Aptos (APT)

Aptos is a L1 blockchain built with Move, by the old Diem team

Basics

• Based in:
• Started in / Announced on: 24-2-2022 announced but started 'in the past few months' before it but also mentions having worked on their BFT engine for 3 years already. This is due to the team having worked on Diem before.
• Testnet release: 15-3-2022devnet; "Later in Q2, there will be an incentivized testnet to help scale the network and stress test it as it marches toward mainnet."
• Mainnet release: "We expect Mainnet to occur in Q3 2022" (15-3-2022)

History

• Team comes from Diem, but moved on to build Aptos after government issues arose.

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].

Governance

Aptos Governance

• From Figment (23-9-2022):

"The currently implemented (likely subject to be improved over time) Aptos on-chain governance process allows community members to create and vote on proposals minimizing the cost of protocol upgrades. Users can vote on on-chain proposals via the Aptos Governance module. An early expiration threshold has been implemented and set to 50% of the total supply of Aptos Coins. This allows for swift implementation of emergency bug fixes without waiting for the full voting period. To propose or vote on a proposal you must stake but you are not required to run a validator node. In order to submit a proposal the proposer’s staking pool must have the minimum required prosper stake and must be locked for the voting period. The scope of governance proposals covers the following:

1. Changes to the protocol parameters (Epoch duration, minimum and maximum stake requirements, etc.)
2. Changes to core protocol code
3. Upgrades to fix bugs and adding functionality
4. Deployment of new framework modules."

Technology

• Whitepaper or docs can be found [insert here].
• Code can be viewed here.

Implementations

• Programming language used: Move

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS): "we achieve over 130k transactions per second with only 32 cores in our execution only benchmark." (15-3-2022). Later had a blog post titled "the path to 100k+ TPS (13-7-2022). Figment promoted an higher number: "Aptos’ experiments in an execution-only environment have already hit over 170,000 transactions per second" (23-9-2022).
• Latency:

How it works

• From this (critical) Twitter thread (13-7-2022):

"How is it safe ser? As discussed on the thread above, Move enables smart contracts interaction with validators to be deterministic, hermetic (state change is predictable; untainted) and metered (protection against DOS attacks). All can be verified by Move Prover. Aptos decouples the codependent execution and consensus layers through a parallel execution engine which synchronize eventually. The parallel execution layer leverages the design of Block-STM's that executes transactions optimistically then detects and manages conflicts before synchronizing and changing the state.

But ser, what about the detected conflicts? They are picked up by at most 1 thread in the parallel execution engine and re-executed based on the execution queue, and re-validated through a queue along with its subsequent txs. Abstractions are separated from trivial executions and validations. This is all possible due to preset orders with indexes that map transactions throughout the execution and validation cycle. Block-STM algorithms handles seamless operations.

With 32 threads working in parallel through the Block-STM design, complemented by its robust state synchronization mechanisms to reduce latency, Aptos would be able to boast up to 100k+ tps with sub-second finality."

• From their blog (15-3-2022):

"Our team has developed a production-grade, low latency Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) engine. We have implemented our fourth iteration of the protocol (the most advanced HotStuff derivative) over the past three years. During that time, we have upgraded the consensus protocol in a private mainnet environment with a diverse set of operators and zero downtime. Our first implementation of the BFT protocol added an active pacemaker that used timeouts to synchronize validators much more quickly than waiting for increasing timeouts. With our latest improvement to the protocol, blocks are committed in as few as two network round-trips, making sub-second finality the common case. Our novel reputation system analyzes the on-chain state and automatically updates leader rotations to adjust for non-responsive validators without any human intervention, making it well suited for decentralized environments. Furthermore, our protocol clearly separates liveness from safety. No matter if the network is unreachable or the non-safety core is compromised in some way, the chain will not fork as long as the BFT honesty guarantees are upheld. The safety of our consensus protocol has been both audited and formally verified."

Staking

• From Figment (23-9-2022):

"Staking on Aptos is similar to most other Proof of Stake networks with a few different features. Each validator's voting power is directly proportional to the amount of the validator’s stake. If a validator’s stake rises to a certain amount of the total token supply, it would allow them to control the consensus outcome. To solve this problem, Aptos has a limit to the amount any validator can stake. [wiki note: this can be circumvented by 1 person running multiple validators, thus not solving this problem] Rewards are capped at a certain stake level after which the validator will not continue to earn rewards. This mechanism is set in place to disincentivize validators from acting maliciously to control consensus outcomes."

