The so-called Solana killer, Aptos is founded by the devs behind Meta’s Diem blockchain, and it uses a new transaction ordering method, getting massive numbers of new investors.
Here are the most important details about the project that you should become aware of.
Aptos new transaction ordering method
It’s still safe to say that Ethereum is the king of smart contract-enabled blockchains, but it’s still too expensive and slow to use.
Solana, on the other hand, it’s faster and buzzier, but it’s also prone to overpromising and occasionally grinds to a halt as well, and this is not the best feature.
The main issue in the space remains the same and involving building a blockchain that’s secure, decentralized and fast. It’s pretty hard to have all these features mixed together in a viable project.
This is exactly what the devs behind Aptos are trying to build with their new project.
As Decrypt online publication notes, Aptos is the recipient of a $150 million funding round led by FTX and investors including Parafi in late July.
Bloomberg notes that Aptos raised $200 million from investors in its last funding round from big players like Andreessen Horowitz, Multicoin Capital, and Haun Ventures back in March.
The company declined to specify its new valuation.
The parallel execution
Aptos was founded by Avery Ching and Mo Shaik, who worked on Diem’s Novi wallet.
The innovative project uses a technique outlined in the Diem days called “parallel execution” – its main aim is to speed up transaction speeds while keeping them cheap.
Here’s the relevant tweet that sheds light on the new project:
1/ Today, we announced our $150M Series A funding round. This is a testament to our team’s technical expertise, the strength & activity of our ecosystem and the vision & ethos we all share. https://t.co/GGnn4TY9Lw
— Aptos (@AptosLabs) July 25, 2022
The official Medium post notes that Aptos includes the leaders, engineers and strategic talent behind years of developments at Diem and Novi.
The project also includes researchers behind cutting-edge innovations such as DiemBFTv4, Narwhal & Tusk, BullShark, and Block-STM.
According to the same official blog post:
“The Aptos team is excited by the strategic support of this round across key verticals our blockchain was built to support: Gaming, Social Networks, Media & Entertainment and Finance.”
On Twitter, the team behind Aptos also mentions the following essential features that stand at the core of this project:
3/ We look forward to continuing to build our team, ship a safe, scalable and reliable foundation for web3 and create performant and upgradable blockchain that fuels our rapidly evolving ecosystem.
— Aptos (@AptosLabs) July 25, 2022
How does Aptos work?
The key feature of Aptos is parallel execution. As you probably know by now, most blockchains make use of a method of transaction ordering that is called sequential or serial execution.
Here, a single chronology of transactions is being updated continually. Each time that people make a trade, or they buy something, the transaction is being added to a single long ledger that includes every transaction that’s been executed on the network, and it’s updated via thousands of nodes.
It’s necessary to wait for every new transaction to be verified, and this can take a great amount of time – this is the very reason for most blockchain’s slow pace of settlement.
On the other hand, paralleled execution is a new method that runs multiple simultaneous chains in – this allows for more to be processed at once.
According to data coming straight from Aptos, they have already been able to reach 130,000 tps – this is huge compared to ETH’s 30 tps.
More chains also mean a more complicated way of seeing the full view of the transaction history. This means that transactions could attempt to process via multiple chains at the same time, and this can cause failure.
Decrypt online publication notes that this is a new method that is not without controversy, and it’s not 100% reliable just yet. But this does not mean that the project is not extremely promising.
