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#Zentry $ZENT

Zentry, formerly GuildFi, announced in April 2024 its rebranding to Zentry, alongside a strategic upgrade of its brand to encompass extensive gaming infrastructure. The project is committed to constructing a Layer0 solution for its Play Economy, referred to as the Metagame Layer. Zentry has recently announced a collaboration with Beam to incubate and support the Sophon ecosystem, an entertainment-focused modular hyperchain powered by zkSync that has successfully secured $60 million through a node sale. Moreover, Zentry has launched its SocialFi platform Nexus and has outlined a strategic blueprint to reveal various product offerings: 1) Radiant, a flagship cross-platform application that is the gateway to the Zentry Metagame for gamers; 2) Zigma, an anime and gaming-inspired IP as an NFT collection; 3) Azul, a cross-world AI companion; 4) Maxion, Zentry’s flagship Web2 game publishing division tailored for game publishers. Infrastructure initiatives such as Zentry-SDK, a Social & Interest Graph, and an Identity Layer are anticipated to be deployed progressively between 2024 and mid-2025.
Executive Summary
Zentry, formerly GuildFi, announced in April 2024 its rebranding to Zentry, alongside a comprehensive upgrade of its brand to encompass extensive gaming infrastructure. At a macro level, Zentry operates as a middle layer in the Web3 space, principally encompassing computing, gaming, and bridging functionalities across various platforms, applications, and virtual worlds. At a micro level, Zentry epitomizes a holistic provider of gaming infrastructure and ecosystem services. Zentry is “the game of games” and is pioneering a new paradigm — the Play Economy, wherein in-game accomplishments or assets can be transferred between games, extending their utility beyond the confines of the digital realm.
The highlights of Zentry encompass:
Zentry demonstrates a robust financial foundation, with a treasury valued at $140 million and an annual revenue of $40 million in 2024. This financial stability ensures a solid runway for sustained development.Zentry is actively engaging with the gaming blockchain Ronin Network to integrate the Beta version of its metagame gateway, Nexus. Within Nexus, creators are empowered to generate content that accentuates the Ronin ecosystem, earning incentives in the form of points and tokens for their contributions.The team has announced a new collaboration between Zentry and Beam, two of the largest gaming ecosystems boasting a combined treasury exceeding $300 million, to incubate and support the Sophon ecosystem. Recently, Sophon successfully raised $60 million through its node sale.During its tenure as GuildFi, Zentry amassed a considerable repository of players and project resources, providing significant support for the project’s post-upgrade advancement.
Nevertheless, it is imperative to acknowledge the following risks:
While the GameFi sector has exhibited signs of recovery, the influx of external capital and market vitality remains markedly below the levels observed in the previous bull market.Following its recent project transition, Zentry remains in an embryonic phase, with its forthcoming infrastructure likely to encounter formidable competitive pressures.
In summary, Zentry’s rebranding presents a potentially auspicious juncture for the project. Transitioning from a gaming guild to the Metagame Layer, the project now boasts an expanded narrative encompassing various domains such as GameFi, SocialFi, and AI. Furthermore, the alliance with Beam represents a formidable collaboration, and the tripartite synergy between Zentry, Beam, and Sophon will facilitate resource integration, thereby establishing a developmental edge. Nonetheless, it is crucial to recognize that, to date, the influx of new players and capital in the current cycle remains limited, necessitating vigilance regarding the future trajectory of the GameFi sector.

1. Overview
1.1 Project Profile
Zentry, formerly GuildFi, announced in April 2024 its rebranding to Zentry, alongside a comprehensive upgrade of its brand to encompass extensive gaming infrastructure. The project is committed to constructing a Layer0 solution for its Play Economy, referred to as the Metagame Layer, encompassing a broad spectrum of sectors, including GameFi, SocialFi, NFT, AI, and Infrastructure.
1.2 Basic Information[1]

2. Project Details
2.1 Team
Zentry proudly maintains a cadre of over 60 professionals, whose expertise spans software engineering, product development, graphic and visual design, marketing, business development, community moderation, and event organization. Zentry, along with the majority of its employees, is headquartered in Thailand, with further employees residing in Singapore, Australia, the U.S., and Europe. The Zentry team is distinguished by its profound experience in the gaming and crypto industries, with prominent members having previously served at esteemed firms like Riot Games, CCP Games, and Playtika. Information on the core members at Zentry is delineated below:

Jarindr Thitadilaka, Founder & Project Lead
Jarindr Thitadilaka graduated from Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, where they earned a Bachelor of Engineering in Information Communication Engineering. Boasting a decade-long tenure in the realms of blockchain technology and software development, Thitadilaka has rendered their expertise to esteemed entities including OmiseGO (OMG Network) and Bitfinex. Furthermore, they have carved a niche for themselves through extensive exploration of cutting-edge domains such as NFT tokenization on Layer2 networks, a testament to their visionary pursuits. Notably, Thitadilaka stands as the pioneering force behind the inception of the first-ever Proof-of-Concept blockchain game on the Plasma protocol, underscoring their avant-garde contributions to the technological landscape.

Gazinpoj Techahuasingh, Co-Founder & Business Development Lead
Embarking on their journey into the realm of cryptocurrencies in 2017, Gazinpoj Techahuasingh swiftly ascended to prominence, curating a fervent community of crypto enthusiasts that burgeoned to encompass over 5 million followers. Venturing beyond conventional boundaries, Techahuasingh diversified their pursuits across multifarious domains spanning media, consultancy, fund management, and research. The culmination of their visionary endeavors materialized in the establishment of GuildFi in 2021, which has since been rebranded as Zentry. Within the echelons of Zentry, Techahuasingh assumes the role of BD Lead, orchestrating strategic partnerships and driving the expansive trajectory of business development.

Ian Pieragostini, R&D Lead
Ian Pieragostini boasts an illustrious career spanning over two decades within the dynamic realm of gaming. Their professional journey has traversed the corridors of industry giants including Microsoft, EA, and Riot Games. Notably, during his tenure at Riot Games, Pieragostini ascended to the esteemed role of Technical Director, orchestrating the meticulous development and fruition of multiple IPs in conjunction with his adept team.

Raymond Chng, Growth Lead
Raymond Chng is an alumnus of Singapore Management University, equipped with a decade-long tenure specializing in strategic expansion and investment advisory. Chng established REVEM in Singapore, offering real estate insights to readers through its proprietary data-driven research and in-depth consumer analytics. Furthermore, Chng serves as the founder and a distinguished contributor among the roster of writers for Embernodes, a pioneering Web3 media entity.
2.2 Financials
Throughout the GuildFi epoch, the team navigated three successive rounds of funding. Subsequently, following GuildFi’s rebranding as Zentry, an additional fundraising endeavor was conducted via the Sophon Node Sale. The cumulative disclosed capital amassed from these fundraising endeavors approximated a sum of $146 million, delineated as follows:

According to the latest Zentry Treasury Vault Report (released on May 29, 2024)[2], the total value of the Zentry Treasury Vault is $151,367,382, up around 44% from early 2024. This is categorized into two main areas: liquid reserves and investments (as illustrated in Figure 2–1). Liquid reserves in the Zentry Treasury comprise stablecoins and major cryptocurrencies, totaling $78,105,000:
1) Stablecoins: $17,850,000, distributed among USDC and USDT, utilized in various lending and yield-generating protocols.
2) Cryptocurrencies: $60,255,000, which includes approximately 16,000 ETH staked across several protocols.
Investments in the Zentry Treasury include seed tokens, equities, liquid tokens, and NFTs, totaling $73,262,382. Moreover, the Zentry Treasury retains an approximate quantum of 1.5 billion $ZENT, with an estimated valuation of $58.6 million.

Jarindr Thitadilaka stated in a thread on X[3], “And we are profitable. This is from Treasury management, Nodes, partnership activation, and investment from all top games/entertainment, which now generating ~$10M a year (fluctuate).” In addition, Sophon has forged a partnership with Zentry and BEAM, two of the largest gaming ecosystems boasting a combined treasury exceeding $300 million, to incubate and support the Sophon ecosystem. Sophon launched a Node Sale in April 2024 and raised over $60 million.
Overall, Zentry reveals a financial abundance from its treasury reserve, bolstered by the recent influx of $60 million from the Sophon Node Sale, thus providing substantial financial backing for future development endeavors.
In the wake of its metamorphosis from a gaming guild, Zentry has restructured its financial strategy, now officially designated as the “Four-Engine Treasury Strategy,” encompassing four distinct engines:
1) Investing in Zentry’s Development — Strengthening the Core: At the heart of our Treasury Strategy is Zentry’s commitment to its development. By continuously enhancing and broadening the core of the Zentry universe, Zentry builds a robust and resilient foundation for all our endeavors. As Zentry introduces more products and experiences, the economic value within the Zentry ecosystem not only increases but also flows back to the Treasury, directly benefiting our token holders and fostering a thriving community.
2) Investing in Others — Capturing Both Financial and Synergistic Value: Zentry extends its investment strategy beyond internal development and meticulously assesses potential investments for strategic alignment with its long-term vision, targeting frontier projects that integrate seamlessly with the Zentry ecosystem. These investments are chosen for their financial returns and the synergistic value they add, helping to create new experiences and enhance Zentry’s technology stack, thus keeping Zentry at the forefront of technological advancement.
3) Ecosystem Incentives — Driving Rapid Expansion: Ecosystem incentives are pivotal in driving the rapid expansion of the Zentry universe. Zentry offers strategic incentives to encourage participation, collaboration, and innovation. These incentives catalyze growth by attracting new users, developers, and partners, contributing to a vibrant and dynamic community. The resulting expansion creates a network effect, exponentially increasing the value and reach of the Zentry ecosystem.
4) Earning Yields — Creating Sustainable Growth: Sustainable growth is fundamental to the Zentry Treasury Strategy. Zentry generates a steady income stream by earning yields by strategically staking stablecoins, ETH, and token nodes. This revenue is strategically reinvested into the development of the Zentry ecosystem or distributed back to $ZENT holders. This approach ensures the continuous growth and enhancement of Zentry and provides tangible rewards to our community, reinforcing their trust and commitment to Zentry.
2.3 Code
At present, the Zentry codebase remains proprietary and has not been made available as open-source.
2.4 Products
The Zentry team is driven by a powerful vision: to create and nurture the Play Economy through seven strategic dimensions:
1) Unified Gaming Experience: A Metagame that spans multiple games and platforms, aggregating achievements, assets, and social connections into one profile for unprecedented continuity.
2) Technological Innovation: Leveraging blockchain, AI, and advanced analytics to create a robust, transparent, and fair infrastructure.
3) Real-World Value Translation: In-game achievements enhance real-world experiences, unlocking discounts, job opportunities, and exclusive rewards.
4) Cross-World Interactions: Breaking down barriers between game worlds, allowing assets and identities to have value across multiple platforms.
5) Economic Empowerment: Establishing gaming as a legitimate economic activity where players can earn, invest, and build wealth through their gaming endeavors.
6) Gamified Lifestyle: Enhancing every aspect of daily life through gamification, making every activity more engaging and rewarding.
7) Inclusive Ecosystem: A world where everyone — casual gamers, professionals, investors, digital artists — can play a vital role in the Play Economy.
Within this conceptualized Play Economy, Zentry endeavors to harmonize disparate realms, including Web2 and Web3 gaming platforms, social networks, blockchain ecosystems, real-life experiences, and financial systems. Its dedication is manifest in the pursuit of the following overarching goals:
1) In-Game Actions Have Real-World Impact: Completing quests or reaching levels can earn cryptocurrency or unlock real-world discounts.
2) Digital Achievements Unlock Tangible Benefits: Gaming skills can lead to job opportunities or financial returns from virtual investments.
3) Social Connections Span Realms: Friendships formed in games can lead to real-world collaborations, and your digital social status could influence your real-world networks and opportunities.
4) Economic Activities Blur Boundaries: Trading virtual items could become as significant as traditional stock market activities, and managing a guild could be akin to running a real-world corporation.
5) Gaming Goes Beyond Games: The principles of gaming extend far beyond traditional video games, permeating various industries through gamification. This involves applying game design elements to non-game contexts, transforming mundane activities into engaging and rewarding experiences.
2.4.1 GuildFi
Formerly recognized as GuildFi, Zentry initially operated as a prominent gaming guild in the GameFi sector. During the previous round of GameFi bull runs, driven by the success of Axie Infinity and other blockchain games, there was a significant influx of gamers seeking to capitalize on the trend. However, the high entry barriers deterred many potential participants, thus prompting the emergence of gaming guilds like GuildFi. In the last bull market, GuildFi secured nearly $150 million in funding and attained a post-money valuation of $4 billion. At its peak, GuildFi boasted a substantial user base of nearly 300,000 registered GuildFi ID users and approximately 130,000 followers on Twitter.
During the GuildFi era, the project primarily operated as a gaming guild and a GameFi services provider, catering to both players and game developers. Players accrued points by completing guild tasks, redeemable for rewards and scholarships, and gained early access to partner projects of GuildFi. For game developers, GuildFi nurtured a vast and engaged player base and served as a significant marketplace for gaming assets, facilitating game promotion, asset sales, and invaluable player feedback. GuildFi disclosed in its latest post on Medium “GuildFi 2023 Recap and Gearing Up for 2024”[4] (posted in January 2024), “Through year 2023 partnerships, GuildFi has brought in a total of 330,000 Partner Pre-Registrations to the aforementioned gaming titles, with the platform accruing 1,900,000 transactions and 280,000 purchases.” Throughout its trajectory of business operations, GuildFi has engaged in partnerships with prominent projects such as Memeland, Ronin, Xai, Sipher, and Pixelmon.
During the GuildFi epoch, the project team cultivated an extensive network of player resources and fostered considerable relationships with various game developers. Nonetheless, the stagnation in the broader GameFi sector’s progression subsequently hindered the growth of gaming guilds. At the end of 2023, GuildFi was in pursuit of a strategic transition, which was referred to as “Project Z”. This culminated in April 2024 with the official rollout of Project Z, or Zentry.

