Aptos is the brainchild of Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, both former employees of Meta. Mo, who is the current CEO of the company, is a founder with years of multinational financial services and blockchain/crypto experience. According to his [LinkedIn profile], he specializes in scaling products and has experience in the private equity and venture capital markets. Ching, on the other hand, is the CTO of Aptos. He is a software engineer and was one of the principal software engineers at Meta. The duo worked together on the Diem blockchain project at Meta. Shaikh and Ching decided to join forces to create Aptos Labs when the Diem project was discontinued in January 2022. It, therefore, comes as no surprise that Aptos employs some of the technicalities of Diem. Other members of the Aptos team include researchers, designers, and engineers from Diem.

For a start, the Aptos team claims that its network can process over 150,000 tps. By comparison, Ethereum’s mainnet tps is around 12 to 15. This high transaction throughput is possible through a parallel execution engine (Block-STM) — a [byzantine fault-tolerant] (BFT) PoS [consensus mechanism]. For context, most blockchains execute transactions sequentially, which means that a single failed transaction or high demand on the network could hold up the entire chain. In the case of Aptos, all transactions are processed simultaneously and validated afterward. Failed transactions are either re-executed or aborted, thanks to the blockchain’s software transactional memory libraries, which spot and manage conflicts. Aptos is built using Move, a new smart contract programming language that claims to offer advantages to [Solidity], the EVM-based programming language. This includes blockchain commands that can be easily verified, modification of private key and modular design of Aptos. New use cases can be realized through Aptos’ upgradeability and configurability, while horizontal throughput scalability — through the natively-implemented [sharding] feature — provides a better user experience.

APT is the native currency of the Aptos blockchain. It has an initial total supply of 1 billion and at the time of writing, its circulating supply is 130 million APT. The distribution is as follows: Community (51.02%); Core Contributors (19.00%); Foundation (16.50%); Investors (13.48%). Under the Community allocation, around 80% are held by the Aptos Foundation and the remaining by Aptos Labs. This will be used to support community growth and Aptos Foundation initiatives, and the remainder will be unlocked monthly over the next ten years. Investors and core contributors are subjected to a four-year [vesting] schedule from mainnet launch. The Aptos team announced a token airdrop of 20 million APT tokens to early testnet users on Oct. 19, 2022. For a summary of Aptos [tokenomics], refer [here].

On-chain user application protocol called LayerZero Labs [launched] the Aptos Bridge on October 19, 2022. The blockchain bridge will allow users to transfer ETH, USDC, and USDT from Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, and Optimism to Aptos.

Aptos uses two consensus protocols – Proof-of-Stake and AptosBFT. AptosBFT is quite similar to DiemBFT, originally developed for Diem. “BFT '' means ‘Byzantine Fault-Tolerant,’ and a network is said to be Byzantine fault-tolerant if it can continue to operate normally even if some of its members go offline or turn malicious. AptosBFT is a custom-made consensus algorithm based on the HotStuff protocol. While there are a lot of background technicalities around how the protocol secures the network, the algorithm analyzes the on-chain state and automatically updates leader rotations to adjust for non-responsive validators without human intervention.

The APT token can be purchased and traded on a number of exchanges, including [Binance], [Huobi], [KuCoin], [Coinbase] and more.