Project research | MOVE is a new public chain: Aptos in-depth research report

Editor | Bowen@Web3CN.Pro

Table of contents

1. Project Introduction

2. Project vision

3. Features and advantages

(1) Meta series

(2) Move language

(3) Block-STM technology

(4) Account management is more secure

(5) Support frequent upgrades

(6) High performance sparse Merkle tree

(7) Meta public chain comparison

4. Development history

5. Team Background

6. Financing Information

VII. Development Achievements

(1) Technological progress

(2) Market conditions

(3) Ecological development

8. Economic Model

9. Risks and opportunities

1. Project Introduction

Aptos is a new independent public chain project established in 2021, a first-tier public chain focusing on security and scalability. Its consensus mechanism adopts Proof of Stake (Proof of Stake), which has attracted much attention due to its Meta background, Move language and high TPS.

2. Project vision

Aptos' vision is to provide a blockchain that can bring mainstream adoption to web3 and enhance the ecosystem of decentralized applications to solve real-world user problems. The team is committed to developing products and applications that "redefine the web3 user experience" on the Aptos blockchain.

Aptos' mission is to advance the state-of-the-art in blockchain reliability, security and performance by providing a flexible and modular blockchain architecture. The architecture should support frequent upgrades, rapid adoption of the latest technological advancements, and best-in-class support for emerging use cases.

3. Features and advantages

(1) Meta series

Aptos, Sui, and Linera are often discussed together because the co-founders of these three projects have experience in projects in Meta.

![Project research | MOVE is a new public chain: Aptos in-depth research report] (https://img.gateio.im/social/moments-69a80767fe-c726459129-dd1a6f-e5a980)

Aptos' team consists of the original creators, researchers, designers, and builders of Diem, the original Facebook (Meta) stablecoin project, formerly known as Libra. Libra is a digital currency project for payment transactions that started in 2019. Due to regulatory reasons and other reasons, it has been transformed into a stable currency and renamed Diem, but it has not been well launched.

For Aptos, having Diem's background on the team is one reason for the attention.

(2) Move language

In theory, using the Move language, Aptos can achieve both high transaction throughput and scalability without sacrificing security.

Move was inspired by Rust, a new programming language developed to develop Diem at that time, which is different from the solidity used by Ethereum.

At that time, Ethereum mainly solved the problem of writing smart contracts on Bitcoin, so Solidity is a programming language for blockchain smart contracts. It treats tokens as variables such as value (value), which is very easy. Asset security issues arise, and assets may be created or disappeared out of thin air.

Move is not a programming language for smart contracts, but a programming language for assets on the blockchain chain. It treats tokens as resources (resources), encapsulates them at the bottom layer, and must be bound to accounts. An account is in There can only be one type of resource at a time, and it must be used when it is withdrawn from the account, as much as it is withdrawn.

The Move module defines the validity period, storage and access mode of each resource, and can be tagged. For example, the store can be stored, and the key can be indexed, so the token can be safely stored and transferred, and will not be generated or disappeared without proper credentials. or be reused.

Currently, projects using the Move language include: Aptos, Sui, Starcoin, 0L Network, etc.

(3) Parallel transactions: Block-STM technology brings high TPS

At present, most blockchains use a serial transaction execution method, that is, transactions are included in the block one by one, and the next transaction must wait for the completion of the previous transaction. The advantage of this is that it will be easier to confirm the transaction status, but the scalability will be limited.

Parallel execution means that multiple transactions can be executed at the same time. Generally, a snapshot of the current state is taken, and then multiple transactions are processed at the same time. This obviously improves the transaction throughput, but the difficulty is how to make different transactions not affect each other.

Block-STM is a technology to accelerate the execution of smart contracts, derived from Diem. Block-STM increases throughput through parallelism, which is the core technology of Aptos. Aptos achieves high TPS by allowing new nodes to participate in state synchronization through Block-STM.

