AveryChing

Honored to be interviewed by @NorthwesternEng about @Aptos and my undergraduate / PhD studies - 9 years in total.

While some think a PhD is not that useful, I learned how to learn, the scientific method, and how to take on hard challenges.

As a bonus, I had Q clearance (i.e., top secret) - which was an experience! Blessed to have an incredible PhD advisor to take me through the process.

Honored to be interviewed by @NorthwesternEng about @Aptos and my undergraduate and PhD studies - 9 years in total.

While some think a PhD is not that useful, I learned how to learn, the scientific method, and how to take on hard challenges.

As a bonus, I had Q clearance (i.e., top secret) - which was an experience! Blessed to have an incredible PhD advisor to take me through the process.

Zooming out to zoom in. The global trading engine is going to radically change the way we think about what decentralized blockchains are capable of.

I couldn’t be more bullish on what’s to come.

Depin has two large on-chain components: payments and coordination.

Payments on-chain can be from clients to depin service providers or internal payments between service providers. As an example, WiFi access charged by the minute, paying to use compute/storage, paying people for sharing traffic data, etc. Real-time on-chain payments need to be extremely reliable, fast, and scalable. This is why rAPTr, Zaptos, Block-STM, Move, and more.

In a typical distributed system, machine management is handled by a coordination layer such as ZooKeeper or etcd. Coordination layers support leader elections, leader rotation, data migration, distributed locks, and failover for machine loss. I’ve had the joy of rebuilding this infrastructure many times - lots of fun each time.

A decentralized distributed system can leverage a blockchain for the same purpose. However, these types of transactions are typically much more expensive compared to their traditional counterparts. For example - you might have a decentralized AI training cluster of thousands of machines reporting their health to the blockchain every second.

These scale & data obstacles are harder to solve and we why we don’t see depin apps trying to do coordination on blockchains. It’s why Aptos is built for such extreme scale and continuing to push boundaries with Shardines and other cutting edge tech. Innovators will coordinate their applications here.

The global trading engine is the base layer for everything that blockchains will do in the future. Still early, but the path is clearly lit and innovation is coming fast.

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Aptos

Many smart tech folks that are super bullish on AI but not (yet) web3.

AI will buy goods and services with on-chain payments.

AI will balance our portfolios across a global range of tokenized assets.

AI will leverage on-chain identity and permissioning in order to enable proxied transactions.

All it needs is a global trading engine