff and three-year vesting period from mainnet launch, excluding staked rewards. Thus:
- 0 APT available for a period of 12 months
- 6.25% unlocked monthly from month 13 until month 18
- 2.08% unlocked monthly from month 19 onwards
Thus, the APT token supply will be as follows:
Source: Aptos Labs
As of the time of writing, the maximum inflation rate starts at 7% annually and is evaluated every epoch. The maximum inflation rate reduces by 1.5% annually until a lower bound of 3.25% annually. All transaction fees are burned, however this may be changed via governance.
APT Token Listing
Bybit will be listing the Aptos token (APT) on our Spot trading platform as the APT/USDT pair.