![Project research | MOVE is a new public chain: Aptos in-depth research report] (https://img.gateio.im/social/moments-69a80767fe-51c7e6a583-dd1a6f-e5a980)

As shown in the figure, Aptos consists of a group of verification nodes that use Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), Proof of Stake consensus mechanism (PoS) to jointly receive and process transaction requests from users.

Unlike other blockchains, most blockchains have a hierarchical structure. The core of the network is a group of active verifiers who are responsible for processing transactions, generating blocks, and reaching consensus. The Aptos network allows active nodes to synchronize state with new validators (inactive validators). The goals are high throughput, low latency, fast synchronization times, resistance to failures and malicious behavior, and tolerance of resource constraints and heterogeneity.

(4) Account management is more secure

The Aptos data model supports flexible key management and hybrid hosting options. This, together with pre-signature transaction transparency and a practical light client protocol, provides a safer and more trusted user experience.

Account and key decoupling approach enables Aptos to seamlessly add new digital signature algorithms to support public and private key types, hybrid hosting model enables advanced recovery solutions and account management to help bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3 . To further enhance the user experience, the Aptos blockchain limits the viability of each transaction and protects signers from infinite validity through three fields of protection - sequence number, expiration time and chain ID, to prevent bugs and attacks.

(5) Support frequent upgrades

Aptos has a history of upgradability, and from the ground up, every area in the system has been designed with modularity and flexibility in mind. This enables the Aptos architecture to support frequent upgrades, which in turn means that the blockchain can quickly adopt the latest technological advancements and provide technical support for emerging use cases.

Aptos' modular architecture design creates client flexibility and is optimized for frequent upgrades with zero downtime - features that have been demonstrated in mainnet iterations, testnets, and many internal stress tests. The Aptos blockchain includes an embedded on-chain change management protocol to rapidly deploy new technology innovations and support new Web3 use cases.

(6) High performance sparse Merkle tree

Aptos uses the Jellyfish Merkle Tree (JMT, Sparse Merkle Tree) design, which utilizes a monotonically increasing version-based key pattern to optimize write scaling on an underlying storage engine based on an LSM tree (log-structured merged tree). JMT strikes a practical balance between CPU, I/O, and storage footprint, ensuring satisfactory performance without dealing with large and unwieldy bloated state data on disk.

In addition to JMT as the persistence format for Aptos state, it has another in-memory implementation of a lock-free sparse Merkle tree. Tailored specifically for caching and parallelization, it works with Block-STM to facilitate high-performance global state updates.

(7) Meta public chain comparison

![Project research | MOVE is a new public chain: Aptos in-depth research report] (https://img.gateio.im/social/moments-69a80767fe-c040b8fe66-dd1a6f-e5a980)

4. Development history

• 2022.01.31 Diem, a stable currency project under Meta (formerly Facebook), was acquired by Silvergate
• 2022.02.24 Aptos publicly entered the market view, the founder and other team members are all from Diem
• 2022.03.15 Aptos completed financing of US$200 million
• 2022.03.28 BinanceLabs announces strategic investment in Aptos
• 2022.05.14 Aptos launches incentive test network
• 2022.06.29 Aptos launched the ecosystem funding program
• 2022.07.01 Aptos Incentivized Testnet 2 opens for registration
• 2022.07.25 Aptos completed a new round of financing of 150 million US dollars
• 2022.08.19 Aptos incentive testnet 3 open registration
• 2022.10.18 The public chain Aptos has officially launched the main network "Aptos Autumn"
• 2022.10.18 Aptos Announces Token Economics
• 2022.10.19 Aptos official domain name service Aptos Name Service launched
• 2023.02.17 Aptos launches ambassador program Aptos Collective
• 2023.03.11 The transaction volume on the Aptos chain exceeded 100 million
• 2023.04.13 Aptos launched a $20 million grant program to encourage artists to create on its chain
• 2023.04.21 Aptos launched the delegated pledge function

5. Team background

Many of Aptos' key team members come from Meta. For example, Avery Ching and Mo Shaikh, co-founder and chief technology officer of Aptos, were the main builders of Diem and Novi.

