Aptos can be quite a suitable example to prove the quick evolution of the blockchain world and how safe a blockchain can be. In the following Aptos Labs review, we will try to understand this project’s value to the Blockchain Layer 1 concept.
And although it may not seem like a novelty, the world has seen astonishing progress in technology. Regardless of the field, technology has come to improve various processes and turn them into remarkable, more manageable tasks.
So, with advanced tech comes great evolution for the crypto field.
What is Aptos?
Aptos, also known as Aptos Labs, is a Web3 start-up based in Palo Alto, USA. It was founded in 2021 by Mohammad Shaikh and Avery Ching, and it raised over $350 million through two funding rounds: Seed Round and Series A. The last funding round took place on July 25, 2022.
Aptos aims to build a safe, scalable, and widely accessible Layer 1 Blockchain, and things seem to be going in the right direction. Also, one considerable advantage of Aptos is that the founders have previously worked for Diem, a blockchain project conducted by Meta.
Along with their growing team, Mohammad Shaikh and Avery Ching proved to have gained vast experience in blockchain technology. Therefore, it is no wonder that Aptos aims to revolutionize the blockchain industry.
Furthermore, ever since the launch of the blockchain, Aptoslabs has been focusing on growing its ecosystem, and it has come to remarkable results. After launching the developer testnet in March, many nodes have been put up, and millions of transactions have been completed.
And now, thanks to its open–source codebase, companies such as Protagonist, MartianDAO, Pontem Network, and many more, have begun building and testing the network. The projects’ use cases include DeFi, NFTs, gaming, and more.
Also, one giant step for Aptos was the launch of their grant program, built to offer teams, individuals, and creators non–dilutive funding to catalyze Aptos’s ecosystem growth. The grant categories include SDKs, documentation, governance, DeFi, open–source, applications, etc.
How Does Aptos Work?
At its core, Aptos has been created with the help of Move, a programming language independently developed by Meta.
The Move language is designed to be used for safe resource management and verifiable execution on a blockchain. Thanks to its expressive specification language, it can verify the proprieties of Move modules, thus ensuring resources are well kept and making sure there is no possibility of them being copied or accidentally destroyed.
Moreover, things such as accounts, transaction fees, validator node management, configuration, and more are also implemented with Move, as it provides safety, one of the primary purposes of Aptos.
Along with Move, Aptos uses a BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerant) engine, developed to separate liveness from safety. Therefore, even if the network is unreachable or the non–safety core is compromised, the chain will not fork, as the BFT honesty guarantees are upheld.
One of Aptos’s main goals is safety, and the team ensures they provide a safe and solid product. Modularizing the code and identifying a minimal TCB (Trusted Computing Base) allows Aptos to leverage high assurance development techniques.
Testing is one of the essential practices for Aptos; thus, before any code commitment, the team runs multiple distributed network tests, such as load testing or Byzantine attacks, evaluating correctness and performance results.
Aptos aims to resolve one more significant issue in the blockchain world: making key recovery safer and more accessible. To achieve that, it allows the accounts to rotate their private keys.
Furthermore, validators can periodically rotate their consensus key as well, providing even more security. Aptos is also working on developing new key recovery techniques that would be directly integrated into the blockchain account model.
One of the most surprising things about Aptos is that the company is working to achieve 130K TPS (transactions per second), thanks to the parallel execution engine (Block – STM). This also leads to lower transaction fees for users.
A Safe and Strengthened Layer 1 Blockchain
Aptos has many benefits for its users and the crypto world in general, one of the most remarkable qualities being its safety.
Another essential thing Aptos is working on is providing parallel account transactions while also preserving control for transaction ordering. Aptos Labs is experimenting with augmenting the sequence number with conflict-resistant sequence numbers to allow account parallelism.
Moreover, the company plans to create alternative implementations of parallelism to provide even more flexibility.
Flexibility is the key all over the network, including the validator nodes. And to get that, Aptos has developed a protocol to sync the transactions and their signed results, thus allowing the node to skip the computation at the cost of higher networking throughput and update the ledger state right away.
Also, unlike other blockchains, Aptos is designed to let users check the top-level transaction accumulator to discover the latest completed transaction.
As previously mentioned, blockchain technology is constantly evolving, and already existing networks should always be up to date regarding the latest upgrades. Not only will it be at their advantage, as they will gain more popularity and will increase their total number of users, but they will also prevent mishaps such as downtime hours or accidental hard forks.
Having that in mind, Aptos has built its network to always be upgradable. And it is not a matter of “if” when talking about its success in what concerns upgradability: the team has already completed various successful upgrades. To achieve that, configuration and validator management are handled with the on-chain state, thus allowing the community to vote and quickly complete upgrades.
The Future of Aptos
After the great success Aptos has met thanks to AIT1 and AIT2 (Aptos Incentivized Testnet), the company is preparing to launch its production-grade mainnet at the end of September. And once the mainnet is launched, Aptos is planning to publish their tokenomics and white paper.
That will be a great opportunity to gain remarkable popularity as a blockchain startup.
Aptos Labs Review Conclusion
Within this Aptos Labs review, we can notice that the company has proven that great and experienced minds can only deliver exceptional products. Thanks to the founders and the team behind the project, Aptos Labs might have a smooth way to the top and a pretty positive outcome.
Yet, the main issues Aptos has to resolve still include blockchain safety, scalability, and speed. But thanks to the advanced technologies and programming languages the team has used when developing the project, the possibility of delivering one of the safest and most scalable products stands quite high.
Also, for Aptos Labs, their community is everything, and they are working hard to create a big, incentivized, and evolution-centered ecosystem, that will benefit both the founding team and the users of the Layer1 Blockchain.