Compliance

• Aptos CEO faces a billion dollar lawsuit by the Glazer family member over equity (20-5-2022).

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].
• From Figment (23-9-2022):

"In the first half of 2022, Aptos Labs launched Aptos Incentivized Testnet (AIT1). Soon After on Jul 12, 2022 AIT2 was launched and wrapped up on Jul 22, 2022. Started on Aug 30, 2022, Sep 14, 2022 marked the end of AIT3. As of right now, we are currently awaiting Aptos Mainnet which is projected for Autumn 2022."

Usage

Projects that use or built on it

• Coindesk published an article (8-2022) about Ian Macalinao wanting to go to Aptos and potentially redo his Solana TVL scheme. So be advised.
• Econia: Hyper-parallelized on-chain order book (23-9-2022)
• Petra Wallet: Official Aptos Wallet (23-9-2022)
• Superposition: Borrowing and Lending on Aptos and beyond (23-9-2022)
• Ditto: Liquid Staking (23-9-2022)
• Pontem Networks: Working towards global financial inclusion powered by blockchains. (23-9-2022)
• Topaz: Aptos NFT marketplace (23-9-2022)

Competition

• Layer 1 blockchains and Sui in particular. Solana as well.
• From Delphi Digital (8-9-2022):

"Both Aptos and Sui aim at maximising the throughput of the network at every node, similar to Solana but with a very different technical approach. One of the core ideas of the design seeks to optimise the mempool dissemination layer by distributing a DAG of transactions and guaranteeing availability.

Both share the potential ability to scale beyond individual validator performance, via internal sharding of a validator and homogeneous state sharding. Internal sharding means that a validator won’t need to scale vertically, increasing its specs to match that of the network, but it can spawn other machines behind a load balancer and shard the state as if it were a single node. This is essentially addressing a concern with Solana that validator specs will bottleneck performance and elegantly achieve scalability."

• From this Sui & Aptos comparison thread (26-7-2022):

"Sui's version of Move has introduced some modifications, the most visible being the ownership API. It is more clean and it exposes the blockchain design more clearly IMO. But the libraries feel a little bit less developed than Aptos'. Aptos uses BlockSTM, which is an evolution of the high-performance HotStuff algorithm, and introduces parallelization by dynamically detecting dependencies and scheduling execution tasks (taking its inspiration from Software Transactional Memory). It's hard to tell which one will perform better in practice, but my bet is with Sui. Aptos has done already a very good job at optimizing their current design, whereas Sui seems to have more room. The two-paths of byzantine agreement give Sui an edge as well.

Sui tackles [state bloat] via efficient sharding of the store, focusing on horizontally scaling the resources. Aptos on the other hand puts more emphasis on supporting heterogeneous validators (contrained CPU and/or constrained storage). I like Sui's take on this.

They are both at a similar stage of development, with Aptos a bit ahead. It took me longer to set up the system than actually coding (I also happen to use NixOS). Learning the language and the environment involves some trial-and-error. Deploying to devnet is somewhat cumbersome in both as well. Fortunately, the unit test libraries are quite usable. The worst part has definitely been the obscure compiler errors, and devnet error responses that make no sense. These can be real time sinks."

Team, Funding and Partners

Team

• Full team can be found [here].
• AptosLabs, used to work on Diem.
• "25+ members" (15-3-2022)
• Took the Head of Marketing from Solana and made it Director of Ecosystem at Aptos (19-7-2022).
• Mo Shaikh, the CEO and co-founder of Matonee, also known as Aptos Labs.

Funding

• Investors FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, a16z crypto, Jump Crypto, Circle Ventures also invested in competitor Sui. Making both real VC darlings.
• From CoinDesk (25-7-2022):

"Raised $150 million in a Series A funding round that was led by FTX Ventures, the venture capital arm of crypto exchange FTX, and Jump Crypto, according to a press release. The round included investments from Andreessen Horowitz, Multicoin Capital and Circle Ventures among other crypto firms."

• From their blog (15-3-2022):

"Raised $200 million in a strategic round led by a16z crypto with participation from Multicoin Capital, Katie Haun, 3 Arrows Capital, ParaFi Capital, IRONGREY, Hashed, Variant, Tiger Global, BlockTower, FTX Ventures, Paxos and Coinbase Ventures, as well as a great supporting cast of other phenomenal firms, executives and angels across the Web2 and Web3 ecosystems."

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