2.4.2 Zentry
In April 2024, GuildFi underwent a rebranding to emerge as Zentry, a transition dubbed by the project team as “The Metagame Layer”. At a macro level, Zentry operates as a middle layer in the Web3 space. Zentry Founder Jarindr Thitadilaka stated, “Think of the Zentry as a new layer, which does the computing, gamifying, bridging, connecting and rewarding for everything that happens in other layers, permeating through various applications, platforms, and virtual worlds.”
Zentry’s Metagame emerges as a middleware, and key aspects of Zentry’s middleware role include:
1) Cross-Sector Integration: Facilitate activities, assets, content, and collaborations across industries, blending play, work, and value creation.
2) Universal ID: Provides universal identity and progression across ecosystems.
3) Interoperability: Ensures compatibility of integration between diverse platforms, protocols, and data formats.
4) Data Aggregation and Analysis: Processes vast amounts of data, enabling informed decision-making for all stakeholders.
5) Value Distribution: Implements mechanisms for fair value distribution among participants.
6) Sustainable Universe and Governance: Builds sustainable economic models and governance structures for the Play Economy.
Through these functions, the Metagame not only connects various elements of the Play Economy but also ensures its growth, fairness, and sustainability in the Web3 era.
At a micro level, Zentry epitomizes a holistic provider of gaming infrastructure and ecosystem services. The project team stated in a post on Medium[5], “Enter Zentry, the Metagame Layer built to bring the MMORPG experience to real life. It is ‘the game of games’.” Zentry is pioneering a new paradigm — the Play Economy, wherein in-game accomplishments or assets can be transferred between games, extending their utility beyond the confines of the digital realm. The Metagame Layer comprises three vertically integrated cores:
1) The underlying blockchain infrastructure bridging Web2 and Web3 data encompassing identity, asset, and activity;
2) A suite of targeted consumer apps designed to onboard various player segments;
3) A multiversal IP world that deepens engagement through compelling narratives and collaborative IP partnerships.
Specifically, the official delineation presents a spectrum of practical applications. For instance, players who completed gaming or real-world activities (victories in online battles, nailing 100 headshots in an FPS, or even crushing fitness goals) can earn rare items and crafting materials for Zentry, which could then be exchanged for tokens or even offer real-world rewards. Conversely, engagement in communal activities like taking three of your friends to five days of coffee runs can unlock exclusive NFTs that supercharge DeFi staking yields. With Zentry, everyone can forge a lifelong, dynamic avatar profile that evolves in status, uniqueness, and real wealth through their play across various ecosystems.
On the product front, Zentry presently harbors plans entailing a multifaceted array spanning SocialFi, GameFi, NFT, AI, and other domains:
Nexus: Web3 culture’s metagame gateway, opening the doors towards the Play Economy and transforming your social interactions into an immersive, profitable gaming experience. This platform transforms social interactions, achievements, and asset ownership across digital and physical worlds into a comprehensive gaming indentity. Nexus goes beyond being a static profile, offering users an evolving digital person that mirrors their journeys across realms. Mexus as a social layer plays a crucial role in realizing Zentry’s vision of real-life MMORPG by: 1) Showcasing achievements and connecting with others; 2) Ensuring every contribution is valued, recognized, and rewarded; 3) Integrating with other platforms and networks for continuous growth; 4) Transforming passive engagement into active participation. Simply put, Nexus constitutes a bastion of SocialFi innovation, wherein users with Nexus Shards are rewarded with tangible rewards for each social interaction such as, but not limited to, likes, comments, replies, and retweets on X (although the precise nature of these tangible rewards remains undisclosed). Zentry unveiled a preliminary beta version of Nexus in May 2024. Furthermore, the official strategic blueprint outlines forthcoming endeavors to introduce a Nexus full-stack game, envisaged to encompass multifaceted social interactions, reminiscent of platforms like fantasy.top.
Radiant: Gamers’ metagame gateway and Zentry’s flagship cross-platform application that turns your Web2 and Web3 gaming activities into a “rewarding adventure”. To date (as of May 30, 2024), Radiant remains poised at the threshold of launch, with conjecture veering towards a Nexus-like paradigm, wherein gamers are rewarded with points for their gaming exploits or achievements, thus precipitating a cascade of digital and tangible rewards. Radiant is Zentry’s revolutionary cross-platform metagame app that overlays both Web2 and Web3 games, creating an immersive experience where players’ actions across various games contribute to a unified profile and cohesive gameplay progression. By introducing a gamification layer over the games players already love, Radiant transforms discrete gaming sessions into chapters of a grand, personalized adventure that spans multiple worlds. For example, reaching a certain rank in an FPS game might unlock abilities in Radiant, or completing quests across two games could reveal new storylines.
Zigma: An anime and gaming-inspired IP as an NFT collection. To date (as of May 30, 2024), Zigma remains absent from the Zentry ecosystem.
Azul: A cross-world AI companion that elevates your gameplay, making it more fun and productive. To date (as of May 30, 2024), Zigma remains pending its official launch.
Vault: The Vault of Zentry is a pivotal application within the Zentry ecosystem, offering a dynamic mechanism for token holders to actively participate in and benefit from the rise of gaming culture and the increasing value across the Zentry universe, Play Economy, and beyond. Users stake or “infuse” their $ZENT tokens into the Vault. Infused tokens generate “fragments,” a resource that reflects the user’s contribution and infusion status. The user’s infusion status, determined by their fragment count, influences their benefits and special unlocks in various applications. Fragments can be strategically burned in exchange for reward allocation (e.g., tokens). The more Fragments burned, the bigger your share of the Vault Drop rewards. A portion of Zentry’s treasury resources is earmarked for the Vault Drop reward pool, enhancing participant returns and incentivizing engagement.
Maxion: Maxion is Zentry’s flagship Web2 game publishing division, enabling developers to publish games on-chain, providing players with true ownership of in-game assets, and bridging popular traditional gaming titles into the blockchain ecosystem. Maxion’s partnership with Gravity has yielded Ragnarok: Landscape, a Web3 adaption of the legendary Ragnarok MMORPG. In the forthcoming year, Maxion is poised to unveil an additional four game titles.
Presently, Zentry remains in its nascent phase. Among its suite of product offerings, Nexus is the sole product to have achieved a formal launch alongside a Beta integration with Ronin Network, with Nexus Beta Season 1 on Ronin Network soon to kick off. Plans for future infrastructure, including the Zentry-SDK, a Social & Interest Graph, and an Identity Layer, are slated for phased rollout between 2024 and 2025.

2.4.3 The Metagame Stack
The Metagame Stack comprises three layers: Consumer Applications, Open IP Universe, and Metagame Protocol. This vertically designed full-stack ecosystem is engineered for robustness, scalability, and adaptability to enable the seamless integration of diverse gaming experiences, social interactions, and economic activities while forming a dynamic, interconnected environment. Users primarily interact with the Consumer Applications, through which users can engage with the Open IP Universe. The Zentry ecosystem currently features a robust layer of Consumer Applications, including the aforementioned Nexus, Radiant, Zigman, and Azul.
The Open IP Universe includes:
1) Zentry IP: The in-house created IPs form the core of the Zentry universe, featuring iconic characters and narratives from flagship titles like Radiant, Nexus, Azul, and more.
2) Game Content: Zentry offers a rich array of gamified experiences. These experiences are continuously enriched by integrating content from Zentry’s vast network of partners, transforming Zentry into an ever-expanding content hub.
3) Collaborative IPs: Zentry actively partners with other creators to bring high-quality, established IPs into its ecosystem.
The fabric of the Metagame Protocol fuses a series of modules, including:
1) Zentry Universal ID: Provides a universal identity, status, and progression system through aggregated data across ecosystems.
2) Off-chain Connectors: Enable intelinking of off-chain user data across integrated ecosystems.
3) Gamification Engine: Transforms integrated ecosystem interactions into rewarding, game-like activities with achievements and challenges.
4) Proof of Play: An activity-aggregation system that leverages blockchain to ensure fair and transparent distribution of rewards.
5) Social & Interest Graph: Maps user relationships and preferences, enabling personalized gameplay, tailored content, and social networking.
6) Omnichain Connectors: Enable interlinking of on-chain user data across integrated ecosystems.
7) Marketplace Engine: Facilitates trading of on-chain and off-chain assets both within the Zentry ecosystem and across ecosystems.
8) Proof of Asset: Authenticates ownership and creation of on-chain and off-chain assets across ecosystems.

2.4.4 Zentry SDK
To facilitate seamless integration with the Metagame Protocol, Zentry provides a powerful Software Development Kit (SDK). This tool is designed to make integration straightforward and efficient for developers and partners and equip them with the necessary resources to connect their applications, protocols, and services directly into the Zentry universe with minimal effort. Key features of the Zentry SDK are as follows:
1) Easy access to core Metagame Protocol functionalities;
2) Seamless processing and integration of essential data (e.g., user identity and play spending);
3) Tools for creating immersive, interconnected experiences within the Zentry ecosystem.
2.4.5 Economic Engines
Zentry’s Metagame serves as the pillar of the Play Economy, functioning as essential middleware that both facilitates and captures significant value across the ecosystem. As the Play Economy grows — fueled by the synergy between the Metagame and partner contributions — the Economic Engines gain momentum and work synergistically, funneling revenue into the Zentry Treasury for strategic allocation, including enhancing the Metagame, attracting partners, and benefiting $ZENT token holders. This reinforces long-term ecosystem growth and sustainability.

Zentry has four Core Economic Engines:
1) Distribution Engine: By uniting diverse player networks, Zentry is poised to become a leading gaming distributor in the new era. Revenue streams include the Gamified Attention Platform (GAP) and Launchpad. The GAP is a novel platform that combines distribution, gamification, and advertising to offer immersive, engaging, and personalized experiences. It connects consumers and brands through Radiant and Nexus, with potential expansion to other applications. The Launchpad is a gamified modular asset distribution platform for tokens, NFTs, and digital assets from games, apps, creators, and ecosystems. It rewards active participants within the Zentry universe through a dynamic contribution model.
2) Commerce Engine: As the hub of the Play Economy, Zentry captures a significant volume of commerce activities and hybrid Web2-Web3 transactions. Revenue streams include the Marketplace, In-world Spending & Taxes, and IP & Transmedia. The Marketplace is a market platform that seamlessly integrates Web2 and Web3 assets, enabling cross-trading and value exchange between on-chain and off-chain items from in-game assets and exclusive commodities to NFTs. Zentry’s Commerce Engine monetizes in-world spending from user interactions, quests, and achievements, including crafting materials, in-world equipment, skins, and shop items. Revenue is also shared with community creators of select digital items. The “IP & Transmedia” section generates revenue through fee-sharing from collaborative IP projects. Zentry’s IP appears both within its own ecosystem and in collaboration with other IPs, while external IPs can also be integrated into the Zentry universe, driving diverse revenue streams through licensing, royalties, and transmedia storytelling across multiple platforms.
3) Treasury Engine: Zentry’s Treasury Strategy focuses on growth and innovation across the ecosystem. Revenue streams include Investment, Ventures, and Staking, Yield Farming & Node Operations. Investments target frontier projects that align with Zentry’s long-term vision, focusing on financial returns and synergistic value. These investments enhance Zentry’s technology stack and user experiences. Ventures are defined as companies where Zentry holds substantial stakes, such as Sophon, Maxion Labs, Zoltan, and AltF4. These ventures act as extensions of the Zentry ecosystem, contributing to its strength and resilience. Zentry monetizes from staking, yield farming, and node operation activities and generates steady income through strategic staking of assets like stablecoins, ETH, and token nodes. Revenues are reinvested into ecosystem development or distributed to token holders, ensuring continuous growth and rewards for the community.
4) Infrastructure Engine: Zentry aggregates vast amounts of user data, including identities, activities, spending, and assets, making it one of the largest data mines in the gaming ecosystem. Revenue streams are derived from Protocol Fees. Zentry constructs a structured fee model for builders leveraging Zentry’s services, covering advanced data insights, developer tools, and integration services. The Zentry SDK, an easy-to-integrate toolkit, allows businesses and projects to tap into Zentry’s vast data resources and capabilities, contributing to protocol fee revenue.
Zentry’s four core engines are highly flexible and mutually supportive, creating a robust ecosystem that adapts to market shifts and seizes new opportunities. These engines work in concert, amplifying each other’s impact. For instance, data collected through the Distribution Engine informs investment decisions for the Treasury Engine, while successful projects launched via the Launchpad become potential investment targets. This interconnected system allows Zentry to maintain a stable foundation while pursuing multiple avenues for exponential growth, driving the evolution of the Play Economy.
2.4.6 Growth Strategy
Zentry’s growth flywheel is powered by a continuous cycle of engagement, community building, and economic activity. This self-sustaining cycle ensures that the Zentry ecosystem continues to grow, innovate, and deliver value to all its participants. The cycle begins with supporting successful launches of gamified experiences, apps, and content. These new offerings create more activities for users, fostering user growth and engagement within the Zentry universe. As the user base grows, it’s amplified by cross-game collaborations, enriching the overall user experience. This expansion leads to increased user interest, social engagement, and growth of the social graph. The larger, more engaged community drives higher economic activity within the ecosystem. This increased activity generates more value for both partners and the community through various fees and asset trading, creating a virtuous cycle of economic growth. As a result of this expanding activity, the Play Economy flourishes. It onboards new games, generates user-created content, attracts consumer brands, and expands beyond gaming into other verticals.

