On October 17th 2022, the Crypto world got its first taste of Aptos ($APT), the latest Layer 1 blockchain, as its mainnet was launched. And with just that little sample of its potential, crypto nerds are already dubbing it the ‘Solana Killer.’ Let’s take a look at who and what is behind the Aptos Chain and what we can expect.
Aptos was founded by Mohammad (Mo) Shaikh and Avery Ching in 2021, former engineers at Meta (formerly Facebook). They consider this project to be the upgrade and replacement of Diem, Meta’s crypto project which was left behind. Mo Shaikh stated in an interview that he witnessed Ethereum’s success and its ability to attract thousands of developers, but at the same time this results in network clogging. Therefore, he sought out to solve the problem of scaling.
Currently, Aptos Labs scored $350,000,000 USD in VC funds which was acquired over 3 funding rounds – quite an accomplishment as all this was raised before even launching the blockchain itself. First comers to Aptos’ Testnet were rewarded with airdrops (150 APT each!) to over 110,000 wallet addresses.
Aptos smart contracts are written in a new Web3 programming language called ‘Move,’ which was initially developed by Meta such is said to have abilities to process parallel transactions. When this was conceived, Meta’s intention was to psh Move to become Web3’s version of Javascript.
Equipped with the ability to process 100,000 transactions all within a seconds, Move can help Aptos tackle the issue of scalability. Keep in mind, the other ‘bluechip’ blockchains like Binance, Ethereum, and Bitcoin all process transactions on the network in sequence – one by one no matter how short or long it takes.
Although the volume has yet to reach numbers enough to test the blockchain for its “100,000 transactions per second,” Aptos has surpassed 10,000 transactions per second – still a significant feat.
So where does Solana ($SOL) come in the conversation?
Well there are many noticeable similarities with Solana – the main one being that Solana can also process about 60,000 transactions per second. This can turn some heads but unfortunately this ability affects their network, resulting in the Solana network being down where they experience higher-than-normal transaction volume.
With the amount funds currently backing Aptos, it definitely has the potential to steal the attention from Solana, especially with Austin Virts on the team lineup (Solana’s former Head of Marketing) now working on building Aptos’ ecosystem.
Aptos is also slowly stealing the NFT spotlight from Solana – something that Solana once had the hype for. Topaz, the current biggest NFT marketplace on Aptos, has been witnessed quite the growth in NFT projects and volume – very impressive considering that NFTs are now considered ‘dead’ by a majority of the market.
I look forward to seeing what Aptos can do and how the market accepts it. To learn more precise details about Aptos and it’s network, team, and tokenomics, I suggest you some of the links below.
Website: https://aptoslabs.com/
Whitepaper: https://aptos.dev/aptos-white-paper/aptos-white-paper-index/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/aptoslabs
GitHub: https://github.com/aptos-labs
Medium: https://aptoslabs.medium.com/
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/aptoslabs
CoinMarketCap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/aptos/