Aptos Founding Engineer Discusses the Technical Journey of the Global Trading Engine

Against the backdrop of increasingly fierce competition in public blockchains, Aptos is steadily moving towards its strategic positioning as a "global trading engine" through technological innovation and ecological expansion. Since it first broke the total locked value of $1 billion last November, Aptos reached $1.03 billion by the end of March. In addition, the market capitalization of stablecoins also surpassed $1 billion for the first time on March 24, achieving a year-on-year growth of more than ten times, demonstrating strong ecological attractiveness and capital carrying capacity.

To meet the rapidly growing trading demands, the Aptos team continues to promote technical solutions such as Zaptos and Shardines, accelerating the construction of an underlying architecture that supports millions of TPS, while strengthening its core advantages in performance, stability, and user experience.

The Meta background team builds a high-performance public chain

Sherry Xiao, an early founding engineer of Aptos, previously worked as an engineer at Instagram, primarily focusing on scalability architecture. She later joined Meta's Libra/Diem team, responsible for validation nodes and infrastructure development. When the Libra project faced policy hurdles, the entire team founded Aptos together in 2022.

When discussing the advantages of the Move language, Sherry pointed out that it was designed as a language for smart contracts from the very beginning, providing many guarantees in asset management and security, as well as formal verification tools. Compared to other smart contract languages, Move can effectively avoid many common security vulnerabilities and reduce the risk of fund losses.

In terms of technical infrastructure, Sherry believes that there is still significant room for improvement in the developer experience and user experience of Web3. Aptos is deeply focusing on ZK-based login solutions and innovations in privacy protection. They recently launched a project in their open-source code repository that can hide transaction details, combining privacy protection and the decentralized characteristics of blockchain.

Aptos is designed to be highly modular, with each module having its own room for expansion. At the consensus layer, their newly released Raptr is the most advanced consensus algorithm implementation in the industry; at the execution layer, Block-STM technology is also industry-leading; in terms of storage, sharding technology has been implemented, and future research will continue on sharding technology and related caching layers to further enhance system performance.

Ecological Layout: Focus on Stablecoins, Trading, and DeFi

Aptos's ecological layout mainly focuses on several aspects: infrastructure construction, cooperation with institutions to launch RWA projects, establishing ecological funds to incentivize community building, and launching the LFM plan to support the development of ecological projects. These efforts have enabled Aptos's ecosystem to achieve stable growth over the past period.

In terms of development in Hong Kong, Aptos is the only participating L1 blockchain platform in the Hong Kong e-HKD project, maintaining close communication with banks and government departments in Hong Kong. They established Aptos Space in Hong Kong through Movemaker, providing a venue for builders to collaborate and gather.

Aptos focuses on transaction-related tracks, including payment, expansion of stablecoin application scenarios, and the DeFi track. They hope to collaborate deeply with large institutions and partners with distribution channels to leverage Aptos's advantages in transfers.

Developer Ecosystem Construction and Talent Cultivation

To attract and retain developers, Aptos focuses on showing developers market prospects, demand, and opportunities. They believe that even in the heat of AI, there are still many developers interested in cryptography, decentralization, and blockchain.

In terms of talent cultivation in universities, Aptos has in-depth cooperation with blockchain associations from several well-known universities, collaborating with professors to design blockchain courses that allow students to learn Aptos technology directly. The company’s engineers also frequently give presentations at universities to attract outstanding developers to join the community.

Looking to the future, Sherry stated that Aptos remains focused on the fields of transactions and payments. They hope to establish a global financial infrastructure that allows more people to enjoy the conveniences of modern financial systems. There is particular anticipation to see innovative payment projects combined with stablecoins, such as implementing salary flow payments on Aptos, where one earns wages every second of work.

Regarding the recent changes in the senior management team, Sherry believes this is a good opportunity to reassess past plans and make adjustments, allowing the team to unite and think about the future direction of their layout.