The growth of the Zentry Universe is propelled by four interconnected drivers:
1) Blockchains: The foundation of Zentry’s Metagame Protocol, enabling unprecedented aggregation of user data from both on-chain and off-chain sources. With the growing number of blockchains and protocols, this integration creates a unified user experience across diverse ecosystems.
2) Diverse Player Networks: The Play Economy welcomes a wide spectrum of player communities, from niche to mass market. Each group can participate and play a unique, meaningful role, with rewards tailored to their level of engagement. As more communities join, the network effect amplifies, fostering a dynamic player ecosystem.
3) Content & IPs: The seamless incorporation of partners’ intellectual property fuels an abundance of compelling content with Zentry’s expanding universe and enriches the gaming experience.
4) Cross-world Activity: Activities within the Play Economy evolve to intertwine with nearly every aspect of daily life. This lifestyle revolution ensures that every action contributes to the Play Economy’s continuous growth.
2.4.7 Sophon
Zentry’s strategic rebranding parallels that undertaken by Merit Circle, marking a pivotal shift from a gaming guild to a more expansive narrative. Shortly following this transformation, Zentry entered into a partnership with Beam to jointly incubate the entertainment-focused modular hyperchain, Sophon.
In April 2024, Sophon announced a partnership with Zentry and BEAM, two of the largest gaming ecosystems boasting a combined treasury exceeding $300 million, to incubate and support the Sophon ecosystem. Sophon is an emerging entertainment-focused modular hyperchain powered by zkSync, designed specifically for high-throughput applications focusing on entertainment, gaming, and artificial intelligence. At present, Sophon finds itself in the embryonic stages of development, with intricate nuances of its product architecture awaiting divulgence.
Zentry assumes a pivotal role as a gaming application layer, synergistically aligning with Beam and Sophon to propel project maturation. In this tripartite synergy, Zentry brings its extensive player network and a reputation as a forward-thinking distributor in gaming, entertainment, and lifestyle; Beam offers a robust technical blockchain infrastructure and product suite that simplifies the complexity of game development while enhancing user experiences; Sophon itself, as a modular hyperchain, is engineered for high throughput and scalability to meet the rigorous demands of next-generation applications.
On the financial front, beyond a combined reserve exceeding $300 million in Zentry and Beam treasuries, Sophon closed a funding round in early April 2024 and secured $10 million from a consortium of investors, comprising Paper Ventures, Maven11, Spartan, SevenX, OKX Ventures, and Huobi Ventures. Moreover, Sophon recently augmented its fiscal reserves to the tune of ~$60 million via its public node sale.
Beyond the purview of mere project synergy, the partnership between Zentry and Sophon features certain benefits for Zentry users:
1) Through the staking of qualified assets in an initial liquidity window hosted by Sophon, $ZENT holders will be eligible to receive a $SOPH token airdrop.
2) For the upcoming Sophon node sale, users who utilize Zentry’s code will receive not only a 10% discount but also exclusivity within the Zentry ecosystem.
3) Zentry will airdrop 5,000 $ZENT to everyone who purchases at least one node in the Sophon node public sale.
4) 10,000 $ZENT tokens will be airdropped to participating wallets that hold at least 10,000 $ZENT tokens prior to the start of the public node sale and purchases at least one node.
Summary: Zentry’s rebranding closely mirrors the strategic evolution of Merit Circle, transitioning from a gaming guild to a comprehensive “Metagame Layer” with an expanded narrative aimed at fostering a sustainable Play Economy. The reimagined Zentry encompasses a diverse array of sectors, including GameFi, SocialFi, NFT, AI, and Infrastructure. Although still in its nascent stages, Zentry boasts a suite of innovative products, including Nexus, Azul, Radiant, Zigma, Vault, and Maxion. From a financial perspective, Zentry is well-capitalized, with a treasury totaling $150 million. This includes liquid reserves of $78,105,000 (in stablecoins and ETH) and investments amounting to $73,262,382 (comprising seed tokens, NFTs, and other assets). Furthermore, in a recent display of strategic acumen, the project has forged a partnership with Beam to co-incubate Sophon, successfully raising $60 million through its public node sale. In summary, while Zentry remains in its formative phase, its substantial financial reserves position it strongly for sustained growth and development.
3. Development
3.1 Historical Overview

Moreover, Zentry (formerly GuildFi) has engaged in a myriad of collaborations and investments across a diverse array of projects, as illustrated in Figure 3–1.

3.2 Current State
At the end of April, GuildFi underwent a rebranding metamorphosis to emerge as Zentry, subsequently initiating the migration of $GF tokens to $ZENT tokens a few days thereafter. Nonetheless, Zentry remains in a nascent stage, having only launched the public version of Nexus.
3.3 Future Prospects
As previously elucidated, Zentry is at the very inception of its evolutionary journey, with merely one product, i.e., Nexus, launched a month ago. The strategic blueprint of Zentry outlines expansive forays into SocialFi, GameFi, NFT, and AI, among other sectors. Imminent product launches may include a Nexus-based full-stack game, bearing resemblance to fantasy.top. Furthermore, there are ambitious plans to unveil: 1) Radiant, a flagship cross-platform application that is the gateway to the Zentry Metagame for gamers; 2) Zigma, an anime and gaming-inspired IP as an NFT collection; 3) Azul, a cross-world AI companion; 4) Zoltan, tailored for game publishers. Infrastructure initiatives such as the Zentry-SDK, a Social & Interest Graph, and an Identity Layer are anticipated to be deployed progressively between 2024 and mid-2025. In the forthcoming year, Zentry’s Web3 game studio and publisher Maxion is poised to unveil an additional four game titles.
4. Tokenomics
On April 25, 2024, Zentry announced that GuildFi’s $GF token is migrating to $ZENT. $GF tokens will be converted to $ZENT tokens at a conversion rate of 1:10 (i.e., 1 $GF = 10 $ZENT). $ZENT serves a multi-faceted role within the Zentry ecosystem, encompassing the following applications: 1) Governance: $ZENT empowers holders with governance rights to engage in pivotal decision-making processes within the Zentry Universe, enabling them to vote on proposed amendments and policies; 2) In-world Utilities: $ZENT facilitates spending for content, progression, and features, and as Zentry expands, it will offer even more ways for holders to engage and enrich their experience; 3) Holder Privileges: $ZENT holders enjoy tiered benefits, including priority access to exclusive features, reward multipliers, and co-creation opportunities; 4) Restaking Benefits: $ZENT holders can infuse their tokens to earn a share of the Vault Drop pool.
In accordance with the $GF token distribution scheme, an extrapolation of the $ZENT distribution can be undertaken:

The $ZENT token release schedule is analogous to that of $GF, as depicted in Figure 4–2. Nevertheless, in actual practice, it is plausible that a subset of users has not yet converted their $GF tokens for $ZENT. Consequently, the extant circulating supply of $ZENT may fall short of the anticipated figures.

Zentry’s Treasury Holdings wallets are displayed in Figure 4–3 below:

5. Sector Analysis
Zentry belongs to the Gaming Infrastructure category under the GameFi sector.
5.1 GameFi Sector Overview
According to the data analytics fed by Footprint[6], the current market cap of GameFi tokens approximates $27.6 billion. Over the past three months, Bitcoin’s significant upward momentum has been accompanied by a modest increase in the market capitalization of GameFi tokens. However, this growth has lagged behind the magnitude of Bitcoin’s ascent.

The current GameFi landscape features over 3,500 blockchain games. The lion’s share of these blockchain games resides within the BNB Chain, Ethereum, and Polygon, collectively comprising almost 60% of the total share. Of these blockchain games, ~700 maintain active status, with the BNB Chain representing about 26.7%, Polygon 12.2%, and Ethereum 20.6%.

There is an observable upward trend in the number of active users engaging with blockchain games. At present, the number of daily active users in the GameFi sector stands at approximately 6.53 million, reflecting a marked improvement from the active user metrics observed in 2023 and exceeding the previous peak of 2 million daily active users seen during the prior bull runs in the sector. This notable increase in daily active users commenced in earnest towards the end of 2023, signifying an augmented interest and engagement within the GameFi sector.

Nevertheless, it becomes apparent that the GameFi sector in the current market cycle has yet to experience a full resurgence regarding its transaction volume. Although there has been an uptick in volume compared to 2023, it remains notably distant from the levels observed in 2022, with the monthly transaction volume currently hovering around the $1,200M mark. Furthermore, the number of monthly transactions in 2024 notably lags behind that of 2023, with the present monthly transaction count standing at 3.13 million, in stark contrast to the approximate 7 million recorded throughout 2023.

