The Genesis of Aptos

Building the safest and most scalable Layer 1 blockchain

By Mo Shaikh

Today is the genesis of Aptos. Our mission is to create universal and fair access to decentralized assets for billions of people.

Aptos is a new, independent project to fulfill our vision of delivering the safest and most production-ready blockchain in the world.

While blockchains have come a long way, it is no secret they are still rife with danger and confusion. The decentralization movement struggles to reach escape velocity because reliability, safety and usability can not be taken for granted. Collectively, these problems hold back adoption, from the average individual to the largest enterprises in the world. A new Layer 1 blockchain is needed, one that’s aimed specifically at solving these problems. Aptos was designed with an emphasis on absolute safety, extensible scalability, and credible neutrality — values that we know firsthand and viscerally understand.

We are not starting from scratch.

We are the original creators, researchers, designers, and builders of Diem, the blockchain that was first built to serve this purpose. While the world never got to see what we built, our work is far from over.

We have had the luxury of thinking about these problems alongside some of the brightest engineers in the world for years. Since departing Meta (formerly Facebook) we have been able to put our ideas into motion, ditch bureaucratic red tape, and build an entirely new network from the ground up that brings them to fruition. We’re now ready to socialize those ideas more broadly and start shipping the infrastructure that we’ve been perfecting.

Aptos will be built in part on the technology we developed in the open over the past three years. Aptos is using Move, the safe and reliable language originally developed for Diem. The ideas we conceived then are still relevant and will serve as an important foundation for a safe, scalable, upgradable Web3. Our plans for decentralization and permissionless access are progressing quickly and will be developed in the open.

Openness is the only way to achieve credible neutrality.

We have years of experience developing and deploying systems at scale, and our entire team has dedicated our careers to this calling. My cofounder, Avery Ching, is one of the world’s leading experts in building distributed systems and scaling them for billions of users. The rest of the founding team at Aptos consists of an impressive group of PhDs, researchers, engineers, designers and strategists including Alden Hu, Alin Tomescu, David Wolinsky, Greg Nazario, Jake Skinner, Josh Lind, Max Kaplan, Mo Ahmed, Neil Harounian, Rati Gelashivili, Rustie Lin, Sasha Spiegelman, Sherry Xiao, Sital Kedia and Zekun Li.

As a team, we are driven by the confidence that we are the right people to build the safest, most scalable and most widely accessible network. That might sound cliché or overly idyllic, but we mean it wholeheartedly: a world utility cannot succeed in the hands of a few. Aptos will only succeed if it is collectively used, owned and maintained by everyone.

Now, on the fourth iteration of the consensus protocol, we are confident that Aptos is capable of bringing affordability, decentralization, and speed to the daily lives of billions of internet users. It is the lowest latency, optimistically-responsive BFT protocol available, and it features a robust, on-chain reputation system and novel methods for parallel execution — a key enabler of speed at scale. We will rapidly deploy many key innovations in performance, functionality and improvements to the overall user experience and leverage our ability to do major upgrades seamlessly in the process.

In the coming weeks, Aptos’s devnet will launch, providing developers everywhere a playground to explore. Shortly after that, there will be an incentivized testnet followed by mainnet, which we expect to launch later this year. We will also begin announcing some of the partners that have already committed to building with Aptos long term.

Come build with us.

I invite everyone to provide input and join the Aptos community. We are looking for builders, validators, users, brands, creators, and believers. If that’s you, follow us on Twitter and take a look at our job board.

Aptos (Ohlone for “The People”) encompasses our mission and ethos for why we build.

-Mo, Avery and the Aptos Team