“Since departing Meta (formerly Facebook) we have been able to put our ideas into motion, ditch bureaucratic red tape, and build an entirely new network,” Aptos stated.
After meeting with intense pressure from the U.S. regulators, Meta (formerly Facebook) had to sell its cryptocurrency project “Diem” to Silvergate Capital. However, some of its former employees are now working together to revive the open-source stablecoin.
Their new project Aptos was cofounded by Mo Shaikh, the former head of strategic partnerships at Novi – Meta’s crypto unit and Avery Ching, head of technology. Both of them left Meta last December, prior to the sale of Diem to Silvergate Capital, and are now serving as Aptos’ CEO and Chief Technology Officer.
The decentralized layer 1 blockchain that Aptos is developing is partly based on Move, the coding language they initially designed for Diem. Their team is working to expand its developer ecosystem as well as attract more projects to the blockchain. The founders of Aptos are confident that they will be able to build a cheap, secure and scalable network.
Recently, Aptos has received a generous strategic funding of $200 million from the capital venture giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), along with other leading firms like Three Arrows Capital, FTX Ventures, Paxos and Coinbase Ventures.
This money is claimed to be used for hiring additional staff as well as supporting “companies, brands and builders” who wish to develop their projects on the Aptos blockchain. The startup has also been hinting that they are in the process of developing multiple decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible token (NFT), Web3, social media and payments projects.
While Aptos refused to give a specific valuation in its interview with TechCrunch, it suggested that it is “well off into the unicorn territory” of around $1 billion.
In conjunction with the funding announcement, Aptos also launched a public devnet with an open-source codebase. The team reveals they had received support from notable companies like Anchorage, Binance and Coinbase, who have guided and contributed code for devnet. According to their press release:
“Later in Q2, there will be an incentivized testnet to help scale the network and stress test it as it marches toward mainnet. We invite validators and other infrastructure providers to join our community now in anticipation of that.”
Aptos’ Mainnet is expected to officially launch in Q3 this year. Developers have approximately 6 months to build and complete their projects before their network is live and accessible to the public.
Following their blog post late last month, Aptos stressed that their blockchain will focus on “absolute safety, extensible scalability, and credible neutrality,” without being subject to rigorous scrutiny from the regulators, as in the case of Diem:
“Since departing Meta (formerly Facebook) we have been able to put our ideas into motion, ditch bureaucratic red tape, and build an entirely new network from the ground up that brings them to fruition.”
“Aptos is using Move, the safe and reliable language originally developed for Diem. The ideas we conceived then are still relevant and will serve as an important foundation for a safe, scalable, upgradable Web3. Our plans for decentralization and permissionless access are progressing quickly and will be developed in the open,” the post added.