In addition, most of the developers and researchers such as Alden Hu in the development team participated in the development of Diem and Novi.

![Project research | MOVE is a new public chain: Aptos in-depth research report] (https://img.gateio.im/social/moments-69a80767fe-ecfe431404-dd1a6f-e5a980)

Mo Shaikh (left) and Avery Ching (right)

Mo Shaikh, Co-Founder and CEO of Aptos, was responsible for strategic partnerships at Meta from May 2020 to December 2021, and before that was Founder and CEO at Meridio from October 2017 to May 2020 CEO, Meridio is a blockchain-based platform for investing and trading liquid fractional real estate.

Avery Ching, Co-founder and CTO of Aptos. Avery Ching has served as the chief software engineer at Facebook for more than 10 years from September 2011 to December 2021, and was the technical director of the Novi team, an encryption platform under the original Meta, focusing on the development of various aspects of blockchain technology, and also Responsible for maintaining the Diem blockchain. From October 2007 to September 2011, he worked as a chief software engineer at Yahoo.

![Project research | MOVE is a new public chain: Aptos in-depth research report] (https://img.gateio.im/social/moments-69a80767fe-717ad618f7-dd1a6f-e5a980)

Josh Lind - Founding Engineer

Josh Lind, the founding engineer of Aptos, is engaged in the research of Layer1 blockchain technology. Before that, was a research scientist working on Diem blockchain in Novi. Completed a PhD in the Large-Scale Data and Systems (LSDS) group and the Center for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering (IC3RE) at Imperial College London. The PhD focuses on improving security and privacy in large-scale distributed systems using trusted hardware.

![Project research | MOVE is a new public chain: Aptos in-depth research report] (https://img.gateio.im/social/moments-69a80767fe-5339c9f269-dd1a6f-e5a980)

Alin Tomescu - Researcher

Alin Tomescu, a founding team member and researcher of Aptos, was awarded a master's degree in computer science and a Ph.D. Aspects of data structures for authentication, secure communications, and secure web applications.

![Project research | MOVE is a new public chain: Aptos in-depth research report] (https://img.gateio.im/social/moments-69a80767fe-403bd50634-dd1a6f-e5a980)

David Wolinsky - Software Engineer

David Wolinsky, Software Engineer at Aptos, was previously the Technical Lead for Web3 at Meta, working across multiple organizations and teams to help shape many strategic technology and product initiatives. Prior to that, worked on the Diem blockchain for almost two years, including designing governance and genesis procedures, establishing security infrastructure plans and principles, and defining integration with Diem. Prior to joining Novi, was Facebook's technical director/manager responsible for Facebook's advertising growth. Previously, he was a research scholar at Yale University.

Alden Hu - Software Engineer

Alden Hu, software engineer at Aptos Labs, worked as a senior software engineer at Novi from February 2019 to February 2022, and previously worked at Instagram and Baidu.

![Project research | MOVE is a new public chain: Aptos in-depth research report] (https://img.gateio.im/social/moments-69a80767fe-7bc6717b6a-dd1a6f-e5a980)

Rati Gelashvili - Researcher

Rati Gelashvili, Aptos founding team researcher, MIT Ph.D., with extensive expertise in concurrency, parallel and distributed algorithms and data structures, Senior Research Fellow at Novi from May 2020 to January 2022 Home.

6. Financing Information

On March 15, 2022, Aptos completed a US$200 million financing round led by a16z, Multicoin Capital, Katie Haun, ParaFi Capital, IRONGREY, Hashed, iant, Tiger Global, BlockTower, FTX Ventures, Paxos, Coinbase Ventures, etc. Participate in voting.