In summary, while there has been a modest recuperation in the market cap of GameFi tokens, coupled with an augmented level of scrutiny and a marginal expansion in active user count, there exists a notable dearth in capital inflow towards the GameFi sector at present. This is underscored by the substantial disparity in transaction volume when compared to the preceding round of bull runs.
5.2 The History of Crypto Gaming Guilds
The evolution of crypto gaming guilds was predominantly catalyzed during the last bull market. At that juncture, the meteoric ascent of blockchain games exemplified by Axie Infinity instigated a frenzy among crypto gaming enthusiasts, advocating for the amalgamation of gaming endeavors with financial remuneration, or the Play-to-Earn (P2E) model. However, the pursuit of P2E opportunities often imposed prohibitive fiscal prerequisites, prompting the advent of gaming guilds heralding scholarship programs as their selling points. These venerable gaming guilds facilitated the renting of in-game assets via a judiciously structured scholarship program while providing gaming tutorials to expedite players’ acclimation to the virtual realms. Functioning as intermediaries, gaming guilds not only facilitated the monetization of P2E gameplay for crypto gamers but also engendered a burgeoning population of gamers and catalyzed a surge in demand for virtual assets.
Following the culmination of the last bull market, the trajectory of crypto gaming guilds has evinced the following defining hallmarks:
1) Inherent Constraints Of Scholarship Program: At its core, the scholarship paradigm primarily caters to P2E-focused gamers within the GameFi sphere. While this community initially contributes to the augmentation of GameFi fervor and the proliferation of communal dynamics during the embryonic phases of blockchain gaming, its prolonged presence engenders palpable peril to the structural integrity of GameFi tokenomics. This predicament is particularly accentuated within the contemporary domain of blockchain gaming, where the maturation of tokenomics models remains nascent, and instances of the “death spiral” phenomenon pervade. The substantial influx of P2E-focused players can inflict severe damage on the game itself, hastening the collapse of the GameFi tokenomics.
Consequently, the sustainability of the scholarship program within individual GameFi ecosystems becomes inherently untenable. Gaming guilds must perpetually seek out profitable GameFi ventures to sustain revenue. However, during the bear market, the paucity of such projects exacerbates the vicissitudes in the revenue streams of gaming guilds, rendering them susceptible to pronounced cyclical perturbations.
Additionally, the existing scholarship paradigm adopted by most crypto gaming guilds is exclusively applicable to P2E-centric blockchain games. Yet, the P2E gaming landscape has universally entered a state of development stagnation. In the long term, the fate of the P2E model in the blockchain gaming domain remains indeterminate, oscillating precariously between perpetuation and extinction.
Moreover, as the GameFi sector navigates towards incremental maturation, a burgeoning cadre of GameFi platforms is embarking upon the implementation of bespoke renting systems, exemplified by the likes of Starshark and Pegaxy. This advent of renting systems presents a formidable impedance to the traditional scholarship program by encroaching upon its coveted user demographic. Should a greater number of players opt to embrace renting systems over revenue-sharing scholarship programs, such as those employed by Yield Guild Games, the revenue streams of gaming guilds are poised for precipitous declines.
2) Regional Imbalance of Guild Distribution: At present, the majority of prominent gaming guilds are predominantly based in Southeast Asia. Notably, Yield Guild Games, the absolute leader of the GameFi sector, boasts a demographic predominantly hailing from the Philippines; GuildFi, dedicated to advancing the concept of Guild-As-a-Service (Gaas), has its principal community base in Thailand; and it’s worth highlighting the ascendance of Ancient8, Vietnam’s largest crypto gaming guild, as a pivotal force within the sector.
3) A Paradigm Shift towards Institutionalization and Multifarious Diversification: Following the triumph of the scholarship program, crypto gaming guilds have embarked on a quest to fervently seek to identify the next “Axie Infinity” archetype. Consequently, contemporary gaming guilds actively partake in the NFT pre-sales hosted by early-stage, promising blockchain games, diligently amassing a corpus of NFTs in preparation for forthcoming P2F opportunities after game launches. Beyond NFT procurement, gaming guilds frequently transition into the role of early investors in myriad blockchain games, metamorphosing from NFT rental agencies and community enclaves into formidable investment institutions within the GameFi domain.
In another direction from institutionalization, gaming guilds are embarking upon a multifaceted journey of diversification, endeavoring to explore alternative developmental avenues. These include offering data, community, and traffic services to partnered projects, as well as furnishing systematic management services for their scholarship and revenue frameworks. This evolution signifies a progression towards a multifarious diversification of businesses and services.
4) Significant Reliance on GameFi Sector Development: The revenue streams of crypto game guilds, whether predicated on commissions derived from the scholarship program or on the return on investments in GameFi ventures, are intricately intertwined with the progression of the GameFi sector. Currently in its nascent stages, this sector possesses substantial potential for future growth. For gaming guilds, the ability to evolve in tandem with this sector and to ensure that their investment portfolios remain consistently profitable is of paramount importance.
In the previous bull market, gaming guilds capitalized on the meteoric rise of the GameFi frenzy, securing considerable financing and revenue. Nevertheless, the limitations inherent in the scholarship paradigm gradually surfaced, and the GameFi sector has encountered systemic challenges in its trajectory of holistic progression, encompassing a dearth of real players, the ascendancy of the finance nature over the playability nature, and the tenuous sustainability of the P2E model. Consequently, the developmental trajectory of gaming guilds has become circumscribed. Confronted with this situation, myriad gaming guild projects have embarked upon trajectories of project transition.
Foremost among them was Merit Circle, which, as early as 2022, initiated a projection transition towards a DAO model extending its tentacles to various sectors. In April 2023, Merit Circle inaugurated the concept of the game-specific blockchain Beam, culminating in Beam’s debut in August of the same year. Following suit, GuildFi introduced Project Z at the end of 2023, heralding its rebranding as Zentry in April 2024. Conversely, Yield Guild Games, the leader of gaming guilds, was the latest among the major gaming guilds to commence its project transition. Yield Guilds Games disclosed its transition from a gaming guild to a protocol layer in March 2024, aspiring to metamorphose into a bastion of gaming infrastructure.
In this market cycle, major gaming guilds have collectively embarked upon a journey of diversified business model transitions, with forays into gaming infrastructure characterizing their product expansions. In response to the aforementioned adversities, a suite of strategic interventions has been orchestrated:
1) Multifaceted Diversification: In recognition of the inherent constraints of the scholarship paradigm, both Merit Circle and Zentry have embarked upon trajectories of strategic business diversification, extending their reach to an array of sectors. Since March 2022, Merit Circle has been navigating towards a DAO model, emblematic of its proclivity towards a multifaceted operational landscape. This paradigm shift encompasses strategic investments in primary GameFi markets, collaborative ventures in game development, and the establishment of robust infrastructures and NFT marketplaces, orchestrating an incursion into the intricate fabrics of midstream and upstream domains in the GameFi industry chain. Meanwhile, Zentry has metamorphosed from a gaming guild formerly known as GuildFi to now a Metagame Layer, with its strategic blueprint outlining expansive forays into SocialFi, GameFi, NFT, and AI, among other sectors.
The strategic rebranding undertaken by Merit Circle and Zentry bears a resemblance, transitioning from a gaming guild that opts for the scholarship paradigm to an entity extending its tentacles into various sectors in the crypto space. This transition seeks to delve into the intricate fabrics of the GameFi industry and bolster the competitive prowess and existential longevity of their respective ventures. Nevertheless, this strategy necessitates substantial technical prowess and management acumen Typically, projects engaging with infrastructure development entail prolonged R&D periods, and their future profitability is fraught with uncertainty. At present, only Merit Circle has embarked upon the nascent stages of its project transition despite Beam having launched and put into operations for merely six months. In contrast, both Zentry and Yield Guild Games have but recently initiated their rebranding endeavors, necessitating additional time for maturation.
2) Enhanced Regional Guild Distribution: During their nascent stages, gaming guilds were predominantly populated by denizens of Southeast Asia, thus imbuing these endeavors with a pronounced regional flavor. However, subsequent to their project transition, these ventures have transcended mere diversification of operational dimensions, catalyzing a refinement in their regional identity. Consider, for instance, the project transition of Merit Circle, traversing realms of investment, project incubation, and infrastructure. These domains have orchestrated a profound shift in the demographic, redirecting focus from mere crypto gamers to project owners and game developers. This has not only amplified the project’s global resonance but has also catalyzed interest and engagement predominantly gracing the echelons of developed countries in Europe and North America. Likewise, Zentry, post-rebranding, steers its business arc towards a panoptic vista of entertainment, thereby fostering interest and engagement, diverse not merely in roles but also geographical origination.
3) Capitalization & Institutionalization: In actuality, the capitalization and institutionalization of gaming guilds in the last market cycle have endowed these projects with a spectrum of revenue streams, fostering enduring resilience amidst the bear market vicissitudes. The likes of Merit Circle, Yield Guild Games, and GuildFi have since expanded their revenue channels through investments, node operation, and treasury management, among other avenues. With the waning relevance of the scholarship paradigm, these ventures might find these avenues their sole source of income. Nonetheless, projects such as Merit Circle and Yield Guild Games have previously ventured capital into myriad unpromising blockchain games, and the ROI on these ventures has fallen short of projections amid the overall lackluster performance of the GameFi sector. Conversely, Zentry’s investment portfolio gravitates towards stablecoins, Ethereum liquid staking, and node operation, thus espousing a more cautious fiscal strategy, with the fiscal health of the Zentry Treasury Vault being comparably robust at the moment.
4) Mitigating Reliance on the GameFi Sector: The last market cycle witnessed gaming guilds steeped in a heavy dependence on the development of the GameFi sector. Ergo, the primary driver behind the ongoing strategic rebranding of gaming guilds is to mitigate such dependence, transitioning instead towards a pan-entertainment paradigm and comprehensive industry continuum. Notably, Zentry’s recent project transition has transcended the confines of GameFi, spanning sectors such as SocialFi, AI, and Infrastructure. The diversification of business sectors facilitates the mitigation of reliance on the GameFi sector development while simultaneously unlocking a dimension of potential growth opportunities. Nonetheless, gaming guilds cannot entirely dissociate from the developmental trajectory of GameFi, as their previously amassed player base and project resources constitute substantial advantages for prospective advancement.
Overall, the prominent gaming guilds in this cycle aspire to surmount past obstacles and pursue new avenues of growth through strategic rebranding. While the transition towards an infrastructure layer and engagement with every fabric of the GameFi industry chain present considerable challenges, posing technical and managerial pressure on its project development and business operations, Zentry’s recent foray into strategic rebranding represents a commendable endeavor, particularly in light of the current suboptimal trajectory of the GameFi sector. This endeavor offers a grandiloquent narrative and unlocks an immense dimension of growth opportunities in the time to come. Henceforth, continuous observation of Zentry’s product delivery and ecosystem ecosystem building remains imperative.
5.3 Layer 0
Amidst the evolution of public chain ecosystems, there has been a marked enhancement in the user base, user requirements, the diversity of applications, and the degree of specialization. Concurrently, the demands on network performance and blockchain specialization have escalated. Within this context, several Layer0 (L0) solutions have come to the fore. From a more expansive narrative vantage point, the Metagame Layer by Zentry can be perceived as a Layer0 solution in the GameFi sector.
At present, the majority of L0 solutions in the crypto space are well-integrated in nature, with established projects such as Cosmos and Polkadot serving as prime examples. These projects primarily delve into the realms of blockchain interoperability, scalability, message passing, and asset bridging, with a paucity of offerings directed towards entertainment, gaming, and end-user applications. Distinct from traditional L0 projects, Zentry manifests a heightened level of specialization in the domains of entertainment and gaming, thereby constituting a niche L0 solution within the GameFi sector.
In the realm of infrastructure, Zentry avails developers of a suite of tools including the Zentry SDK, Zentry ID, and Zentry Chain. Furthermore, this year, Zentry has partnered with Beam to incubate and support the Sophon ecosystem, an endeavor tailored specifically for entertainment and gaming to meet the demands for higher throughput and expedited transaction processing. Moreover, Zentry has envisioned an expansive IP universe, spanning a diverse array of products, including anime and gaming, atop its foundational infrastructure. Building upon this foundation, Zentry’s focus extends to consumer-oriented applications, which encompass a multitude of sectors such as SocialFi, GameFi, and NFTs. In sum, when juxtaposed with other ecosystems, Zentry delineates a more lucid and supportive strategy tailored for gaming and entertainment. During the GuildFi era, the project amassed a significant user base and potential user demographic within the Web3 gaming and SocialFi spheres. Should Zentry execute prudent planning and traffic redirection, it is poised to infuse its ecosystem with renewed vigor and dynamism in the ensuing periods.

Zentry’s strategic planning encompasses not merely the interconnection of multiple platforms and ecosystems but also the linkage between the tangible and virtual realms, thereby amplifying the technical complexity of interoperability. Furthermore, the diversity and volume of the data involved are substantially greater, imposing elevated demands on network performance. At present, Zentry remains in its nascent stages, with pertinent technical documentation and whitepaper yet to be unveiled. Consequently, several critical points warrant close scrutiny in the forthcoming period:
1) The methodologies by which interoperability and scalability are realized;
2) The security and transparency of interactions;
3) The authentic user experience and customizability of the Zentry SDK;
4) The dispersion of liquidity across multiple ecosystems.
In summation, while Zentry faces considerable technical challenges, it will unlock a great margin of growth opportunities if successfully overcoming these challenges. As of now, no rival project exists within the Layer0 category of the GameFi sector, endowing Zentry with a distinct first-mover advantage through its strategic rebranding.
6. Risks
Sector Risk: Despite indications of a resurgence currently in the GameFi sector, the influx of external capital and overall market vitality remain markedly inferior to those observed in the preceding bull market.
Competitive Risk: Following its recent project transition, Zentry remains in an embryonic phase, with its forthcoming infrastructure likely to encounter formidable competitive pressures.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Reference
Official Zentry Website, https://zentry.com/
Zentry Medium, https://medium.com/zentry

[1] Source: CoinGecko (as of December 18, 2024)
[2] https://medium.com/zentry/unlocking-zentrys-treasury-vault-6505b8516e3a
[3] https://x.com/jarindr/status/1791139263368847387
[4] https://medium.com/guildfi/guildfi-2023-recap-and-gearing-up-for-2024-c2576bc896d2
[5] https://medium.com/zentry/introducing-zentry-the-gaming-superlayer-60ab6c9f8c90
[6] https://www.footprint.network/research/gamefi/game-overview/game-market?series_date-79421=past90days

— Investment Risks and Disclaimers —
This report is only for information purposes and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Please do not make any investment decisions based on this report. First.vip and authors of this report are not responsible for any results of your investment.This report is drafted from the date indicated. As market or economic conditions may change from time to time subsequently, the content of this report may not necessarily reflect such changes. The graphs, charts and other visual aids are provided for information purposes solely, none of which should be relied upon as investment decisions. First.vip will not assist anyone in making investment decisions and no graph, chart or other visual aid can capture all of the factors and variables required to make such decisions.Some of the statements in this report may contain First.vip’s future assumptions and other forward-looking views. With known & unknown risks and uncertainties, actual results, performance or events may differ materially from the views and assumptions expressed in the statements.Any speculations, forecasts and estimates contained in this report are speculative and are based on certain assumptions. These forward-looking statements may prove to be inaccurate and may be affected by inaccurate assumptions, known/unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, most of which are beyond our control. It can be anticipated that some or all of these forward-looking assumptions will not be realized or will differ materially from actual results.

Original text: https://x.com/firstvip61/status/1857053627954704450
#Aptos $APT
Aptos is a public chain project established at the end of 2021. It inherits many of Meta's achievements in the field of blockchain and has a very good team and financing lineup. Since the launch of the mainnet in October 2022, Aptos has proven its efficiency and reliability with practical actions, establishing its leading position among the new generation of public chains. In the future, it will be possible to achieve greater development relying on the long-established ecosystem.

Investment Summary
Aptos is a public chain project launched at the end of 2021.

