Aptos founding engineer reveals the global trading engine technology roadmap

Aptos Founding Engineer Sherry: The Technical Road to Building a Global Trading Engine

Aptos is steadily moving towards its strategic goal of becoming the "global trading engine" through technological innovation and ecological expansion. Since it first surpassed a total locked value (TVL) of $1 billion last November, Aptos reached $1.03 billion by the end of March. In addition, its stablecoin market capitalization also surpassed $1 billion for the first time on March 24, growing more than tenfold year-on-year, demonstrating strong ecological appeal and capital capacity.

In this context, Aptos has not only achieved continuous iterations at the technical level but has also made multiple breakthroughs in ecological construction: a well-known DeFi protocol completed its first non-EVM environment testnet deployment, significantly increasing DeFi activity. To meet the rapidly growing transaction demand, the Aptos team continues to advance technologies such as Zaptos and Shardines, accelerating the construction of underlying architecture that supports millions of TPS, strengthening its core advantages in performance, stability, and user experience.

This article features an in-depth conversation with Sherry Xiao, an early founding engineer of Aptos, focusing on key topics such as the technical architecture of the global trading engine, ecosystem expansion strategies, and developer support. It explores how Aptos stands out in the new round of public chain competition by being technology-driven and ecosystem-oriented.

High-Performance Public Chain Created by Former Social Media Giant Talent

Sherry Xiao is one of the early founding engineers of Aptos. Before joining Aptos, she worked as an engineer at a well-known social media platform, primarily focusing on scalability architecture. Later, she joined the digital currency project team of a social media giant, responsible for validating nodes and infrastructure construction, helping several large payment and e-commerce companies deploy validating nodes.

When the cryptocurrency project faced regulatory obstacles, the entire team ventured out to start their own business in 2022, founding Aptos. In fact, many talents have emerged from the blockchain team of this social giant; some have joined other public chain projects, some have joined well-known venture capital crypto teams, and others have created their own startups. It can be said that the company has contributed a large number of talents to the Web3 industry.

As an engineer, Sherry believes that the biggest advantage of the Move language compared to other smart contract languages is that it was designed specifically for smart contracts from the beginning, providing many guarantees in asset management and security, as well as formal verification tools. Compared to other smart contract languages, Move can effectively avoid many common security vulnerabilities, reducing the risk of fund loss. In addition, Move offers innovative features such as dynamic dispatch, account abstraction, and permissioned signatures, enabling developers to build more advanced products.

When discussing the bottlenecks of the current technological infrastructure, Sherry stated that there is still significant room for improvement in the developer experience and user experience of Web3. Taking Aptos as an example, the infrastructure is already quite mature, with its throughput, speed, and Gas fees reduced to very low levels, but providing unique features on-chain to enable developers to create standout products remains a major challenge.

The Aptos team is deeply engaged in ZK-based login solutions and innovations in privacy protection. They recently launched a project in the open-source code repository that can hide transaction details, allowing users to know that a transaction has occurred between two parties, but not see the specific amounts or balances. This technology combines privacy protection with the decentralized nature of blockchain, creating interesting products.

In terms of scalability, Aptos has unique advantages. As an engineering team from a certain social giant, they have rich experience in building highly scalable systems. Aptos's design is very modular, with each module having its own space for expansion:

  • At the consensus level, the newly released Raptr is the industry's most advanced consensus algorithm implementation, maximizing parallelization.
  • On the execution level, Block-STM technology is also industry-leading, with many newly launched public chains and L2s adopting this technology;
  • 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 and welcome for community use. However, other chains, even if they copy Aptos's technology, will still face delays. For example, while they are still using Block-STM V1, Aptos is already working on V2; by the time they catch up, Aptos has already released performance optimizations for Move 2.0. Therefore, developing directly on Aptos is a wiser choice.

Interview with Aptos founder engineer Sherry: The technical journey of building the "global trading engine" by Meta blockchain "OG"

Ecosystem Layout: Stablecoins, Trading, and DeFi

The Aptos blockchain data is performing well, with the number of accounts surpassing 47 million and weekly transaction volume exceeding 39 million transactions. This progress mainly comes from several aspects:

First is the infrastructure construction, Aptos has natively supported three major stablecoins. Users generally report that the transfer experience on Aptos is very smooth, and on-chain peer-to-peer payments have become a significant advantage.

Secondly, Aptos has collaborated with several institutions, including a well-known asset management company, to launch multiple RWA projects on-chain.

At the beginning of this year, Aptos announced a $2 million ecosystem fund to incentivize community building and support various DeFi protocols and projects. This has also facilitated the growth of DEX trading volume and on-chain activities.

In addition, Aptos has launched the LFM program to assist ecological projects in planning their roadmaps, conducting token generation events (TGE), connecting to exchange resources, obtaining venture capital, and providing marketing and KOL guidance. These efforts have enabled the Aptos ecosystem to achieve steady growth over the past period.