On March 28, 2022, Binance Labs announced a strategic investment in Aptos Labs, the development team of the public chain project Aptos, and will work closely with Aptos in development, code review, infrastructure construction, and hackathons.

On July 25, 2022, Aptos announced the completion of a new round of financing of US$150 million, led by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto. Other investors include Griffin Gaming Partners, Franklin Templeton, Circle Ventures and Superscrypt, a16z crypto and Multicoin Capital, etc.

On September 15, 2022, Binance Labs announced an increased strategic investment in Aptos Labs to expand its commitment to infrastructure.

VII. Development Achievements

(1) Technological progress

① Move language: is a next-generation language for secure, sandboxed, and formally verified programming. Its first use case was the Diem blockchain, for which Move provided the basis for its implementation. Move allows developers to write programs that flexibly manage and transfer assets while providing security and protection from attacks on those assets. Currently, blockchain projects using the Move language include: Aptos, Sui, Starcoin, 0L Network, etc.

At the beginning of the Move language design, it tried to solve the protection problem of digital assets from the perspective of programming language. Aptos and the Move language were developed concurrently over three years ago. Aptos accounts, transaction fees, standard library, validator node management and configuration are all implemented with Move.

② Parallel execution engine

Aptos implemented Block-STM in an open source code base, relying on Rayon, Dashmap and ArcSwap crates for concurrency.

![Project research | MOVE is a new public chain: Aptos in-depth research report] (https://img.gateio.im/social/moments-69a80767fe-cfc3fe79b5-dd1a6f-e5a980)

Aptos compared Block-STM to sequential execution of blocks. Each block contains 10k transactions, and the number of accounts determines the level of conflict and contention. In low contention cases, Block-STM archiving was 16x faster than sequential execution using 32 threads, and in high contention cases, Block-STM archiving was over 8x speedup. Importantly, Block-STM incurs a small amount of overhead when the workload is sequential in nature. Overall, Block-STM is able to extract inherent parallelism from workloads dynamically and transparently (without user prompting).

③ BFT consensus agreement

The Aptos team has developed a production-grade, low-latency Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) engine. Over the past three years, a fourth iteration of the protocol has been implemented.

Aptos added an active pacer via the BFT protocol that uses a timeout to synchronize validators much faster than waiting for an increased timeout. With recent improvements to the protocol, blocks can be submitted in as few as two network round trips, making sub-second finality a common occurrence.

④ Network

Aptos Incentivized Testnet 1: Successfully launched nodes and passed liveness checks within 24 hours, with over 95% availability

Aptos Incentivized Testnet 2: Test coin supports staking and staking rewards, decentralized faucet support

Aptos Incentivized Testnet 3: Successfully launched nodes and passed liveness checks within 12 hours of node launch time, availability exceeded 97%, etc.

Aptos mainnet "Aptos Autumn" goes live

(2) Market conditions

On October 24, 2022, Aptos and PancakeSwap reached a cooperation, and PancakeSwap and CAKE tokens will be deployed on Aptos.

On November 11, 2022, Aptos and Google Cloud have reached a cooperation and will launch the accelerator program.

On March 9, 2023, Aptos reached a cooperation with the cross-chain bridge Wormhole, and users can bridge NFT assets to Aptos.

On April 26, 2023, 11 Web3 companies have joined the Google Cloud Startup Support Company Program, and Aptos, Base, Flow, etc. have been shortlisted.

On May 11, 2023, the number of applications for the long-term funding program Aptos Grant DAO exceeded 300.

(3) Ecological development

At present, Aptos officially shows that there are nearly 150 ecosystems on its chain, including cross-bridge, DeFi, NFT, games, infrastructure and other fields.

![Project research | MOVE is a new public chain: Aptos in-depth research report] (https://img.gateio.im/social/moments-69a80767fe-c534253d3a-dd1a6f-e5a980)

8. Economic Model

(1) Token Overview

APT is the governance token of Aptos, the total amount is 1 billion, the precision is 8 digits, and the smallest unit is called Octa.

