Aptos

What is Aptos (APT)?

Aptos is a layer 1 blockchain that aims to spur mass adoption of Web3 around the globe. With a vision of universal and fair access to decentralized assets for billions of people, Aptos is a next-generation blockchain with significant history.

The Aptos ecosystem is already flourishing despite the project’s relative youth. This is because Aptos is the evolution of the Diem blockchain, with years of engineering under its belt.

Aptos is uniquely upgradeable and focuses on a people-first experience, but innovation lies close to its core. It has a modular approach to transaction processing and various architectural breakthroughs under the hood. That’s why Aptos can achieve hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.

When Was Aptos Launched?

Aptos announced its genesis in February 2022 and iterated through several incentivized testnets before launching the mainnet in October 2022.

The initial supply of APT tokens at the mainnet launch was 1 billion tokens, with each token having 8 digits of precision. The minimum unit of divisibility is called an Octa.

Over 410 million APT tokens were given to the Aptos Foundation, earmarked for grants, incentives, and other community growth incentives. Some of these tokens have already been distributed to projects building on the Aptos protocol, with 130 million APT available for use right away. The Foundation received a further 16.5% of the supply that was not earmarked for the community.

A further 100 million APT went to Aptos Labs. These tokens, in addition to the Foundation’s remaining APT tokens, are vested, unlocking every month over a ten-year period.

Core contributors to the project received 19% of the total token supply, and investors received almost 13.5%. These tokens are locked for the first year but then hit the market until the four-year anniversary of the mainnet launch.

Major investors in Aptos include FTX Ventures, Jump Crypto, Andreessen Horowitz, Multicoin Capital, Dragonfly, and Binance.

Who are the Founders of Aptos?

Aptos was founded by Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching. Shaikh and Ching are former employees of Meta, the tech company formerly known as Facebook. They were part of the Meta/Facebook team that developed the Diem blockchain.

Diem, formerly known as Libra, was an attempt to build a global cryptocurrency payment network. The project was shuttered after three years, suffering pushback from consumers and—far more crucially—regulators. Diem’s assets were sold to Silvergate Capital Corporation in early 2022.

Diem was the brainchild of the French-born Facebook Messenger head, David Marcus, who was previously president of PayPal. It was also championed within Facebook by former Andreessen Horowitz partner, Morgan Beller.

In his announcement of Aptos’ genesis, Aptos founder Shaikh wrote that the developers of Aptos were not starting from scratch. He further proclaimed: “We are the original creators, researchers, designers, and builders of Diem… while the world never got to see what we built, our work is far from over.”

Decentralization and permissionless access are planned features of Aptos, just as they were intended to be part of Diem’s roadmap. Of course, this close association with Diem isn’t an advertisement in everyone’s eyes.

Open Markets’ Matt Stoller was quoted by The Verge describing Diem/Libra as “a private global International Monetary Fund run by techbros.” Uber whistleblower Susan Fowler tweeted: “Facebook: we are one of the largest platforms on which damaging, disease-causing, life-ending misinformation is spread, but here’s a global currency!” The Verge went on to point out that the trust in the company we now call Meta was “a hard sell” in 2019. The Financial Times went a step further, quoting an unnamed government official saying, “Diem… could never fix being linked to Facebook. It was their original sin.”

All the same, Aptos being more than a spiritual successor to Diem perhaps shouldn’t be judged too harshly. After all, the team behind it has several years of experience in the development and launch of an enterprise-grade blockchain. This means that it’s no longer burdened by any baggage-laden leadership.

How Does Aptos Work?

Aptos is composed of clients and validators. These clients are the part of the system that submits transactions to the network or query network state and history. There are two types of clients:

• Full nodes. These clients replicate the transaction and blockchain state from validators or other full nodes. They may choose to prune transaction history and blockchain state as desired to reclaim storage.
• Light clients. These clients only maintain the current set of validators. They can query partial blockchain state securely, usually from full nodes.

Meanwhile, validators are responsible for network security and verify transactions that nodes send to them. They then package these transactions into blocks, which form a blockchain.

According to Aptos co-founder Avery Ching, Aptos can commit blocks in just two network round-trips, resulting in sub-second finality. This makes it an extremely fast network, especially when compared with first- or second-generation blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

In fact, Aptos has been able to hit transaction speeds of up to 150,000 transactions per second. However, this extraordinary figure was called into question by users shortly after the launch since user transactions hadn’t been enabled yet.

Aptos also features smart contracts, which make it possible to build a wide range of decentralized apps on its network. This is thanks to Move, a smart contract programming language based on Rust.

The Move language confers various advantages and emphasizes resource scarcity, preservation, and access control. Move modules define the lifetime, storage, and access pattern of every resource. This ensures that resources don’t disappear, can’t be produced without the appropriate credentials, and can’t be double-spent.

What Makes Aptos Unique?

Aptos launched the Aptos Name Service (ANS) along with its mainnet. This was a simple but well-received move.

Similar to Ethereum’s ENS, this allows Aptos users to use a human-readable .apt name for their Aptos wallet address rather than their public key. This sort of focus on users is one of many things that set Aptos apart.

