Aptos: What is the difference between PayPal investment and the public chain built by Facebook members? ｜Project introduction

Aptos Labs is building a new layer 1 blockchain with a focus on security, scalability and upgradeability.

Want to create a rapidly innovative and adaptable blockchain to meet the needs of billions of people today and tomorrow . Expect significant improvements in user experience in terms of security and scalability. Make the blockchain more accessible to common users, especially non-crypto-native users, to accelerate the adoption of web3 by internet users.

Team background and project origin

Aptos was founded in 2021 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The main leaders, Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, were also the main builders of Diem (formerly Libra) and Novi (formerly Calibra).

Meta (formerly Facebook) encountered many ups and downs in the encryption field. Many projects were suspended for a while, and many members left Meta. Continue to invest in the encryption field. The same is true for Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, who left Meta after Diem was blocked from launching, and gathered with many core developers such as Diem and Novi's original creators, researchers, designers, and builders to work on the open source Diem code. A new network called Aptos was built on top of the library.

Many of the current Aptos team members have worked at Meta, which means the Aptos team has extensive experience developing and deploying systems at scale Experience, and Aptos use team members are also familiar with the Move language, members do not need to increase the cost of new learning.

According to Aptos, co-founder Avery Ching is one of the world's leading experts in building distributed systems. There are Alden Hu, Alin Tomescu, Dahlia Malkhi, David Wolinsky, Greg Nazario, Jake Skinner, Josh Lind and many other team members consisting of PhDs, researchers, engineers, designers and strategists.

Aptos will build in part on technology its team members have developed publicly over the past three years, with plans to focus on security, scalability The three aspects of performance and upgradeability are deployed.

Security

Move Programming Language

In terms of language, Aptos uses the Move programming language originally developed for Diem. The Move language is designed for secure resource management on the blockchain Designed for and verifiable execution. Three years ago, these workers developed both the blockchain and the Move language. Current accounts, transaction fees, standard library, validator management and configuration are all implemented through Move. Move is hailed by many as Diem's greatest innovation.

As we all know, Ethereum's Solidity is one of the most commonly used languages by developers, with powerful functions and good scalability. Compared with Move, its security is more prominent, and it provides a very strong security guarantee from the underlying memory and the code level of smart contract programming.

Hotstuff Consensus Derivatives

< p>Aptos proposes that it has developed a production-grade, high-guarantee, low-latency Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) engine and, over the past three years, has implemented the fourth iteration of the consensus protocol (a state-of-the-art derivative of Hotstuff). HotStuff is a leader-based Byzantine fault-tolerant replication protocol for a partially synchronous model. Once network communication becomes synchronized, HotStuff enables the correct leader to drive the protocol to consensus at the speed of actual network latency.

The Aptos team upgraded the consensus protocol in the private mainnet environment, added an active pacemaker, and used timeouts to synchronize verification Far faster than waiting for an increased timeout, blocks can be submitted in just two network round trips, achieving sub-second finality. And Aptos' reputation system analyzes on-chain status and automatically updates leader rotation without any human intervention, for unresponsive validators. The protocol clearly separates liveness from safety. Regardless of whether the network is unreachable or the non-secure core is compromised in some way, as long as the BFT honesty guarantee is maintained, the chain will not fork.

Validation tests, keys and multi-agent transactions

To ensure security, the Aptos team repeatedly tested Aptos Core by running a large number of validators in different environments.

Aptos has set up the account key recovery and rotation protocol, which mainly prevents the key from being stolen. The specific performance is Aptos supports any account to rotate its private key, and validators can also periodically rotate their consensus keys. To prevent key loss, Aptos is also developing new technology for key recovery that can be directly integrated into the blockchain account model.

Aptos utilizes Move's signer type through multi-agent transactions, allowing arbitrary transactions across multiple on-chain accounts in a single transaction Number of atomic operations.

Scalability

Indicators and Measurement

High transaction costs, low throughput and high finality limit the popularization and development of blockchain, Aptos believes that L1 should pay attention to the development of sustainable Scalability to optimize user experience.

In terms of blockchain performance indicators, due to different test benchmarks, there may be differences in data, Aptos intends to share the benchmark test framework And compare the performance characteristics of various use cases on different blockchains. Such as throughput TPS (the number of transactions processed per second) and finality (the time from when a client creates and submits a transaction to when the other party confirms that the transaction has been submitted).

Throughput and finality

Aptos plans to completely separate the consensus protocol from transaction execution in its plan to improve throughput and finality speed. In order to promote transaction propagation, the team has started to develop and iterate the next consensus protocol, which may be launched on the testnet this year.

In addition to this, another difficulty is transaction execution time. Using new technology inspired by software transactional memory, Aptos achieved over 130k transactions per second in an execute-only benchmark using only 32 cores.

The final bottleneck in terms of performance is the authenticated data structure and associated state storage. In-memory Merkle trees are efficient on a small scale when validating ledger state (e.g. account balances, smart contracts, etc.), but cannot write large Merkle trees to persistent storage. To address this, Aptos is designing authenticated data structures by exploring higher branching factors, access pattern-optimized caching, and careful versioning, and Aptos is also developing support for large accounts.

Parallel account transactions and control transaction sequencing

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Different from the serial number approach popularized by Ethereum, Aptos uses an attempt to enhance the serial number method with a collision-resistant serial number, allowing accounts to parallelize on the serial number window, while still allowing users to control transactions when necessary Sort. Consider implementing more flexible and composable parallel account transactions in the future.

Support different states of management nodes

For high-throughput blockchains, state synchronization between nodes can be CPU-intensive, and Aptos supports a range of different state synchronization protocols. And in order to support cheap full nodes, there is a protocol in Aptos to synchronize transactions and their execution results signed by quorum validators, allowing nodes to skip calculations at the cost of higher network throughput, and directly from the executed ledger Status update ledger status result.

Unlike most blockchains that need to download the blockchain to get the latest ledger, the Aptos client can use transaction accumulation server to get the latest committed transactions and allow pruning of previous transactions and ledgers.

Upgradeability

The development of blockchain is changing with each passing day. From Defi to NFT to DAO, the types of hot spots are constantly changing. However, it is difficult for many underlying protocols to make major improvements after release, so that it is difficult for the current network to quickly adapt to the ever-evolving web3 requirements.

Aptos proposed some major upgrades to the network, some were down for hours, some experienced an unexpected hard fork . On the other hand, Aptos manages the management and configuration of verifiers using on-chain status, which facilitates community voting and quick execution of upgrades. In the past few years, it has successfully executed several major upgrades without downtime, ensuring safe and reliable deployment.

Financing Situation and Roadmap

Aptos announced on March 15 that it completed a US$200 million financing round led by a16z, with Tiger Global, Katie Haun, Multicoin Capital, Three Arrows Capital, FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and many other well-known VCs participating.

Then, not only Binance Labs announced that it invested in Aptos Labs, but the payment giant PayPal also said that it had participated in the investment, which was invested by PayPal Ventures The first Layer 1 public chain project. It should be noted that in order to maintain isolation from Meta and ensure the independence of Aptos, the project did not receive financing from Meta related personnel.

According to the current Aptos roadmap plan, the developer testnet will be released in Q1 this year. Developers will start from March 15, that is, Start building on the Aptos testnet. Working with strategic partners and the web3 developer community while gathering feedback and improving the Move developer experience and the Move language.

Q2 launch incentive testnet, provide a larger test platform, cooperate with the node operator community, and jointly operate decentralized network. Bug bounties are proposed to improve the infrastructure and provide incentives for those involved in securing the network. It should be noted here that the difference between the development network and the test network is that the development network is mainly built to try out new ideas, while the test network is used to verify the test results of core developers and prepare for the launch of the main network.

Aptos plans to release the mainnet in Q3 this year, and deploy the next major version to the Aptos mainnet from Q4 to Q1 next year.

Current developers can build on the incentive test network, and the second phase of the incentive test is about to start, and users who meet their hardware requirements can run nodes to participate.

In terms of applications, Liquidswap developed by Pontem is the first decentralized exchange. Pontem is a product development studio, and according to it, it may also cooperate with Aptos to build development tools, EVM, AMM and other Dapps and infrastructure. In addition to Liquidswap, there is also the Fewcha wallet on Aptos. And Martian DAO is also building various products for the Aptos ecosystem, including Martian Wallet, and an NFT market called Curiosity, which can be duly followed.

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