- Aptos launched its mainnet today, after four years of development and a $1 billion valuation.
- Many people have called it a “Solana killer” Aptos says that during testing, it was able to handle 130,000 transactions per second, while Solana can only handle 30,000.
- Aptos, on the other hand, has a lower tps than Bitcoin at the moment, and most of its tokens are either staked or ready to be sold to retail investors.
Aptos launched its mainnet today, after four years of technical development and a $1 billion valuation. The company’s secret sauce was made in the depths of Meta, and its goal is to make “the safest and most scalable layer 1 blockchain.” Aptos investor and leading exchange FTX has already said that it will list Aptos’ APT token on Wednesday.
Aptos is the latest high-profile attempt to build the perfect blockchain for smart contracts, which is code that supports the huge world of NFTs, DAOs, and DeFi. Many people have called it a “Solana killer.”
Even though Ethereum has improved a lot since the merge, competitors like Solana are making inroads with much faster transaction speeds. However, Solana sometimes has outages, which has opened the door for even newer players like Aptos.
In 2019, Facebook (Meta) was working on a blockchain project called Libra, which was later changed to Diem. The tech giant put the project on hold because of pressure from government regulators and lots of criticism from the crypto community. But developers saw value in what made it stand out: “parallel execution,” which is a way to order and combine transactions to speed up the process quickly.
Aptos says that during testing, it was able to handle 130,000 transactions per second, while Ethereum could only handle 30 transactions per second.
The Move programming language, which is related to Aptos, is also a key part of the new Aptos ecosystem because it focuses on scarcity and access control.
Aptos has been a big draw for venture capitalists in the months leading up to its launch. It closed a $200 million strategic round led by Andreessen Horowitz in March and a $150 million Series A round led by FTX in the summer. The amount of venture capital it raised in a short amount of time led some Web3 circles to believe that investors were leaving Solana for Aptos.
Aptos also chose Anchorage Digital as one of its preferred institutional custodians last month, after working with them for years. Anchorage Co-Founder and President Diogo Mónica had been on the Diem technical steering committee.
“We are proud to arrive here together, for the people,” the project wrote on Medium. “This is step one in a long journey to create universal and fair access to decentralised applications for billions of people through a safe, scalable, and upgradable blockchain.”
Time will tell if Aptos’s approach to executing transactions will be a silver bullet or if it will attract enough blockchain developers to build with it and its own language.
Aspiring “Twitter VC ghostwriter” @ParadigmEng420 was not happy with today’s launch. He said that communication had broken down, that the number of transactions per second was lower than promised, and that he had questions about how Aptos tokens would be distributed.
Today Aptos launched – October 17, 2022 at 14:22:40
Aptos, on the other hand, has a lower tps than Bitcoin at the moment, and most of its tokens are either staked or ready to be sold to retail investors.
Siddhanjay Godre, a blockchain engineer and venture lead in Singapore, praised the launch, saying that Aptos’ parallel execution model and very strong community make it “likely to compete with ETH in the near future.”
I’m excited to see Aptos launch their mainnet. It’s a Parallel Execution chain with a very strong technology and community that will likely compete with Ethereum in the near future.
In the meantime, it’s been fun to learn and write MOVE lang https://t.co/M63hVXu4kf
Many developers are now waiting for the upcoming launch of the Sui blockchain, which also uses the Move language and has a lot in common with Aptos. However, sceptics and Solana supporters are already getting ready for a fight.
Three chains that are almost the same won’t all work.
This isn’t like Ethereum, Cosmos, or Solana, where different ideas are being tried out and competition is good.
Solana/Aptos/Sui is a war, and in the long run, only one side will win.