In Hong Kong, Aptos is the only L1 blockchain platform participating in the Hong Kong e-HKD project and has been actively involved in related discussions. Aptos maintains close communication with banks and government departments in Hong Kong, and a well-known consulting firm is also its partner.

Aptos has also collaborated with the Hong Kong Cyberport in many innovative aspects. Its official community organization, Movemaker, just held a hackathon event at the Cyberport a few weeks ago, hoping to nurture local projects. Although Aptos does not have a large office in Hong Kong, it has established a co-creation space called Aptos Space in a prime location in Hong Kong through Movemaker, providing a venue for builders to collaborate and gather, and actively hosting offline events to attract Web3 talent.

In the current market environment, Aptos will focus on supporting transaction-related sectors in its ecosystem. They are paying attention to the expansion of payment and stablecoin application scenarios, as well as the DeFi sector, particularly in developing the leading projects of the "DeFi trifecta" (DEX, lending, liquidity staking).

Aptos also hopes to collaborate deeply with large institutions and partners with distribution channels. Aptos has a clear advantage in transfers - low latency and low cost, making it very suitable for large-scale payment businesses. They are also focusing on the combination of gaming and DeFi, as well as the application scenarios of AI agents in trading.

Recently, Aptos announced the creation of a global trading engine. Over the past few years, they have been deploying the infrastructure for this global trading engine. They believe that the foundational infrastructure of blockchain has been addressed quite well, and they are now focusing on innovation at the user experience level.

  • Keyless is a zk-based technology that allows users to log in directly using mainstream social media accounts, addressing the pain points of private key management and mnemonic phrase memorization.
  • Achieved account abstraction ( account abstraction ) and permission sign ( permission sign ) functions, allowing DeFi developers to better control user authentication and entry processes;
  • Added features such as dynamic script (dynamic script) and dynamic dispatch (dynamic dispatch) in the Move language, helping DeFi or trading applications achieve functional innovation.

These technical points come together to form Aptos's vision: to build a global trading engine and invite developers to create innovative applications using this infrastructure.

Talent Development: Developer Ecosystem Construction and Collaboration with Universities

In the context of AI becoming a popular direction, Aptos is still able to attract and retain developers. While some developers may be drawn to hot fields, each application scenario has its own developer base. Even amidst the AI boom, there are still many developers interested in cryptography(, decentralization, and blockchain, features that AI cannot satisfy.

For developers, the most important thing is to see the possibilities of the future, rather than just short-term speculation. Developers all have dreams and hope to create products that can be widely used. As long as they can see market prospects, demand, and opportunities, they can attract developers to continue to strive in the blockchain field.

Aptos places great importance on talent cultivation in universities. As a team with engineers from a social media giant, they understand that universities are the largest talent pool. Aptos has in-depth collaborations with blockchain associations from several well-known universities, including partnerships with a university in Singapore and a renowned university in China.

Aptos collaborates with professors to design blockchain courses, allowing students to directly learn Aptos technology, making Aptos the first lesson in entering the blockchain. Most of the company's engineers hold PhDs and often give lectures at well-known universities to attract excellent developers to join the community.

Recently, at a hackathon held in Hong Kong, a team from a well-known university's blockchain association showcased an excellent project, and Aptos looks forward to their future growth.

Regarding the future development of Web3, Sherry and the entire team's vision remains focused on the fields of trading and payments. From the initial digital currency projects, they have aimed to establish a global financial infrastructure that allows more people to enjoy the conveniences of the modern financial system.

Sherry is particularly looking forward to seeing the combination of innovative payment projects with stablecoins. For example, salary streaming payments can be fully realized on Aptos—getting paid every second for work done every second, something traditional financial institutions cannot achieve.

Migrating traditional payment software onto the blockchain, combined with privacy protection features, can create exciting new scenarios. These innovative applications are the key to truly promoting the widespread adoption of blockchain technology.

Regarding the recent changes in the team's upper management, Sherry believes that this is quite normal for many teams. For the team, this is actually a good opportunity to reassess past plans and make adjustments. Previously, they had been focused on their work, and such changes allow the team to unite and think about the direction of future planning.

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quiet_lurkervip
· 07-18 12:37
Running has entered the venue~
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OnchainHolmesvip
· 07-17 22:11
It's okay, just not very useful.
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GasFeeLadyvip
· 07-15 14:40
watching them stack TVL like it's gas fees in 2021... bullish af
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MemecoinResearchervip
· 07-15 14:37
bullish af but correlation w/ tvl looks sus tbh
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HappyMinerUnclevip
· 07-15 14:35
bull bull To da moon
View OriginalReply0
MEVHunterLuckyvip
· 07-15 14:28
Finally To da moon!
View OriginalReply0
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