Aptos

Aptos is a Layer 1 for everyone. In the Ohlone language, “Aptos” means “The People.”

The blockchain has been developed over the past three years (since 2019) by over 350+ developers worldwide. It offers consensus, decentralization, smart contract design, and system security innovations. The combination of technologies will provide a fundamental building block to bring web3 to the users. The Aptos blockchain natively integrates and uses the Move language internally for secure and fast transaction execution. The Move prover (a formal verifier for smart contracts written in the Move language) provides additional safeguards for contract invariants and behavior. This focus on security allows developers to better protect their software from malicious entities.

The Aptos data model enables flexible key management and hybrid custodial options. Alongside transaction transparency before signing and practical light client protocols, it provides a safer and more trustworthy user experience.

The Aptos blockchain leverages a pipelined and modular approach for the key stages of transaction processing. Specifically, transaction dissemination, block metadata ordering, parallel transaction execution, batch storage, and ledger certification all operate concurrently. This approach fully leverages all available physical resources, improves hardware efficiency, and enables highly parallel execution.

Unlike other parallel execution engines that break transaction atomicity by requiring upfront knowledge of the data to be read and written, the Aptos blockchain does not put such limitations on developers. It can efficiently support atomicity with arbitrarily complex transactions, enabling higher throughput and lower latency for real-world applications and simplifying development.

The Aptos modular architecture design supports client flexibility and optimizes frequent and instant upgrades. Moreover, the Aptos blockchain provides embedded on-chain change management protocols to rapidly deploy new technology innovations and support new web3 use cases. The Aptos blockchain is experimenting with future initiatives to scale beyond individual validator performance: its modular design and parallel execution engine support the internal sharding of a validator, and homogeneous state sharding provides the potential for horizontal throughput scalability without adding additional complexity for node operators.