#Aptos $APT
Founded in late 2021, Aptos is a public blockchain inheriting many of the technical innovations made by Meta in the blockchain space and is backed by an impressive lineup of investors. Since the launch of the mainnet in October 2022, Aptos has demonstrated its efficiency and reliability, establishing itself as a leader among the next-generation public blockchains. With its prosperous and engaging ecosystem, it may gain more significant growth in the future.
Executive Summary
Founded in late 2021, Aptos is a public blockchain.
From a team perspective, Aptos has deep ties to Diem (formerly known as Libra) and Novi, which were developed by Meta. After Meta faced regulatory pressure and was forced to abandon its blockchain endeavors, several core members of the original dev team chose to build Aptos. In a sense, Aptos can be seen as one of the heirs to Meta’s blockchain legacy. As one of the leading software development companies, Meta has a strong talent pool with excellent academic backgrounds and reliable technical development capabilities. With the continuous growth of Aptos, its development will be backed by a solid team.
In terms of funding, as of November 7, 2024, Aptos has gone through six funding rounds. Before its mainnet launch in 2022, Aptos secured $350M in funding at a valuation of $2.75B. Afterward, it closed four strategic funding rounds with undisclosed amounts. Its investors are top-tier crypto VCs such as Binance Labs, Dragonfly Capital, a16z, Multicoin Capital, Circle, and Coinbase Ventures. The latest funding round was closed on September 19, 2024. Therefore, it can be expected that the Aptos team is now rather well-funded.
From a product and technical perspective, Aptos aims to build a scalable, secure, reliable, and upgradable smart contract platform. The decentralized foundation for a secure, scalable, and upgradeable Web3 environment that Aptos uses are the Move programming language, the DiemBFT consensus algorithm, the Block-STM parallel execution engine, and an efficient node synchronization scheme. While focusing on scalability and security, Aptos has made some trade-offs in terms of decentralization. Although the number of nodes in the network is small and the entry barriers are high, posing the centralization risk, the performance advantages of Aptos are apparent. After its mainnet launch, Aptos processed more than 12,000 transactions per second and more than 300M transactions per day at its peak, with a latency of less than 1 second. Besides, it has never encountered delays or network downtime, which proves its efficiency and reliability in processing transactions. Additionally, in terms of transaction costs, Aptos has significantly reduced gas fees for users, thus offering more space for the development of DeFi and other sectors in its ecosystem.
From a project development perspective, since its inception, Aptos has been gaining momentum, especially since Q3 2024. The number of active addresses has been steadily increasing with strong user retention, and the tx count has seen significant growth. On August 15, 2024, it set a record for processing over 300M transactions in a single day, with peak transaction throughput approaching 13,000 TPS, further validating the impressive performance of the Aptos blockchain. Aptos has been sparing no effort to cultivate its ecosystem. At present, protocols running in the Aptos ecosystem cover different verticals such as DeFi, gaming, and social. At the same time, Aptos is actively maintaining strong relationships with Web2 enterprises and regulatory bodies, with collaborations with companies like Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Amazon, South Korea’s Lotte, and SKT. Additionally, at the end of October 2024, the native USDT (Tether) officially went live on Aptos, which is expected to bring more liquidity to Aptos and unlock greater potential of the Aptos ecosystem.
From a tokenomics perspective, $APT plays a dual role in the Aptos ecosystem, providing both utility and governance capabilities. Users can use $APT tokens to participate in network consensus, vote on proposals, pay for the gas fees, and drive the growth of the Aptos ecosystem. At present, most of the initial total supply of $APT is held by the Aptos Foundation and is designated for ecosystem-related items, such as grants, incentives, and other community growth initiatives. This allocation manifests Aptos’ strong focus on the long-term growth of its ecosystem.
From the perspective of the sector, the public blockchain sector where Aptos runs has gone through several bull and bear runs, as well as the evolution of blockchain technology. The demand and understanding for public blockchains have become increasingly clear. It is evident that the consensus algorithm and performance of a public blockchain are the roots that allow its ecosystem to thrive. The prosperity of the ecosystem is the fruit that grows from these roots. To be qualified as an outstanding public blockchain, the underlying technology must be robust enough to yield good results, and at the same time, these results must be remarkable enough to gain market recognition. Currently, Aptos has laid a solid foundation for cultivating a thriving ecosystem with its well-designed technical architecture, and it has nourished the seeds through its well-designed tokenomics model and ecosystem growth plans. It now waits for the subsequent growth of ecosystem projects to produce impressive results. From a competitive landscape perspective, Ethereum and Solana are still in the top tier. Aptos, along with Sui, are orders of magnitude behind them in many respects (except for network performance). Aptos and Sui were both founded by former Meta employees and developed using the same programming language (Move), with comparable network performance. However, the two blockchains have different focuses in ecosystem development, which has caused some divergence in market perception. We believe that as Aptos continues to nurture its ecosystem and as more ecosystem projects gain traction, Aptos is expected to gain more significant growth.

1. Overview
1.1 Project Profile
Founded in late 2021, Aptos is a public blockchain inheriting many of the technical innovations made by Meta in the blockchain space and is backed by an impressive lineup of investors. Since the launch of its mainnet in October 2022, Aptos has demonstrated its efficiency and reliability, establishing itself as a leader among the next-generation public blockchains. With its prosperous and engaging ecosystem, Aptos may gain more significant growth in the future.
1.2 Basic Information [1]

2. Project Details
2.1 Team
The dev team behind Aptos, Aptos Labs, is primarily located in California, North America, with employees spread across the globe. The total number of employees is estimated to be over 100, with LinkedIn showing 225 employees. According to the Aptos whitepaper, before the mainnet launch in 2022, over 350 developers had been involved in the development of Aptos. According to the official website[2], Aptos’ leadership team currently includes 16 founding members and 12 department heads. Some core members are introduced as follows:

Mo Shaikh — Co-Founder & CEO: Mo holds a BS in Accounting from Hunter College and an MBA from the University of Rochester. After graduating, he worked in real estate and private equity analysis at firms like KPMG, Blackstone, and Boston Consulting Group. In 2017, Mo founded Meridio (a blockchain-based platform for investing in and trading fractional shares of real estate with liquidity), where he also served as CEO. In May 2020, Mo joined Novi (Meta) as a Strategic Partner. In December 2021, Mo co-founded Aptos and has served as CEO ever since.

Avery Ching — Co-Founder & CTO: Avery holds a BSc and PhD in Computer Engineering from Northwestern University. After graduating, he served as the Principal Software Engineer at Yahoo, Facebook, and Novi Financial. With over 20 years of experience in technical development, Avery has a wealth of expertise in both the traditional Internet industry and the blockchain industry. At the end of 2021, after Novi’s pilot program concluded, Avery chose to co-found Aptos with Mo and has served as CTO ever since.

Alin Tomescu — Head of Cryptography: Alin holds a BS in Computer Science from Stony Brook University and both a Master’s and Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT. He served as a Teaching Assistant and Research Assistant at MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science for over six years. In 2020, Alin left MIT to join VMware as a Research Scientist. In February 2022, Alin joined Aptos as a founding member and has served as the Head of Cryptography ever since.

David Wolinsky — Head Architect: David holds a PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of Florida. After graduating, he spent four years as a Lecturer at Yale University. In 2015, David joined Facebook as a Software Engineer and later became the Tech Lead of Web3 at Meta (Novi). In February 2022, after Novi’s pilot program concluded, David chose to join Aptos as a founding member and has served as Head Architect ever since.

Neil Harounian — Head of Ecosystem: Neil holds a BSc in Finance from NYU Stern School of Business. After graduating, he worked in investment banking and later joined several crypto VCs. In January 2022, Neil joined Aptos as a founding member and has served as Head of Ecosystem ever since.

Sasha Spiegelman — Head of Research: Sasha holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology and a PhD in Distributed Systems. After graduating, he joined VMware, where he worked on blockchain research. In 2020, Sasha joined Novi Financial as a Senior Blockchain Researcher. In February 2022, after Novi’s pilot program concluded, Sasha chose to join Aptos as a founding member and has served as Head of Research ever since.

Zekun Li — Head of Blockchain: Zekun holds a BSc in Computer Science from Fudan University and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. After graduating, he joined Instagram as a Software Engineer and later joined Meta (Diem) in 2018, where he worked as a Staff Software Engineer. In February 2022, after Diem and Novi’s pilot program concluded, Zekun chose to join Aptos as a founding member and has served as Head of Blockchain ever since.

Asha Dakshinamoorthy — Product Lead: Asha holds a BBA in Quantitative Finance from Texas McCombs School of Business. After graduation, she worked as a Consultant at Deloitte. In 2017, Asha joined ConsenSys, the dev team behind MetaMask, where she served as Product Lead. In 2019, Asha joined AlphaPoint, a white-label software company, as Head of Product. Later that year, she transitioned to Templum Inc., a security token service provider, also as Head of Product. In June 2022, Asha joined Aptos Labs as Product Lead and has held the position ever since.
It can be seen that Aptos has deep ties to Diem (formerly known as Libra) and Novi, which were developed by Meta. After Meta faced regulatory pressure and was forced to abandon its blockchain endeavors, several core members of the original dev team chose to build Aptos. In a sense, Aptos can be seen as one of the heirs to Meta’s blockchain legacy. As one of the leading software development companies, Meta has a strong talent pool with excellent academic backgrounds and reliable technical development capabilities. With the continuous growth of Aptos, its development will be backed by a solid team.
2.2 Fundraising
Table 2–1 Aptos Funding Insights
As of November 7, 2024, Aptos has gone through six funding rounds. Before its mainnet launch in 2022, Aptos secured $350M in funding at a valuation of $2.75B. Afterward, it closed four strategic funding rounds with undisclosed amounts. Its investors are top-tier crypto VCs such as Binance Labs, Dragonfly Capital, a16z, Multicoin Capital, Circle, and Coinbase Ventures. The latest funding round was closed on September 19, 2024. Therefore, it can be expected that the Aptos team is now rather well-funded.
2.3 Code
Figure 2–1 # of Commits Created in Aptos’ Repositories[3]
Figure 2–2 # of Code Authors for Aptos
Aptos’ source code is open-source on GitHub. Figures 2–1 and 2–2 show that there are up to ~70 active code authors (~50 now) at peak who have created a total of 40,233 commits to Aptos’ repositories. The dev activity surged in Q3 2022, Q3 2023, and Q2 2024 when the team was focused on the dev work of introducing the incentivized testnet & the mainnet, the Move language & a new on-chain identity solution, and a new fungible asset standard & the Raptr consensus protocol, respectively. Overall, Aptos has maintained a stable development pace, without any significant signs of development stagnation. Therefore, it is expected that Aptos will continue to demonstrate strong technical development potential in the future.
Aptos’ source code is open-source on GitHub. Figures 2–1 and 2–2 show that there are up to ~70 active code authors (~50 now) at peak who have created a total of 40,233 commits to Aptos’ repositories. The dev activity surged in Q3 2022, Q3 2023, and Q2 2024 when the team was focused on the dev work of introducing the incentivized testnet & the mainnet, the Move language & a new on-chain identity solution, and a new fungible asset standard & the Raptr consensus protocol, respectively. Overall, Aptos has maintained a stable development pace, without any significant signs of development stagnation. Therefore, it is expected that Aptos will continue to demonstrate strong technical development potential in the future.
2.4 Product & Technology
Aptos is a blockchain aiming to bring mainstream adoption to decentralized ecosystems by offering scalability, safety, reliability, and upgradability. The Aptos blockchain aims to bring mainstream adoption to Web3 and solve real-world problems with a decentralized ecosystem of applications. In line with its principles and vision, Aptos has made unique designs in the consensus algorithm, smart contracts, network security, performance, and decentralization.
2.4.1 Vision & Technical Architecture
Aptos aims to build a scalable, secure, reliable, and upgradable smart contract platform, implicitly addressing the “Blockchain Trilemma.” The “Blockchain Trilemma” was introduced by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, who believes that the blockchain trilemma consists of three attributes: decentralization, security, and scalability. The main idea of the blockchain trilemma is that by using so-called simple methods, a blockchain cannot be simultaneously decentralized, secure, and scalable.
For example, Ethereum and Bitcoin sacrifice decentralization in favor of scalability and security. Next-gen public blockchains such as Solana prioritize scalability while compromising on decentralization and security. In contrast, according to the Aptos whitepaper and its blog posts, it is designed with scalability, safety, reliability, and upgradeability, without specifically mentioning decentralization. Therefore, it implies that Aptos has chosen to prioritize scalability and performance at the expense of decentralization.
Table 2–2 Aptos: Goals & Technologies
According to the Aptos whitepaper, the Aptos blockchain is built on the following core design principles:
1) Fast and secure execution along with simple auditability and mechanical analyzability via a new smart contract programming language, Move.
2) Extremely high throughput and low latency through a batched, pipelined, and parallelized approach to transaction processing.
3) Novel parallel transaction processing that efficiently supports atomicity with arbitrarily complex transactions through Block-STM.
4) Optimizations for performance and decentralization via rapid, stake-weight validator set rotation and reputation tracking.
5) Upgradeability and configurability as first-class design principles to embrace new use cases and the latest technology.
6) Modular designs that enable rigorous component-level testing along with appropriate threat modeling and seamless deployment.
We will then dive into the core technologies used by Aptos.
2.4.2 The Move Language
In 2021 the Diem Engineering Team’s article “Why Build Move,[4]” the use of programming languages in blockchain is discussed. In any blockchain, the role of the chosen language is to provide accurate representations of state and transition. State: 1) What is the value of an asset? 2) where is the asset stored? 3) who has ownership of the asset?; Transition: 1) who can create/destroy/move assets? 2) what state transitions are allowed? 3) what are the rules for transferring assets?
Additionally, due to the inherent characteristics of blockchains, for any programming language to be suitable for blockchain use, it must be deterministic, hermetic, and metered:
Deterministic: A blockchain uses a state machine replication (SMR) approach, thus the programming language must ensure determinism to make sure that validators can maintain state consistency. In the case of C, for example, the lack of memory safety is untenable, while a language like Java allows for operations with undefined semantics — making either of these unsuitable for safely expressing state transitions for the SMR approach.
Hermetic: Due to the necessity of maintaining fidelity on the blockchain, it is vital that the inputs to transaction execution are strictly limited. In the case of a blockchain, programs must only be allowed to accept inputs from the global state or the current transaction. Any reference to an external source jeopardizes the ability to form consensus by presenting the possibility for returning differing values for different validators.
Metered: To ensure that the network continues to process transactions, each state transition must be assigned an upper bound on resource consumption. Without defined bounds, the network may stall in the presence of long-running or even non-terminating transactions. This is the impetus for the gas function in many blockchains, which limits the runtime of each individual program and terminates if the limit is breached. This metering functionality is almost never a built-in component of general-purpose languages, thus a specialized programming language is required to provide the metering functionality for blockchains.
To make the execution of the transactions on the Aptos blockchain retain the attributes of deterministic, hermetic, and metered, and ensure the security and reliability of the blockchain network, the Move language, inspired by languages like Rust, introduced the concepts of “resources” and “modules” in its design.
Move is a language using a “resource-based” approach. “Resources” in Move are essentially objects that have certain attributes, and any assets in Move can be represented by or stored within resource. Besides, Move emphasizes resource scarcity. Move modules define the lifetime, storage, and access pattern of every resource. This ensures that resources like Coin are not produced without appropriate credentials, cannot be double spent, and do not disappear.
Modules are libraries that define struct types along with functions that operate on these types and are defined by the account address and module name. A module in Move may either be a library or a program that can create, store, or transfer assets. Move also emphasizes “access control”. There are two types of modules in Move: private modules and public modules. Move ensures that only public module functions may be accessed by other modules. In contrast, private modules cannot be accessed by other modules and can only be mutated within the module that defines it. By distinguishing between private and public modules, the security of Move is further enhanced. In addition, modules will be grouped into a package located at the same address. An owner of this address publishes the package as a whole on-chain, including the bytecode and package metadata. The package metadata determines whether a package can be upgraded or is immutable. The owner can add new functions and resources to the package without changing the existing functions and resources, thus enhancing the programmability and upgradability of smart contracts. In addition to modules, Move also has a type of program called scripts, which accepts any number of arguments but returns nothing. Their primary purpose is to invoke public modules to make a specific global state update.
Through the design of resources and modules, Move not only makes the execution of the transactions on the Aptos blockchain retain the attributes of deterministic, hermetic, and metered but also enables efficient and secure transaction execution. Additionally, it facilitates the future updating of code.
2.4.3 DiemBFT

