What is Aptos (APT)?
Aptos is a layer 1 blockchain built by core team members of Meta’s Diem project, using the Move smart contract programming language.
You may remember Meta’s stablecoin payment system, Diem. Core team members at Aptos, namely its leaders Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, lead Aptos Labs, which is responsible for the development of the Aptos blockchain. Founded in 2021, Aptos Labs’ vision is to create a blockchain that is reliable, safe, and high-performance. The project’s whitepaper goes as far as to point out the need to be able to upgrade without user concern or downtime. This is something that we are beginning to see a lot of in blockchain. That is, there is increasingly an emphasis on abstracting away from core technologies so that users, and in this case developers, can interact with them without having to concern themselves with every part of what they are using.
Aptos Labs is the organization developing technology on Aptos as well as the blockchain itself. Recently, the organization launched Aptos Autumn, the network’s mainnet. The mainnet is focused on three core principles of upgradeability, the Move programming language, and an intuitive, robust user experience.
How does Aptos work?
Aptos is a Proof of Stake blockchain, meaning it uses a network of validators to securely process and verify transactions.
It uses Move, a smart contract programming language that focuses on safety and flexibility. This means that it is quite modular. With its ability to upgrade modules and its programmability, the Move language can facilitate upgrades that are quite seamless. Under its programmable framework, it also offers developers more control over data management and execution.
Aptos’s consensus mechanism, AptosBFT, is a byzantine fault tolerant consensus mechanism. What this basically means is that the system can function even with a certain amount of component failure and trustlessness. What is also very promising is that one of the network’s core design principles is its emphasis on scaling horizontally, utilizing sharded ledger states. This will alleviate network stress as it grows.
Aptos’s roadmap and future
This year, the Aptos roadmap has been focused on launching its mainnet, Aptos Autumn, which happened in early Q4, 2022.
Earlier this year, Aptos announced a partnership with Google Cloud, which is a pretty big deal and is also quite congruent with the latter company’s commitment to developing Web3 technology. At the time being, this partnership is defined by Google running some of Aptos’s validator nodes.
With its stress on developer usability and the attention garnering of the likes of Google, it will be interesting to see where Aptos goes.
What can you do with $APT?
$APT is of course Aptos’s governance token. A lot of the initial APT supply has gone towards community initiatives, like grants and other incentives. The token is used for paying network and transaction fees and voting on network decisions.
How to acquire $APT
You can trade $APT perpetual contracts with up to 20x leverage on Poloniex | APT Perpetual
Feeling ready to get started? Sign-up is easy! Just hop on over to https://poloniex.com/signup/ to start your crypto journey🚀
was originally published in The Poloniex blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
