Aptos: The Solana Killer from Facebook's Libra Devs
Aptos is a fast, low-fee Layer 1 blockchain that is expected to compete with Solana.
Remember when Solana was the hottest "Ethereum killer" Layer 1 blockchain? Now, we've officially entered the "Ethereum killer killer" phase, as Aptos prepares for its mainnet launch.
Aptos is a fast, low-fee Layer 1 blockchain that is expected to compete with Solana. Aptos was founded by Facebook devs who worked on the company's canceled Libra cryptocurrency. The project is off to a strong start, with over 300 devs and $350M in funding from FTX, a16z, Multicoin Capital, and others. Aptos will distribute a token later this year, but it won’t be available for sale to Americans.
Unlike most blockchains, which process transactions sequentially, Aptos processes them in parallel. According to Aptos, their blockchain can handle 130k transactions per second (TPS), compared to Ethereum's 30 TPS.
Parallel execution in blockchains has been tried before without much success, but Aptos will be the most prominent and well-funded parallel execution blockchain. Parallel execution makes it harder to see the full transaction history for the blockchain, and it also tends to cause transactions to fail at high rates. We'll see if Aptos has completely resolved these issues.
So will Aptos challenge Solana in the super-fast, low-fee blockchain space? Solana has a serious head start among high-frequency traders, and its NFT ecosystem remains strong. Solana does go down frequently, and investors distrust the blockchain's centralization. But will a project born at Facebook, which uses Facebook's weird blockchain programming language, win investors?
Aptos has already won over two prominent DeFi project builders: the Macalinao brothers who pumped Solana's DeFi TVL by $7B with fake money are now building projects on Aptos.