A consensus mechanism (also known as a consensus protocol or consensus algorithm) refers to the mechanism that ensures the collaborative operation and secure record-keeping in a distributed system. It is the mechanism used to sort and confirm blocks (transactions) among a set of validators.
Different blockchains may adopt different consensus algorithms based on their goals. Bitcoin, for example, uses the Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism, where miners compete to solve a complex mathematical problem, and the first one to solve it gets to add a new block to the blockchain and receives a reward. PoW is the consensus algorithm that underpins decentralization, while the process consumes considerable computational power and energy, making it costly and resource-intensive. On the other hand, the early Proof of Stake (PoS) mechanism operates by adjusting mining difficulty based on the % and duration of tokens staked by a node operator, thus speeding up the process of finding the random number. PoS is less decentralized than PoW. However, by avoiding the computational puzzle, the PoS mechanism reduces energy consumption significantly and speeds up the transaction verification process.
Today, the Aptos blockchain leverages DiemBFT, a BFT consensus protocol. DiemBFT is a production-grade, low-latency BFT engine developed by Aptos. It is a variant of the HotStuff consensus protocol that was designed for Diem. To improve efficiency, the BFT consensus mechanism only requires a specific minimum number of nodes to function effectively. The formula to determine the minimum number of nodes needed to achieve BFT is: n ≥ 3f + 1, where f represents the maximum number of faulty nodes the system can tolerate. For example, if N = 3f+1, 1/3 of the nodes could suffer from byzantine failure, and the entire system will still operate with no issues.
Over the past few years, DiemBFT has gone through four iterations, with the following improvements:
1) Consensus in the common case only requires two network rounds (with round trip times typically less than 300 milliseconds worldwide).
2) Dynamically adjusts to faulty validators through a leader reputation mechanism. The on-chain leader reputation mechanism promotes validators that have successfully committed blocks in a window and demotes validators that are not participating.
In a BFT consensus mechanism, a leader rotation mechanism is typically used, where an elected leader proposes a block of transactions. However, many leader rotation mechanisms do not account for the leader’s state, meaning that a faulty node could be selected as the leader. If too many faulty nodes are chosen as leaders, it can negatively impact the speed and efficiency of the blockchain network.
Therefore, DiemBFT v4 introduced State Machine Replication (SMR), which takes into account the liveness and effectiveness of the nodes. Liveness means tracking the activity of nodes by analyzing the data on-chain and electing leaders from them. In the event that a leader is attacked, compromised, or becomes inactive due to network disruptions, the reputation system ensures that a new leader can be quickly and reliably selected.
Furthermore, the Aptos protocol clearly separates liveness from safety. No matter if the network is unreachable or the non-safety core is compromised in some way, the chain will not fork as long as the BFT honesty guarantees are upheld. The safety of its consensus protocol has been both audited and formally verified.
Currently, Aptos is working on the next-generation consensus protocol, and in September 2024, Alexander Spiegelman, Head of Research at Aptos Labs, announced that Aptos will soon be launching a next-gen BFT consensus protocol, Raptr, which combines the main Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) techniques to unlock high TPS while preserving Aptos’ optimal theoretical latency. It is expected that Raptr will be deployed in two phases.
2.4.4 Block-STM
When we describe the performance of public blockchains, the two commonly used metrics are Throughput and Finality. Throughput refers to the number of transactions a blockchain can process per second, while Finality refers to the time measured from when a client creates and submits a transaction until another party confirms the transaction is committed.
As of November 12, 2024, after its mainnet launch, Aptos processed more than 12,000 transactions per second and more than 300M transactions per day at its peak, with a latency of less than 1 second. Besides, it has never encountered delays or network downtime. Theoretically, Aptos can achieve up to 160,000 TPS.
These impressive statistics are a direct result of Aptos’ superior transaction processing architecture:
1) Decoupling the consensus protocol from the execution pipeline: The consensus protocol agrees on a proposed transaction ordering. In a separate protocol and outside of the critical path, validators execute the transactions and have an agreement on the final transaction ordering and execution results. By eliminating the co-dependencies that come with combining consensus and execution, higher throughput and lower latency are achieved. Aptos Labs is focusing its efforts on this decoupling for their next protocol iteration, which is on track to be integrated into testnet later this year.
2) Block-STM Parallel Engine: Aptos uses a highly efficient, multi-threaded, in-memory parallel execution engine called Block-STM. STM stands for Software Transactional Memory, a new approach to engineering that supports flexible transactional programming of synchronization procedures.
On Ethereum, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is single-threaded, with only one core to process transactions. When there is a surge in network activity, a large number of transactions can pile up, and it takes longer to process them. To address this issue, next-gen blockchains like Solana have adopted multi-threaded parallel processing. Aptos also uses a multi-threaded parallel execution engine to process transactions. According to the current tests, under low contention, Block-STM achieves 16x speedup over sequential execution with 32 threads.
Aptos implemented Block-STM in safe Rust in the Aptos open-source codebase, relying on Rayon, Dashmap, and ArcSwap crates for concurrency. Besides, it evaluated the system with non-trivial peer-to-peer Move transactions. In Figure 2–3 below, every block contains 10k transactions and the number of accounts determines the level of conflicts and contention. Figure 2–3 shows that the transaction throughput varies with different thread counts and account numbers.
Figure 2–3 Block-STM Performance with Different Contention Levels[5]

As seen in the figure above, the transaction throughput for sequential execution is not affected by the number of threads, with a consistent throughput of 10,000 TPS. In contrast, Block-STM achieves 4x, 11x, and 16x speedup over sequential execution with 4, 16, and 32 threads, respectively. It can be seen that the parallel engine significantly boosts transaction speed. As the number of users increases, the advantage of using 32 threads becomes more apparent, enabling a higher transaction throughput.
3) Optimized Authenticated Data Structures: One challenge is that while authenticating the ledger state (e.g., account balances, smart contracts, etc.), in-memory Merkle trees are efficient at small scale. However, writing large Merkle trees to persistent storage is a bottleneck. Aptos is designing its authenticated data structures to be database-friendly by exploring higher branching factors, access pattern-optimized caching, and careful versioning.
2.4.5 State Synchronization
State sync is the protocol that allows non-validator peers to distribute, verify, and persist this blockchain data and ensures that all peers in the ecosystem are synchronized. Most blockchains today are structured hierarchically, with a set of active validators at the heart of the network. The validators grow the blockchain by executing transactions, producing blocks, and achieving consensus. The rest of the peers in the network (e.g., fullnodes and clients) replicate the blockchain data produced by the validators (e.g., blocks and transactions).
Figure 2–4 Aptos Node Networks[6]

