Aptos uses a byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism and is built around several design principles.
First, fast and secure execution with simple auditability and mechanical analyzability. Aptos uses Move, a new smart contract programming language based on Rust, emphasizing safety and flexibility. It focuses on resource scarcity, preservation and access control and was enhanced by the Aptos team with support for broader web3 use cases. For instance, DAOs can collaboratively share accounts, and NFT collections can be minted in a single account.
Since Aptos is built using Move, the project claims to offer several advantages that Ethereum does not. For instance, blockchain commands can be easily verified, and Aptos allows users to modify their private keys. Furthermore, the modular design of Aptos allows it to upgrade without disconnecting the entire network.
Second, Aptos’ batched, pipelined and parallelized approach to transaction processing allows for extremely high throughput and low latency. Put simply, each transaction stage on the Aptos blockchain is completely independent and individually parallelizable, resembling modern, superscalar processor architectures. This modular design aids development speed and facilitates frequent updates through faster release cycles. The low-latency BFT consensus mechanism secures the blockchain, while simultaneously allowing it to hit transaction speeds of up to 150,000 transactions per second (tps) in testnet conditions. By comparison, Ethereum mainnet’s current tps is around 12 to 15.
Finally, the upgradeability and configurability of Aptos allow it to embrace new use cases, while the horizontal throughput scalability preserves decentralization. In doing so, Aptos natively implements design features like sharding that other blockchains have to add through improvement protocols, like future planned Ethereum upgrades.