In-Depth Analysis by the Founding Engineer of Aptos: The Technical Journey of Building a Global Trading Engine

Aptos is steadily moving towards its strategic positioning as the "Global Trading Engine" through technological innovation and ecosystem expansion. By the end of March this year, Aptos's total locked value reached $1.03 billion, with the market value of stablecoins exceeding $1 billion, showing a more than tenfold year-on-year growth and demonstrating strong ecological appeal.

On the technical level, Aptos continues to promote solutions like Zaptos and Shardines, accelerating the construction of underlying architecture that supports millions of TPS. In terms of ecological construction, multiple breakthroughs have also been achieved, such as Aave completing its first non-EVM environment testnet deployment, significantly boosting DeFi activity.

Recently, we had an in-depth conversation with Sherry Xiao, an early founding engineer of Aptos, discussing key topics such as the technical architecture of the global trading engine, ecosystem expansion strategies, and developer support, revealing how Aptos stands out in the new round of public chain competition with technology as its foundation and ecology as its wings.

From Social Media Giant to Blockchain Pioneer

Sherry Xiao is one of the early founding engineers of Aptos. Before joining Aptos, she worked as an engineer at Instagram, primarily responsible for scalability architecture. She then joined a blockchain project team of a major social media giant, responsible for validation nodes and infrastructure construction, assisting multiple financial institutions in deploying validation nodes.

After the project encountered policy obstacles, the entire team ventured into entrepreneurship with their leader in 2022 and established Aptos. In fact, the blockchain team from this social giant has contributed a large number of talents to the Web3 industry; some have joined other public chain projects, some have entered the crypto teams of venture capital firms, and others have created their own startup projects.

Advantages and Innovations of Move Language

As a language designed specifically for smart contracts, Move has significant advantages in asset management and security. It provides formal verification tools that can effectively avoid many common security vulnerabilities, reducing the risk of fund loss. The Move prover tool allows developers to verify the correctness of smart contracts.

In addition, Move also offers innovative features such as dynamic distribution, account abstraction, and permissioned signing, enabling developers to build more advanced products. For developers familiar with programming languages and data structures, learning Move is not difficult, as the basic principles of programming are common.

Future Development of Technical Infrastructure

Although Aptos has a relatively mature infrastructure, there is still significant room for improvement in the developer experience and user experience of Web3. Aptos is deeply exploring innovations in ZK-based login solutions and privacy protection. For example, they recently launched a project in their open source code repository that can hide transaction details, displaying only the parties involved in the transaction without revealing specific amounts and balances. This technology combines privacy protection with the decentralized characteristics of blockchain, which is expected to lead to innovative products.

Scalability Advantages of Aptos

Scalability is a core advantage of Aptos. The team has extensive experience in building highly scalable systems and has been responsible for the infrastructure of large-scale social platforms. Aptos's design is very modular, with each module having its own room for expansion:

• At the consensus level, the newly released Raptr is the industry's leading consensus algorithm implementation, taking parallelization to the extreme.
• On the execution level, Block-STM technology is also industry-leading and has been adopted by several emerging public chains and L2.
• In terms of storage, sharding technology has been implemented, and further research on sharding technology and related caching layers will continue in the future to further enhance system performance.

These technologies are all open source, but Aptos has always maintained a leading advantage in technological iteration.

Ecological Layout: Stablecoins, Trading, and DeFi

The ecological layout of Aptos mainly focuses on several aspects:

1. Infrastructure Construction: Native support for three major stablecoins, on-chain peer-to-peer payments become a significant advantage.
2. Collaborate with institutions to launch RWA projects.
3. Establish a $2 million ecological fund to support the development of DeFi protocols and projects.
4. Launch the LFM program to provide comprehensive support for ecological projects.

These efforts have led to stable growth in the Aptos ecosystem over the past period.

Hong Kong Layout and Compliance Development

Aptos is the only participating L1 blockchain platform in the Hong Kong e-HKD project, maintaining close communication with banks and government departments in Hong Kong. The team has several innovative collaborations with the Hong Kong Cyberport and has established the co-creation space Aptos Space in Hong Kong through the official community organization Movemaker, providing a collaborative space for builders.

Aptos places great importance on the activity of the developer ecosystem in the Asia-Pacific region and will invest more resources in this area in the future to encourage more high-quality teams to join the ecosystem.

Key Supported Ecological Tracks

Aptos focuses on the following tracks:

• Trading related: payment, stablecoin application scenario expansion
• DeFi: Especially leading projects such as DEX, lending, and liquidity staking.
• Institutional cooperation: Deep collaboration with large institutions and partners with distribution channels.
• Innovative Applications: Focus on the integration of gaming and DeFi, as well as the application scenarios of AI agents and trading.

Vision of the Global Trading Engine

Aptos is focused on innovation in the user experience layer:

• Keyless: A zk-based technology that allows users to log in directly using mainstream social accounts.
• Account abstraction and permission signatures: Allow DeFi developers to better control user authentication and onboarding processes.
• Move language innovation: Adding features such as dynamic scripts and dynamic distribution to assist DeFi or trading applications in achieving functional innovation.

These technical points together constitute Aptos's vision for building a global trading engine and invite developers to utilize this infrastructure to create innovative applications.

Developer Ecosystem Construction and Talent Cultivation

Despite AI becoming a popular direction, the blockchain field still attracts developers interested in cryptography and decentralization. Aptos attracts developers to continue their efforts in the blockchain space by showcasing market prospects and opportunities.

In terms of talent cultivation in universities, Aptos collaborates with several well-known universities to design blockchain courses, allowing students to directly learn Aptos technology. Company engineers also frequently give presentations at universities to attract excellent developers to join the community.

Future Outlook

The Aptos team's vision focuses on the fields of trading and payments, dedicated to building a global financial infrastructure. They particularly look forward to seeing innovative payment projects combined with stablecoins, such as payroll flow payments and other functionalities that traditional financial institutions find difficult to achieve. Migrating traditional payment software onto the blockchain, combined with privacy protection features, is expected to create key applications that drive the widespread adoption of blockchain technology.

The recent changes in the senior management team are seen as an opportunity to re-examine and adjust future layouts. The Aptos team will continue to unite and promote the innovation and application of blockchain technology.