51.02% of the tokens will be allocated to the community, 16.5% to the foundation, 19% to core contributors, and 13.48% to investors.

(2) Community and foundation distribution

This token pool is earmarked for ecosystem-related projects such as grants, rewards, and other community development programs. A total of 410,217,359.767 tokens of the community and foundation are held by the Aptos Foundation, and 100,000,000 tokens are held by Aptos Labs. It is expected to be unlocked within ten years. The specific allocation details are as follows:

125,000,000 APT to support ecosystem projects, grants and other community building

· Preliminary plan to provide 5,000,000 APTs to support the Aptos Foundation

1/120th of the remaining community and foundation tokens are expected to be unlocked monthly for the next 10 years

(3) Distribution of core contributors and investors

Core contributors and investors: All investors and core contributors will be locked for 4 years, no APT will be distributed in the first 12 months, 3/48 APT will be unlocked in the 13th month after the mainnet release, and then unlocked every month , the 18th month is fully unlocked. Starting from the 19th month after the mainnet launch, 1/48th of the tokens will be unlocked every month, so that all such tokens will be unlocked by the 4th anniversary of the mainnet launch.

(4) Token Supply Schedule

More than 82% of the tokens have been locked by the above categories and cannot be released temporarily.

![Project research | MOVE is a new public chain: Aptos in-depth research report] (https://img.gateio.im/social/moments-69a80767fe-25b9481c78-dd1a6f-e5a980)

9. Risks and opportunities

(1) OPPORTUNITY

① Market environment:

The public chain track has always been the most challenging and the best place to carry value. With the rapid explosion of applications such as DeFi, NFT, and Web3, the narrative and conceptual aspects of the public chain are the main concerns of the market One of the points, of course, the competition on the public chain track has never stopped.

A breakdown of the development of the public chain track, from BSC, Solana, Avalanche, Fantom, Near, Avalanche, to Terra, one public chain after another not only showed a good answer in the secondary market price, but also ushered in a booming ecology The development has driven a small upsurge of emerging public chains.

② Project progress:

Aptos has a total of 108 verification nodes around the world. The total supply of APT is 1,034,592,689, and the amount of tokens in the pledge pool is 877,583,198. Its market value is currently $1,681,095,144, ranking 33rd in the entire network.

APT volumes remain low and the bullish momentum could continue if there is no significant bearish pressure in the market.

(2) Risk

① The effect is not as expected

In October last year, the Aptos Autumn mainnet launch was not satisfactory. According to Aptos official data, it can achieve 160,000 TPS, but according to the browser data, the Aptos network throughput is only 30-40 TPS, which is far from the target value.

② Lack of advantageous projects

Although Aptos is also trying to develop a public chain with its own characteristics, despite this, for example, Framework co-founder Vance Spencer and others questioned on Twitter: Has Aptos done something that Solana has not done? .

Due to the high degree of overlap with Solana in terms of technology, capital, and ecological developers, Aptos also needs to face the competitive pressure from Solana.

③ Overvalued

As a star public chain, Aptos has become the darling of capital since its launch. In the financing in July 2022, Aptos' valuation reached 2.75 billion US dollars. From the perspective of the bear market, Aptos' valuation is high.

④ Potential risks brought by the Korean market

The South Korean market is one of the hottest crypto trading markets in the world, and the prices of crypto assets in its market are often higher than those in other countries. This phenomenon is called "kimchi premium". After the collapse of Terra, there was a vacuum in the Korean local encryption market, and a new protagonist was urgently needed, so Aptos seized the opportunity to enter the Korean market. In the white paper released simultaneously on the Aptos official website, Korean is the only language other than English. The madness of the Korean market may pose a potential risk to the project.

reference:

Comprehensive Interpretation丨Dark Horse Star Public Chain Aptos: Opportunities and Challenges under the First Mover Advantage

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