Figure 2–4 above shows that the validators are interconnected, and in addition to them, there are fullnodes, clients, and other non-validator nodes responsible for various functions. In this process, state synchronization plays a crucial role in the sound operation of the blockchain.
1) Data correctness: State sync is responsible for verifying the correctness of all blockchain data during synchronization. This prevents malicious peers and adversaries in the network from modifying, censoring, or fabricating transaction data and presenting it as valid.
2) User experience: When new transactions are executed by validators, state sync is responsible for propagating the data to peers and clients. If state sync is slow or unreliable, peers will perceive long transaction processing delays, artificially inflating the time to finality.
3) Relationship with consensus: Validators that crash or fall behind the rest of the validator set rely on state sync to bring them back up to speed. If state sync cannot process transactions as quickly as they are executed by consensus, crashed validators will never be able to recover. Moreover, new validators will never be able to start participating in consensus and fullnodes will never be able to sync to the latest state.
4) Implications on decentralization: Having a quick, efficient, and scalable state sync protocol allows for: (i) faster rotations of an active validator set, as validators can move in and out of consensus more freely; (ii) more potential validators to choose from in the network; (iii) more fullnodes to come online quickly and without having to wait long periods of time; and (iv) lower resource requirements, increasing heterogeneity. All of these factors increase decentralization in the network and help to scale the blockchain in size and geography.
To enable more efficient state synchronization, Aptos adopts the following measures:
1) Supporting a spectrum of different state synchronization protocols that tradeoff CPU and network bandwidth. Nodes can select the most suitable protocol based on their needs, encouraging more nodes to join the Aptos network.
2) In order to support inexpensive fullnodes, Aptos has a protocol that can sync transactions and their executed results signed by a quorum of validators that allows a node to skip the computation at the cost of higher networking throughput and directly update the ledger state from the executed results.
3) Instead of having to download a chain of blocks to get to the latest ledger as most blockchains do, a client can use the top-level transaction accumulator to get the latest committed transaction. This also allows for inexpensive pruning of previous transactions and ledger history if desired.
Through the implementation of state sync, Aptos has improved throughput by 10x and latency by 3x. Besides, peers can validate and synchronize over 10k TPS with sub-second latency in Aptos today.
2.4.6 Security Design
The Aptos blockchain aims to bring mainstream adoption to Web3 and solve real-world problems with a decentralized ecosystem of applications. To reach billions of Internet users, the Web3 user experience must be safe. Given the frequent occurrences of fraud in the blockchain space, measures need to be implemented to increase the security of user transactions:
1) Transaction Viability Protection
Signing a transaction means that the signer authorizes the transaction to be committed and executed by the blockchain. Occasionally, users may sign transactions unintentionally or without fully considering all the ways in which their transactions might be manipulated. To mitigate this risk, the Aptos blockchain constrains the viability of every transaction and protects the signer from unbounded validity. There are currently three different protections provided by the Aptos blockchain — the sender’s sequence number, a transaction expiration time, and a designated chain identifier.
A transaction’s sequence number can only be committed exactly once for each sender’s account. As a result, senders can observe that if the current account sequence number is ≥ the sequence number of a transaction t, then either t has already been committed or t will never be committed (as the sequence number used by t has already been consumed by another transaction).
The blockchain time advances with high precision and frequency (typically sub-second), If the blockchain time exceeds the expiration time of transaction t, then similarly, either t has already been committed or t will never be committed.
Every transaction has a designated chain identifier to prevent malicious entities from replaying transactions between different blockchain environments.
2) Key Rotation & Hybrid Models of Custody
Aptos accounts support key rotation, an important feature that can help reduce the risks associated with private key compromise, long-range attacks, and future advances that might break existing cryptographic algorithms. In addition, Aptos accounts are also flexible enough to enable new hybrid models of custody. In one such model, a user can delegate the ability to rotate the account’s private key to one or more custodians and other trusted entities. A Move module can then define a policy that empowers these trusted entities to rotate the key under specific circumstances. For example, the entities might be represented by a k-out-of-n multi-sig key held by many trusted parties and offer key recovery services to prevent user key loss. Moreover, while many wallets support various key recovery schemes, such as backing up private keys to cloud infrastructure, multi-party computation, and social recovery, they are typically implemented without blockchain support. In contrast, supporting key management functionality at the Aptos blockchain layer provides full transparency of all key-related operations.
3) Pre-Signing Transaction Transparency
Today, wallets provide very little transparency about the transactions they sign. As a result, users are often easily tricked into signing malicious transactions that may steal funds and have devastating consequences.
To address this, the Aptos ecosystem provides services for transaction pre-execution: a precautionary measure that describes to users (in human-readable form) the outcomes of their transactions prior to signing. In addition, Aptos also enables wallets to dictate constraints on transactions during execution. Violating these constraints will result in the transactions being aborted, to further protect users from malicious applications or social engineering attacks.
With these security designs, Aptos is able to provide users with a safer environment for using the blockchain.
Summary:
From a team perspective, Aptos has deep ties to Diem (formerly known as Libra) and Novi, which were developed by Meta. After Meta faced regulatory pressure and was forced to abandon its blockchain endeavors, several core members of the original dev team chose to build Aptos. In a sense, Aptos can be seen as one of the heirs to Meta’s blockchain legacy. As one of the leading software development companies, Meta has a strong talent pool with excellent academic backgrounds and reliable technical development capabilities. With the continuous growth of Aptos, its development will be backed by a solid team.
In terms of funding, as of November 7, 2024, Aptos has gone through six funding rounds. Before its mainnet launch in 2022, Aptos secured $350M in funding at a valuation of $2.75B. Afterward, it closed four strategic funding rounds with undisclosed amounts. Its investors are top-tier crypto VCs such as Binance Labs, Dragonfly Capital, a16z, Multicoin Capital, Circle, and Coinbase Ventures. The latest funding round was closed on September 19, 2024. Therefore, it can be expected that the Aptos team is now rather well-funded.
From a product and technical perspective, Aptos aims to build a scalable, secure, reliable, and upgradable smart contract platform. The decentralized foundation for a secure, scalable, and upgradeable Web3 environment that Aptos uses are the Move programming language, the DiemBFT consensus algorithm, the Block-STM parallel execution engine, and an efficient node synchronization scheme. While focusing on scalability and security, Aptos has made some trade-offs in terms of decentralization. Although the number of nodes in the network is small and the entry barriers are high, posing the centralization risk, the performance advantages of Aptos are apparent. After its mainnet launch, Aptos processed more than 12,000 transactions per second and more than 300M transactions per day at its peak, with a latency of less than 1 second. Besides, it has never encountered delays or network downtime, which proves its efficiency and reliability in processing transactions. Additionally, in terms of transaction costs, Aptos has significantly reduced gas fees for users, thus offering more space for the development of DeFi and other sectors in its ecosystem.
3. Development Trajectory
3.1 Accomplished Milestones
Table 3–1 Milestones Accomplished by Aptos
3.2 Current State
3.2.1 Key Metrics
Figure 3–1 Aptos Daily Tx Count[7]
Figure 3–2 Aptos Daily Active Addresses
Figure 3–3 Aptos Key Metrics — 1
Figure 3–4 Aptos Key Metrics — 2
According to Dune Analytics, as of 10:00 AM on November 11, 2024, there are 33,671,757 active addresses and 1,909,381,503 txs on Aptos. Over the past 30 days, the number of active addresses sat at 8,184,230, accounting for ~24.30% of the total address count. Since the beginning of 2024, the number of active addresses has amounted to 25,084,036, which makes up ~74.50% of the total. This data shows that Aptos has a strong user retention rate, indicating good user engagement and active participation within its ecosystem. Aptos has shown consistent growth in network usage since its mainnet launch in October 2022. Notably, in Q4 2024, there has been a significant surge in daily active addresses, with a similar upward trend observed in the tx count. In addition, due to the popularity gained by some ecosystem projects such as Tapos (a blockchain-based game), Aptos saw two peaks in the tx count in 2024 — one in May and another in August. On August 15, 2024, the daily tx count reached 326,972,362 txs, setting a new record for the highest daily tx count on Layer 1s ever recorded by Aptos. The peak throughput was close to 13,000 TPS. Despite this massive surge in transactions, the Aptos network did not experience any delays in producing blocks, demonstrating its exceptional network performance in handling a large number of transactions in parallel.
3.2.2 Ecosystem
As a Layer 1 blockchain, Aptos benefits from excellent network performance and has nurtured an engaging ecosystem.
As of November 11, 2024, there are 192 projects built on Aptos, covering 16 verticals, of which there are 49 DeFi projects, 48 infrastructure projects, 28 crypto wallets, 25 gaming projects, 18 social projects, and 16 NFT tooling projects, including several high-profile projects that have garnered significant market attention. Based on the number of projects across these sectors, the Aptos ecosystem is still in the early to mid stages of development, with a current focus on building infrastructure. As its ecosystem grows, more projects and use cases are expected to emerge, and the ecosystem will have greater potential for growth.
Table 3–2 Aptos Ecosystem Landscape[8]
Aptos has been actively advancing collaborations with and providing support to its ecosystem projects. It has provided new versions of the Move language, a new code compiler, a code formatter, a development suite, a new Aptos token standard, a new Wallet Adapter Standard, and more, thus helping dev teams in the Aptos ecosystem better leverage their unique advantages.
Additionally, the Aptos Foundation introduced the Aptos Grant Program and the Aptos Code Collision Hackathon. There are now four categories of the Grant Program that can be applied for: “Original Ideas”, “Idea Speakers”, “Gasless Transactions”, and “Strengthening Defense”, helping dev teams turn and monetize their ideas into blockchain projects from scratch. As of November 2024, there are more than 200 grant recipients, such as Thala Labs, Pontem Wallet, Merkle Trade, Mercato, Wapal, and Aptos Arena.
In addition to actively nurturing the ecosystem, thanks to the abundant resources earned by its core members (who are former Meta employees), Aptos has also been maintaining strong partnerships with Internet companies and Web2 enterprises around the world such as Amazon, Alibaba, Google, NBCUniversal, Microsoft, Brevan Howard, SK Telecom, Boston Consulting Group, and South Korea’s Lotte. Additionally, Aptos has fostered good relationships with U.S. regulatory bodies. In June 2024, the CFTC named Aptos co-founder and CEO Mo Shaikh to its subcommittee on digital assets.
3.2.3 Community
Table 3–3 Aptos Community
As of November 11, 2024, Aptos owns a large community, where its Twitter followers are rather active in liking and replying to tweets posted by Aptos; the number of members on Discord servers and Telegram is also large, and their discussions mainly revolve around the ecosystem growth and the $APT tokenomics model. The Aptos Forum also sees high levels of activity, with discussions centering around the current state of the Aptos protocol, upcoming technical upgrades, and its future direction of development.
3.3 Roadmap
Aptos has not yet disclosed a detailed roadmap. According to responses from its team members in the community, there are no plans to release a roadmap in the near future. However, they will continue to provide real-time updates on the protocol development through community channels.
At present, the dev work of the Aptos blockchain has been largely completed. Moving forward, the focus will likely shift toward network upgrades. The primary direction for the future growth of Aptos will probably center around growing the ecosystem and strengthening partnerships.
Summary:
From a project development perspective, since its inception, Aptos has been gaining momentum, especially since Q3 2024. The number of active addresses has been steadily increasing with strong user retention, and the tx count has seen significant growth. On August 15, 2024, it set a record for processing over 300M transactions in a single day, with peak transaction throughput approaching 13,000 TPS, further validating the impressive performance of the Aptos blockchain. Aptos has been sparing no effort to cultivate its ecosystem. At present, protocols running in the Aptos ecosystem cover different verticals such as DeFi, gaming, and social. At the same time, Aptos is actively maintaining strong relationships with Web2 enterprises and regulatory bodies, with collaborations with companies like Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Amazon, South Korea’s Lotte, and SKT. Additionally, at the end of October 2024, the native USDT (Tether) officially went live on Aptos, which is expected to bring more liquidity to Aptos and unlock greater potential of the Aptos ecosystem.
4. Tokenomics
4.1 Supply
4.1.1 $APT Allocation [9]
The native token of Aptos is $APT, which is an inflationary token and was launched on the mainnet in October 2022. The initial total supply is 1,000,000,000. Initially, the annual inflation rate for $APT is 7%, with this rate gradually decreasing over time until it reaches a minimum of 3.25% after 50 years. These newly minted tokens will be used to reward the current and future node operators and $APT stakers to maintain the sound operation of the network. As of November 11, 2024, the total supply of $APT stands at 1,125,360,719, of which 520,057,351 has been put into circulation, accounting for 46.2% of the total supply.
Table 4–1 Initial Token Distribution[10]
Distribution Schedule for the Community and the Aptos Foundation
The Community (51.02%) and Foundation (16.5%) allocations are designated for ecosystem-related items, such as grants, incentives, and other community growth initiatives. Some of the tokens have been allocated to projects building on the Aptos protocol and will be granted upon the completion of certain milestones. A majority of these tokens (410,217,359.767) are held by the Aptos Foundation, and a smaller portion (100,000,000) are held by Aptos Labs. These tokens are anticipated to be distributed over a ten-year period:
1) 125,000,000 $APT available initially to support ecosystem projects, grants, and other community growth initiatives now and in the future for the Community category;
2) 5,000,000 $APT available initially to support the Aptos Foundation initiatives for the Foundation category;
3) 1/120 of the remaining tokens for the community and the Foundation are anticipated to unlock each month for the next 10 years.
Distribution Schedule for Core Contributors and Investors
The Core Contributor (19%) and Investor (13.48%) allocations are subject to a four-year lock-up schedule, excluding staking rewards if applicable, from mainnet launch that unlocks according to the following schedule:
1) No $APT available for the first twelve months;
2) 3/48ths of such tokens unlock on the 13th month after mainnet launch and each month thereafter up to and including the 18th month;
3) 1/48th of the tokens unlock each month thereafter beginning on the 19th month after mainnet launch so that all such tokens are unlocked on the four-year anniversary of mainnet launch.
It should be noted that according to the estimated $APT supply schedule, both unlocked (i.e., tokens that are available for distribution) and locked (i.e., not available for distribution) tokens can be staked. Hence, most of the tokens on the network are staked.
Figure 4–1 Estimated $APT Supply Schedule
According to Figure 4–1, more than 50% of the initial total supply goes to the community. However, most of the tokens are now still held by the Foundation to drive the growth of the ecosystem. Besides, since both locked and unlocked tokens can be staked, and $APT stakers can earn a portion of newly minted $APT tokens, the % of the community allocation to the total $APT supply will gradually decrease. Overall, $APT tokens are now distributed in a rather centralized manner (mostly held by the Foundation), which could pose challenges for the future participation of smaller token holders in the ecosystem.
4.2 Utility
$APT, as the utility and governance token of Aptos, has the following use cases:
1) The Aptos network operates on a PoS consensus algorithm where validators need to have a minimum required amount of staked $APT tokens to participate in transaction validation and earn block rewards.
2) As a participant in the Aptos ecosystem, once users have staked $APT tokens, they can vote on governance proposals, which include decisions related to network parameters, marketing strategies, ecosystem growth, and technical upgrades.
3) Users must pay transaction fees in $APT when executing transactions on the Aptos blockchain.
4) For rewarding ecosystem participants and community contributors.
4.2.1 Node Networks
The Aptos consensus mechanism uses PoS combined with a unique BFT consensus protocol for validators to collectively process transactions.
Figure 4–2 Aptos Node Map[11]
The Aptos blockchain distinguishes two types of fullnodes: validator nodes and fullnodes. While both types of nodes share the same code, they differ in their roles and responsibilities. Fullnodes replicate the entire state of the blockchain by synchronizing with upstream participants, e.g., other fullnodes or validator nodes. Besides, they connect directly to validator nodes and offer scalability alongside DDoS mitigation. However, fullnodes do not participate in consensus, and any third-party blockchain explorers, wallets, exchanges, and dApps can run a local fullnode. When a transaction is submitted to the Aptos blockchain, validator nodes run a distributed consensus protocol, execute the transaction, and store the transaction and the execution results on the blockchain. Users must stake the required minimum amount to join the validator set. Moreover, they can only stake up to the maximum stake amount. The current required minimum for staking is 1M $APT tokens and the maximum is 50M $APT tokens.
Figure 4–3 $APT Staking Stats
As of November 12, 2024, there are 150 validator nodes in the Aptos network, running in 47 cities in 23 countries. They have staked 909,136,163 $APT, accounting for 80.78% of the initial total supply. It can be seen that there is now still a small number of validator nodes in Aptos, which may introduce centralization risks. However, they are operated around the globe, somewhat ensuring the security of the Aptos network.
4.2.2 Delegated Staking
In April 2023, Aptos introduced delegated staking, which is a new feature allowing users to reap staking rewards without requiring them to serve as validators for the blockchain’s transactions. Besides, it also enhances the decentralization and security of the network.
Figure 4–4 Delegated Staking
Participants can stake $APT in the Aptos Explorer. After opening the Validators interface (in Figure 4–4), users can click on “Delegation Nodes” to browse a dropdown list showing the active validator nodes and their detailed information such as the delegated amount, # of delegators, commission, and rewards earned. If $APT token holders click the button to the left of a staking pool address, they will be able to view more detailed information about the staking pool. This includes the compound rewards (which represent the APR that accrue on staked $APT), the amount of rewards earned by this staking pool so far, rewards performance, etc. At present, the compound rewards earned on the stakes to different staking pools are ~7% APR. $APT holders can make an informed decision about which validator node to delegate their tokens to. Once they have chosen the preferred validator, they can click the “Stake” button on the right side to proceed with the delegated staking process.
Additionally, users can choose from several staking interfaces created by Aptos’ partners (e.g., wallets, staking portals). In this way, they can receive liquid staking tokens (LSTs) to perform more DeFi operations. Aptos’ partners who have created staking interfaces include Tortuga, Ditto, Thala, and others.
4.2.3 Governance
By staking $APT, Aptos community members can create and vote on proposals.
At present, to create a proposal, the required minimum for staking is 1M $APT tokens. Besides, the stake has to be locked up for 14 days and after the end of the 3-day voting period. However, any participant who stakes $APT can vote on governance proposals. Once $APT tokens are staked, the staker will receive a voter key, which represents the voting power of the token holder and can be used for voting, stored by a custodian, or delegated to other voters. Voting power is calculated based on the current epoch’s active stake of the proposer or voter’s backing stake pool.
On Aptos, a public blockchain, there are not many protocol decisions that can be made through governance and voting, mostly revolving around technical upgrades. The following describes the scope of the proposals for the Aptos on-chain governance:
1) Changes to the blockchain parameters, for example, the epoch duration, and the minimum required and maximum allowed validator stake.
2) Changes to the core blockchain code.
3) Upgrades to the Aptos Framework modules for fixing bugs or for adding or enhancing the Aptos blockchain functionality.
4) Deploying new framework modules.
As of November 12, 2024, a total of 116 governance proposals have been submitted on Aptos Governance, of which 1 proposal is currently in the voting phase, 7 proposals failed because there were not enough votes, 1 proposal was rejected (AIP-52: Automated Account Creation for Sponsored Transactions was initially rejected but was later re-submitted and passed), and 107 proposals have been passed and executed on-chain.
So far, some of the most important governance proposals on Aptos[12] include increasing block gas limit to account for concurrency increase, enabling the multisig prologue check, reducing stake lockup duration & governance voting duration, enabling yearly reward rate decrease, enabling fee payer, enabling delegated staking, implementing decrease in staking rewards, enabling keyless accounts, and changing the storage format. It can be seen that most of the governance proposals revolve around improving the network performance of Aptos, enriching the use cases of the Aptos ecosystem, and lowering the thresholds to submit/vote on proposals.
Summary:
From a tokenomics perspective, $APT plays a dual role in the Aptos ecosystem, providing both utility and governance capabilities. Users can use $APT tokens to participate in network consensus, vote on proposals, pay for the gas fees, and drive the growth of the Aptos ecosystem. At present, most of the initial total supply of $APT is held by the Aptos Foundation and is designated for ecosystem-related items, such as grants, incentives, and other community growth initiatives. This allocation manifests Aptos’ strong focus on the long-term growth of its ecosystem.
5. Sector Analysis
5.1 Sector Overview
Aptos runs in the public blockchain sector.
Public blockchains are a core piece of infrastructure in the crypto space and boast considerable room for growth. Therefore, an increasing number of users and funds have been flowing into the sector, making the competition among public blockchains very intense. The development of public blockchains can be roughly divided into three phases:
Phase 1 (2008–2013): Following the release of the Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin gained significant popularity, leading to the emergence of many “altcoins” aiming to improve on Bitcoin and the first-gen public blockchains represented by Bitcoin.
Phase 2 (2014–2017): Ethereum was the first blockchain to support smart contracts and dApps with Turing completeness. Besides, the launch of NFT projects such as CryptoKitties allowed users to witness the use case of blockchain. Ethereum, with its strong first-mover advantage, has cultivated a prosperous ecosystem, with other public blockchains emerging during this period such as NEO, QTUM, and EOS.
Phase 3 (2018 — Present): Various consensus algorithms and validation mechanisms have facilitated the launch of many high-performance, low-cost public blockchains, represented by BSC, Solana, and Avalanche.
In the current phase, three main trends have emerged: 1) the continuous launch of different Ethereum Layer 2 solutions; 2) the development of monolithic blockchains leveraging new technologies, such as Aptos and Sui; 3) the development of blockchains tailored for meeting specific needs, such as privacy-focused blockchains and modular blockchains.
The fundamentals of a public blockchain can be analyzed from the following three perspectives:
1) Consensus Algorithm, which determines whether or not a blockchain is decentralized and censorship-resistant. The consensus algorithm used by a public blockchain can determine its network security. Users tend to lock their funds on blockchains they perceive to be the most secure, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum instead of Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin. How to design an efficient consensus algorithm is a significant challenge for most public blockchains, and their consensus mechanisms also determine their core competitiveness. For example, although EOS was once as popular as Ethereum, it eventually lost favor due to severe centralization among its nodes.
2) Technical Architecture, i.e., whether a public blockchain is able to achieve high performance. This revolves around the Blockchain Trilemma, which was proposed by Vitalik Buterin, the Founder of Ethereum. He believes that the blockchain trilemma consists of three attributes: decentralization, security, and scalability. The main idea of the blockchain trilemma is that by using so-called simple methods, a blockchain cannot be simultaneously decentralized, secure, and scalable. For example, Ethereum and Bitcoin sacrifice decentralization in favor of scalability and security. Next-gen public blockchains such as Solana prioritize scalability while compromising on decentralization and security.
3) Ecosystem Prosperity, whether a public blockchain can onboard a large number of developers to build and deploy protocols on the blockchain, thus nurturing an engaging ecosystem. Public blockchains are just a piece of infrastructure and need a large number of developers, ecosystem projects, and users to help them capture value. The more developers there are and the more prosperous the ecosystem, the larger the number of active users, leading to a significant increase in marginal returns.
The public blockchain sector has gone through several bull and bear runs, as well as the evolution of blockchain technology. The demand and understanding for public blockchains have become increasingly clear. It is evident that the consensus algorithm and performance of a public blockchain are the roots that allow its ecosystem to thrive. The prosperity of the ecosystem is the fruit that grows from these roots. To be qualified as an outstanding public blockchain, the underlying technology must be robust enough to yield good results, and at the same time, these results must be remarkable enough to gain market recognition.
5.2 Competitor Comparison
The competition among public blockchains is now rather fierce. At present, the position of Ethereum in the public blockchain sector remains unshakable. Besides, it strives to improve network efficiency and scalability through the ETH 2.0 upgrade and Layer 2 solutions. Among next-gen blockchains, Solana and BSC have also onboarded many talented dev teams to their ecosystems and boasted a large user base with their respective advantages. Additionally, among blockchains developed by former Meta employees, Sui launched its mainnet in May 2023, and Linera is still under active development. In contrast, Aptos has gained a first-mover advantage to nurture a robust ecosystem by launching its mainnet earlier than Sui and Linera.
To provide a more comprehensive view of the competitive landscape of the public blockchain sector where Aptos operates, the following three blockchains will be selected for comparison:
Ethereum: A decentralized, open-source blockchain platform allowing developers to build and deploy dApps and smart contracts. Founded in 2014, Ethereum introduced the concepts of Turing completeness and smart contracts, bringing programmability to the blockchain and enabling the development of dApps on the platform. With the largest number of developers and the most prosperous ecosystem, Ethereum is likely to remain a formidable competitor for any blockchain in the short term. Using Ethereum as a benchmark helps us better evaluate the fundamentals and the competitive landscape of Aptos in the public blockchain sector.
Solana: A high-performance blockchain that can achieve a peak throughput of up to 100,000 TPS. Founded in 2017, Solana has developed 8 key technologies: Proof of History (PoH), TowerBFT (a PoH-optimized version of PBFT), Turbine (a block propagation protocol), Gulf Stream, Sealevel (parallel smart contracts run-time), Pipelining, Cloudbreak (Horizontally-Scaled Accounts Database), and Archivers (distributed ledger storage). By leveraging these technologies, Solana significantly improves the network performance and gains a strong competitive edge over other next-gen blockchains. After recovering from a challenging bear market, Solana has proven its resilience and value, positioning it as a strong contender with the potential to rival Ethereum. Solana is one of the key competitors to Aptos.
Sui: The dev team behind Sui (Mysten Labs) was founded by key executives from Meta’s Novi Research and lead architects of the Diem blockchain and Move programming language. Besides, it is backed up by a strong lineup of VCs such as a16z, FTX Ventures, and Jump Crypto. Sui aims to build a high-performance and low-latency blockchain. Sui and Aptos share great similarities in many regards. For example, both Aptos and Sui utilize Move, a Rust-based programming language, for parallel execution. Therefore, Sui is the most direct competitor to Aptos.
In Table 5–1, we will compare these blockchains from different perspectives (e.g., team, funding, consensus, network performance, node distribution, ecosystem, and FDV).
Table 5–1 Competitor Comparison
From a team & funding perspective, despite the significant technological innovations and potential of next-gen blockchains like Aptos and Sui, Ethereum and Solana have substantial advantages as early pioneers in the blockchain space.
Ethereum currently underperforms Solana, Aptos, and Sui in terms of network performance, which has been a persistent and acute issue in recent years. However, through the development of its Layer 2 solutions and sharding designs, Ethereum has gradually been able to meet the demands of some projects. Yet, it still falls far short of meeting the needs of dApps that need to process a large number of transactions with low latency. When comparing Solana with Sui and Aptos, there is no clear performance advantage among them. However, Aptos currently outshines in terms of the stability of processing many transactions in parallel, which will contribute to the growth of its ecosystem projects.
From the perspective of node distribution, after transitioning to a PoS consensus mechanism, Ethereum has seen a surge in the number of validators, with over 1M validators currently in operation, making Ethereum the most decentralized L1 blockchain. In contrast, the number of validators in Solana has significantly dropped. Moreover, the performance of leaders greatly determines whether the consensus can be successfully reached in the network, meaning that if a leader is attacked or goes offline, it could potentially compromise the security of the entire network. Both Aptos and Sui are still in the early stages of development, with a high threshold for onboarding validators, which introduces certain centralization risks.
From the perspective of the ecosystem landscape, Ethereum and Solana are leading the trends in liquid staking infrastructure and user-oriented dApp ecosystems, respectively. Aptos and Sui, in comparison, still lag significantly behind the former two in terms of ecosystem prosperity. However, when comparing Aptos and Sui, Aptos holds a certain advantage and is now focused on building infrastructure, showing potential for significant growth in the future.
In terms of FDV, when comparing Aptos and Sui, we believe that the FDV of Aptos may be somewhat undervalued. As the Aptos ecosystem continues to grow and if it can incubate projects that capture significant market attention and create hype, Aptos has significant potential for growth in the future.
Summary:
From the perspective of the sector, the public blockchain sector where Aptos runs has gone through several bull and bear runs, as well as the evolution of blockchain technology. The demand and understanding for public blockchains have become increasingly clear. It is evident that the consensus algorithm and performance of a public blockchain are the roots that allow its ecosystem to thrive. The prosperity of the ecosystem is the fruit that grows from these roots. To be qualified as an outstanding public blockchain, the underlying technology must be robust enough to yield good results, and at the same time, these results must be remarkable enough to gain market recognition. Currently, Aptos has laid a solid foundation for cultivating a thriving ecosystem with its well-designed technical architecture, and it has nourished the seeds through its well-designed tokenomics model and ecosystem growth plans. It now waits for the subsequent growth of ecosystem projects to produce impressive results. From a competitive landscape perspective, Ethereum and Solana are still in the top tier. Aptos, along with Sui, are orders of magnitude behind them in many respects (except for network performance). Aptos and Sui were both founded by former Meta employees and developed using the same programming language (Move), with comparable network performance. However, the two blockchains have different focuses in ecosystem development, which has caused some divergence in market perception. We believe that as Aptos continues to nurture its ecosystem and as more ecosystem projects gain traction, Aptos is expected to gain more significant growth.
6. Risks
1) Competition Risk: Aptos, Sui, and Linera, which are blockchains developed by former Meta employees, share great similarities in terms of the team, technology, and investors. Therefore, the competition among them is fairly intense.
2) Centralization Risk: According to the Aptos whitepaper and its blog posts, it is designed with scalability, safety, reliability, and upgradeability, without specifically mentioning decentralization. Therefore, it implies that Aptos has chosen to prioritize scalability and performance at the expense of decentralization.
3) Steep Learning Curve: The Move language is a new smart contract programming language, requiring developers to invest time and resources in learning. Moreover, deploying and migrating protocols to Aptos also entails time and cost.

