Aptos co-founder: Our goal is not to kill any blockchain

2023-01-31 22:00

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Aptos co-founder and Chief Technology officer Avery Ching details Aptos' evolution, insight into its user base and why he thinks Aptos is gaining traction now.

Aptos "Not Here To Kill' Any Blockchain: Co-founder"

Original article by SHALINI NAGARAJAN

7 Updao

Aptos, the venture capital-backed Tier 1 blockchain, saw huge price growth in January, with its value soaring more than 400 percent in the last month.

原生 Token APT 上个月的交易价格仅为 3.59 美元，但最后交易价格为 18.37 美元。其近 30 亿美元的市值现已超过 Stellar 和比特币现金，并正在接近 Ethereum Classic 和 Monero。

When you consider the fully diluted value, Aptos is currently the fourth largest chain, worth $18 billion. But interest in the network has raised some eyebrows, largely because of its low base of users and developers.

「对于一个几乎为零的用户和应用程序的链来说，这简直是疯狂；投资者在定价什么？Aptos 因其对内部人员和投资者有利的 Token 分配不佳而感到羞耻，这使他们能够持有归属 Token 以获得流动性回报，」Blockworks Research 高级分析师 Dan Smith 说。

Blockworks spoke with Aptos co-founder and chief Technology officer Avery Ching, who detailed the network's evolution, insight into its user base and why he thinks it's gaining traction now.

Confidence in the tech Bros team

Ching has worked at Meta (formerly Facebook) for about a decade. His focus is on data infrastructure and extended systems to support insight and analysis of products in Meta.

After three years there, he joined the Diem (or Libra) team, which is tasked with building an innovative financial infrastructure for Facebook's billions of daily active users.

The project was ultimately unsuccessful, and Ching and co-founder Mo Shaikh left to work on a related project, now called Aptos.

The pair's experience on social networking sites "allowed us to build the technology in a much more open and permissionless way than what was happening at Meta," Ching said.

Aptos currently has a team of more than 100 people and has no plans to grow too fast. The network has employees all over the world, including Palo Alto, New York, Seattle, Florida, Israel and Asia, which Ching credits for "fueling the rise of Aptos."

"Some of them come from other backgrounds like mine, and they know how to operate machines on a large scale in a large production environment to support goods for customers," Ching said.

As influential as cloud computing infrastructure

Ching says Aptos' main goal is to decentralize applications, just as cloud computing is for Web2.

"" Think about what Netflix relies on, or Dropbox or Amazon or Meta? These products rely on millions of machines running in data centers around the world that can scale up and down in a minute so they can have enormous capacity to support their products." "

But the Web3 industry is far from being a decentralized Internet for everyone, and Aptos wants to be around for the long haul.

"There are a lot of things that need to be worked out before we can make it mainstream. That's our mission. That's our purpose," he said.

What drives the development of Aptos

The network claims 10,000 full nodes and more than 30 projects at its mainnet launch, which according to Ching is the largest number of projects ever counted at the blockchain launch.

Aptos Github page shows a number of projects built in gaming, DeFi, infrastructure, markets, NFT tools and Bridges.

Aptos backers have in recent weeks touted an increase in the total value locking (TVL) of DeFi protocols, such as decentralised trading platform PancakeSwap, a DEX derived from Binam. But TVL in dollars can be misleading when most of a chain's DeFi activity is in volatile tokens.

When tracking Aptos TVL in APT terms, there is a downward trend since the end of 2022.

"Looking at the data, I don't see a meaningful TVL change," Smith said.

The ratio of the network's market cap to TVL suggests that it attracts many multiples of Ethereum's ratio at its current APT price.

Ching dislikes the tired "Ethereum killer" trope.

"We're not here to kill anybody," Ching said, noting, "I think Ethereum is a great technology. In fact, we're inspired by a lot of what Ethereum does."

根据 Aptos 基金会的 Token 经济细分，核心团队 19% 的 Token 分配被锁定 12 个月，但是，即使未分配，完整的 APT 分配也可用于质押，这意味着团队、基金会和投资者都可以从每日销售中获利将回报投入到飙升的市场中。

Ching 拒绝就 Token 的价格置评。

「我不能具体谈论 Token ，我只能谈论我们的使命是什么，我们正在做什么，以及为什么我们认为它现在越来越受欢迎，」他说。

Early NFT attempts and other activities

Aptos reports it has added more than 5,000 NFT series, with Aptos Monkeys, Aptosmingos and Bruh Bears at the top of the list, according to a press release.

Aptos Monkeys shows around 1,700 APT trades (around $30,000) in the last 24 hours on Topaz, the leading Aptos NFT market.

OpenSea's now-leading Sewer Pass, the BAYC Sewer Pass, sold 907 ETH ($1.4 million) during the same period.

The network's native wallet has been downloaded more than 1.4 million times, Posting notes, but daily active accounts have been stagnant for the past month at around 25,000 to 30,000.

The network's developer and user base is considered low compared to other major blockchains.

But Aptos told Blockworks that it counted 2.85 million cumulative unique addresses and 60.6 million user transactions by the end of 2022.

"For a network that's just a little over three months old, that's huge," Ching said.

Another point of interest for the network is some of its recent partnerships, including Seoul-based game studio Megapixel, which will announce its first Web3 game at Aptos.

As Blockworks previously reported, South Korean interest has largely driven APT's price increase. Aptos noted that its world tour of hackathons will begin next week, with the first stop in Seoul.

Tough times for the industry

Aptos did poorly when it launched in October, with observers pointing out that it was not actually trading at the speed it promised. However, Blockworks' Dan Smith said confusion was to be expected because "launching layer-1 is a multi-year task."

Given the downbeat environment across the industry, many would say the launch of the network could have happened at the worst possible time, Ching said.

"But for us, we're not really focused on a lot of external things like that," he said.

"Hundreds of projects had been waiting for us to start and ask us to continue with the technology stack and wanted to build, and we felt that serving those builders was more important than anything else at the time."

Ching points to four verticals to focus on: gaming, social, finance and instant entertainment.

Given his experience with Meta and the fact that it's a great way to get people to use blockchain, social seemed like an obvious choice for Ching. Aptos expects to make an announcement in this area soon.