Of course, there’s a lot going on beneath the surface, too. One of the most interesting things about Aptos is the way it handles upgrades. It’s built in a modular way with the help of Move. Because changes can be made to specific modules, release cycles can be made faster and safer.

This feature, while simple, supports the rapid evolution of the blockchain. It’s also extremely important because, historically, major upgrades (including hard forks) have been a thorn in the side of many of the major blockchains.

How is the Aptos Network Secured?

Aptos is secured by a low-latency Byzantine Fault Tolerant proof-of-stake engine, building on the implementation of the Diem blockchain. This BFT protocol, referred to as AptosBFT v4, is resistant to the misbehavior of up to a third of its network nodes.

The Aptos reputation system analyzes the on-chain state and automatically updates leader reputations to adjust to non-responsive validators. This makes it well-suited for decentralized environments.

The consensus protocol was audited and formally verified while still under Facebook’s stewardship, although plenty of improvements have been made since then.

At its core, though, Aptos is a proof-of-stake network. This means that network validators have the incentive to follow the protocol by verifying transactions and maintaining uptime.

To become a validator, node operators have to bond or stake APT tokens into the protocol. If they perform as required in their role of validator, they are rewarded with more APT tokens in proportion to their original stake.

If they misbehave, they are slashed—their stakes are confiscated, which means they are entirely removed. This system of economic incentives and disincentives is the basis of proof-of-stake.

What is the Use of APT?

The main use of the APT token is for staking since Aptos is a proof-of-stake blockchain. Validators need to stake APT tokens into the protocol and get rewarded with them. These validators and other APT holders also have a role to play in on-chain network governance by voting their APT tokens.

However, users of the Aptos blockchain also need APT. As the native currency of the network, it is also used for transaction or gas fees.

When a user submits a transaction, they must also specify the max gas amount, or the amount of gas units they are willing to spend to execute the transaction. They must also define a gas unit price, which is the gas price that they are willing to pay in APT.

The final gas fee can then be calculated by multiplying the total amount of gas consumed and the gas unit price. If a transaction runs out of gas during execution, the sender will be charged based on the max gas amount, and all changes made by the transaction are reverted.

Aptos published a blog post prior to the mainnet launch detailing the exact ins and outs of their gas schedule.

Who Controls Aptos?

Aptos has instituted on-chain network governance, where proposals are made and voted on by APT holders. The provenance of this governance system may expand, according to the Aptos whitepaper. The other controlling entities are the Aptos Foundation and Aptos Labs.

How Much APT Is In Circulation?

Aptos launched with an initial supply of 1 billion APT tokens and no defined total supply cap. As per the Aptos Foundation, the maximum reward rate for validators will begin at 7% and be evaluated at every epoch.

The maximum reward rate is supposed to go down by 1.5% every year until it hits a lower rate of 3.25%. Furthermore, transaction fees are currently burned, but this could be subject to change, along with the emission schedule, when on-chain governance rolls out.

How Do You Buy APT?

Even though APT is a new cryptocurrency, it is already listed on many exchanges. This is indicative of interest in the APT token from both professional traders and the wider public.

You can buy APT with fiat currencies such as USD and EUR on several exchange platforms, but a lot of trading activity is carried out in stablecoins as well.

Is It Possible to Buy Aptos Instantly?

Aptos is an extremely fast blockchain network in theory, and its significant transaction capacity is far from congested as its ecosystem develops. So, if you’re buying APT peer-to-peer on Aptos or using an Aptos DEX like Pontem Network or Laminar Markets, you should expect near-instant transactions.

How Do You Store APT?

You can store APT on an exchange or a non-custodial account, where you are in charge of your keys.

Petra is one of the leading APT wallets that was developed by the Aptos Labs team. It functions as a browser extension and can be used to interact with dApps and store and transfer digital assets, including NFTs. The Martian Wallet is also a popular part of the Aptos ecosystem and comes with wide integration among Aptos services. However, if you prefer to stick to your mobile device, you could consider the Fletch Wallet.

Aptos Energy Consumption

Aptos is a proof-of-stake blockchain, which means that it does not require tens of thousands of computers running 24/7 to keep the network running. It does require nodes with high uptime, but PoS validators field a single correctly-configured machine rather than the entire warehouses full of computers you’ll see proof-of-work miners run.

Of course, more validators means a more secure decentralized network, but the number of computers needed for this remains relatively low. By extension, so does the amount of energy required, too.

Is APT a Good Investment?

Aptos has been in development for a total of four years across its iterations and counting its predecessors. As such, it should be no surprise that the network offers a compelling product with plenty of features for developers and users to get excited about.

However, many cryptocurrencies and blockchain networks are judged on how they perform under stress. For example, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin are often referred to as “battle-tested” since they’ve survived and, indeed, performed for so long.

Despite hiccups at launch, Aptos has excited many investors, and the market capitalization of the APT token has made considerable strides.

Many investors have also criticized the project for its token ownership. This could very well be valid criticism since the entire 1 billion genesis supply was either in the hands of the team, core contributors, Aptos Foundation, or its seed investors.

Ultimately, though, if Aptos can squeeze out from beneath the shadow of Diem and truly make good on its vision, there’s little to stop the project from becoming a mainstay of the industry.