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- Investment Risks and Disclaimers -
This report is only for information purposes and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Please do not make any investment decisions based on this report. First.VIP and authors of this report are not responsible for any results of your investment.This report is drafted from the date indicated. As market or economic conditions may change from time to time, the content of this report may not necessarily reflect such changes. The graphs, charts, and other visual aids are provided for information purposes solely, none of which should be relied upon as investment decisions. First.VIP will not assist anyone in making investment decisions and no graph, chart, or other visual aid can capture all of the factors and variables required to make such decisions.Some of the statements in this report may contain First.VIP’s future assumptions and other forward-looking views. With known & unknown risks and uncertainties, actual results, performance, or events may differ materially from the views and assumptions expressed in the statements.Any speculations, forecasts, and estimates contained in this report are speculative and are based on certain assumptions. These forward-looking statements may prove to be inaccurate and may be affected by inaccurate assumptions, known/unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, most of which are beyond our control. It can be anticipated that some or all of these forward-looking assumptions will not be realized or will differ materially from actual results.
References
Aptos Documentation, https://aptos.dev/enAptos Whitepaper, https://aptos.dev/assets/files/Aptos-Whitepaper-47099b4b907b432f81fc0effd34f3b6a.pdfProject Analysis — Aptos, First.VIPAptos Medium, https://aptoslabs.medium.com/
[1] https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/aptos, data as of November 12, 2024
[2] https://aptoslabs.com/team
[3] Figures 2–1 and 2–2 were captured from https://cauldron.io/.
[4] https://www.diem.com/en-us/blog/why-build-move/
[5]https://medium.com/aptoslabs/block-stm-how-we-execute-over-160k-transactions-per-second-on-the-aptos-blockchain-3b003657e4ba
[6] https://aptos.dev/en/network/blockchain/node-networks-sync
[7] https://dune.com/aptos/aptos-chain-metrics-overview
[8] https://aptosfoundation.org/ecosystem/projects
[9] https://aptosfoundation.org/ecosystem/projects
[10] https://aptosfoundation.org/currents/aptos-tokenomics-overview
[11] Figures 4–2, 4–3, and 4–4 were captured from https://explorer.aptoslabs.com/validators?network=mainnet.
[12] https://governance.aptosfoundation.org/
[13] CoinGecko, data as of November 12, 2024, 3:00 p.m.

#Illuvium $ILV
Illuvium is a blockchain game world based on Immutable X and developed using the Unreal Engine 5. It includes four different types of games. These four games share a unified world view and are developed for different player groups. They are connected through the economic mechanism of the game world, which greatly enriches the players' gaming experience. At present, the game development progress is good, the mechanism and gameplay are well designed, and the game quality has surpassed most of the blockchain games on the market. It is expected that the main games will be launched in public beta within the year, so we choose to pay attention to Illuvium.

$AXL #axelar

Axelar is a cross-chain interoperability project based on cross-chain technology. On top of the concepts of cross-chain and multi-chain, it also proposes an inter-chain concept and is committed to providing a unified development environment for all Web3 applications. . To this end, