Article source: Yuliya
Interview: Tong, PANews
Editor: Yuliya, PANews
Against the backdrop of increasingly fierce competition in public chains, Aptos is steadily moving towards its strategic positioning as a 'global transaction engine' through technological innovation and ecological expansion. Since breaking through a total locked value (TVL) of 1 billion USD for the first time last November, Aptos reached 1.03 billion USD by the end of March. Furthermore, the market capitalization of stablecoins also surpassed 1 billion USD for the first time on March 24, showing a year-on-year growth of more than ten times, demonstrating strong ecological appeal and financial capacity.
In this context, Aptos has not only achieved continuous iteration at the technical level but has also made multiple breakthroughs in ecological construction: Aave completed its first non-EVM environment test network deployment, and DeFi activity has significantly increased. To meet the rapidly growing transaction demand, the Aptos team continues to advance technologies such as Zaptos and Shardines, accelerating the construction of an underlying architecture supporting millions of TPS, enhancing its core advantages in performance, stability, and user experience.
In this trend, PANews conducted an in-depth conversation with Aptos's early founding engineer Sherry Xiao, discussing key topics such as the technical architecture of the global transaction engine, ecological expansion strategies, and developer support, providing insight into how Aptos stands out in the new round of public chain competition with technology as its foundation and ecology as its wings.
High-performance public chain created by Meta 'OG'
PANews: Please introduce your background and your role at Aptos.
Sherry: I am Sherry Xiao, one of the early founding engineers of Aptos. Before joining Aptos, I worked as an engineer at Instagram, mainly responsible for scalability architecture. Later, I joined Meta (formerly Facebook) on the Libra/Diem team, responsible for validating nodes and infrastructure construction, helping institutions such as Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and eBay deploy validation nodes.
After the Libra project faced policy obstacles, our entire team followed our leaders to start a business in 2022 and established Aptos. In fact, many talents have emerged from Facebook's blockchain team; some joined Sui, some joined a16z's crypto team, and others founded other startup teams, such as Lightspark created by David Marcus. It can be said that Facebook has supplied a large number of talents to the Web3 industry.
PANews: As an engineer, how do you evaluate the advantages of the Move language compared to other smart contract languages?
Sherry: For those with an engineering background, switching languages is commonplace. The Move language is developed based on Rust, and its biggest advantage is that it was designed as a language specifically for smart contracts from the beginning, providing many guarantees in asset management and security, as well as formal verification tools.
Compared to Solidity and EVM, Move can effectively avoid many common security vulnerabilities and reduce the risk of fund losses. The Move prover tool also allows developers to verify the correctness of smart contracts written in the Move programming language. In addition, Move offers innovative features such as dynamic dispatch, account abstraction, and permission signatures, enabling developers to build more advanced products.
For developers familiar with programming languages and data structures, learning Move is not as difficult as one might think, as the basic principles of programming are interconnected.
PANews: What bottlenecks still need to be iterated upon in the current technological infrastructure?
Sherry: Overall, I believe there is still much room for improvement in the developer experience and user experience in Web3. Taking Aptos as an example, the infrastructure is already quite complete, with its throughput, speed, and Gas fees reduced to very low levels, but how to provide unique features on-chain that allow developers to create standout products remains a significant challenge.
We are deeply engaged in ZK-based login solutions and innovations in privacy protection. If large-scale payments are to be realized, user privacy is an important consideration. We recently launched a project in our open-source codebase that can hide transaction details; users can only know that a transaction occurred between Alice and Bob, but cannot see the specific amount and balance. This technology combines privacy protection and the decentralized characteristics of blockchain, enabling the creation of interesting products.
PANews: Aptos emphasizes high-performance blockchain; what unique advantages does it have in scalability compared to other public chains?
Sherry: Scalability is our core advantage. As a team of engineers from Facebook, we have extensive experience in building highly scalable systems, having been responsible for large-scale infrastructures like Instagram and Facebook.
Aptos's design is highly modular, with each module having its own space for expansion:
At the consensus level, our recently released Raptr is the industry's most advanced consensus algorithm implementation, taking parallelization to the extreme.
At the execution level, our Block-STM technology is also industry-leading, with many newly released public chains and L2s adopting this technology, such as Movement, Monad, Polygon, etc.
In terms of storage, we have implemented sharding technology, and will continue to explore sharding technology and related caching layers in the future to further enhance system performance.
These technologies are all open source, and the community is welcome to use Aptos's technology. However, other chains, even if they copy our technology, will still experience latency. For example, while they are still using Block-STM V1, we are already working on V2; when they catch up, we will have launched performance optimizations for Move 2.0. Therefore, developing directly on Aptos is a wiser choice.
Ecological layout: stablecoins, trading, and DeFi
PANews: Aptos's on-chain data is performing well, with the number of accounts exceeding 47 million and weekly transaction volume exceeding 39 million transactions. What aspects have contributed to this progress?
Sherry: Our ecological layout mainly focuses on several aspects:
First is infrastructure construction; we have natively supported the three major stablecoins USDT, USDC, and USDE. Users generally report that transfers on Aptos are very smooth, and on-chain peer-to-peer payments have become one of our significant advantages.
Secondly, we have collaborated with institutions such as Franklin Templeton to launch multiple RWA projects on-chain.
At the beginning of this year, we announced a 2 million USD ecological fund to incentivize community building and support various DeFi protocols and projects. This has also promoted the growth of DEX trading volume and on-chain activity.
In addition, we have launched the LFM program to help ecological projects plan roadmaps, conduct token generation events (TGE), connect with exchange resources, obtain venture capital, and provide marketing and KOL guidance. These efforts have enabled our ecosystem to achieve stable growth over the past period.
PANews: Is the news about Hong Kong's stablecoin HKDA possibly being issued on Aptos true? What plans are there for compliant development in Hong Kong?
Sherry: Aptos is the only L1 blockchain platform participating in Hong Kong's e-HKD project, and we have been actively involved in related discussions. We maintain close communication with banks and government departments in Hong Kong, and BCG is also our partner.
We also have many innovative collaborations with Hong Kong Cyberport, and our official community organization Movemaker just held a hackathon event at Cyberport a few weeks ago, hoping to nurture local projects.
Although we do not have a large office in Hong Kong, we have established a co-creation space called Aptos Space in a prime location through Movemaker, providing a place for builders to collaborate and meet, and actively hosting offline events to attract Web3 talent. We place great importance on the activity of the developer ecosystem in the Asia-Pacific region, as many high-quality ecological projects come from the Chinese-speaking area. Our layout in the Asia-Pacific region will become deeper, investing more resources, continuing to achieve more collaborations in this region, and promoting better development teams to join our ecosystem.
PANews: Which project tracks will Aptos focus on supporting in the ecosystem in the current market environment?
Sherry: As we can see from our recently released global transaction engine, transaction-related tracks are a direction we place great emphasis on. We focus on payment, the expansion of stablecoin application scenarios, and the DeFi track, particularly on developing leading projects in the 'three-piece set' of DeFi (DEX, lending, liquidity staking).
We also hope to collaborate deeply with large institutions and partners with distribution channels. Aptos has significant advantages in transfers—low latency and low cost, making it very suitable for large-scale payment businesses. We are also focusing on the integration of gaming and DeFi, as well as application scenarios for AI agents and trading.
PANews: Aptos recently announced the creation of a global transaction engine; how will this vision be realized?
Sherry: Over the past few years, we have been deploying the infrastructure for the global transaction engine. We believe that the foundational construction of blockchain has been solved quite well, and we are now focusing on innovations at the user experience level:
For example, Keyless is a zk-based technology that allows users to log in directly using their Google, Facebook, or Apple accounts, solving the pain points of private key management and mnemonic phrase memory.
We have implemented account abstraction and permission signing features, allowing DeFi developers to better control user authentication and entry processes.
In the Move language, we have added dynamic scripts and dynamic dispatch features to help DeFi or trading applications achieve functional innovations.
These technical points come together to form our vision: to build a global transaction engine and invite developers to use this infrastructure to create innovative applications.
Talent cultivation: Developer ecosystem construction and cooperation with universities
PANews: How does Aptos attract and retain developers in the context of AI becoming a hot direction?
Sherry: There will indeed be developers attracted by popular fields, but each application scenario has its own developer base. Even in the case of the AI boom, many developers remain interested in cryptography, decentralization, and blockchain, characteristics that AI cannot fulfill.
For developers, the most important thing is to see the possibilities of the future, not just short-term speculation. Developers all have dreams and hope to create products that can be widely used. As long as we can show them the market prospects, demand, and opportunities, we can attract developers to continue working in the blockchain field.
PANews: What measures does Aptos have regarding talent cultivation in universities?
Sherry: We place great importance on cultivating talent in universities. As a team composed of former Facebook engineers, we understand that universities are the largest talent pool. We have in-depth collaborations with blockchain associations at Stanford University and Berkeley University, and we also have projects in collaboration with SMU in Singapore and Tsinghua University in China.
We collaborate with professors to design blockchain courses, enabling students to directly learn Aptos technology, using Aptos as the first lesson for entering the blockchain space. Most of our engineers hold PhDs and often give talks at universities such as MIT and UC to attract excellent developers to join the community.
During the recent hackathon held in Hong Kong, teams from Zhejiang University and Tsinghua University's blockchain associations showcased excellent projects, and we look forward to their growth in the future.
PANews: What are your personal expectations for the future development of Web3?
Sherry: My personal vision and the vision of the entire team still focus on the fields of trading and payments. Since the Libra project, we have hoped to establish a global financial infrastructure that allows more people to enjoy the conveniences of the modern financial system.
I particularly look forward to seeing innovative payment projects combined with stablecoins. For example, streaming payments can be fully realized on Aptos—being paid every second worked, something traditional financial institutions cannot achieve.
Migrating traditional payment software to the chain, combined with privacy protection features, can create exciting new scenarios. These innovative applications are key to promoting the widespread adoption of blockchain technology.
PANews: What impact will recent changes in the senior management team have on Aptos?
Sherry: Personnel changes are quite normal for many teams. For the team, this is actually a good opportunity to reassess past plans and make adjustments. Previously, we were focused on getting the job done, and such changes allow us to unite and think about future layout directions.
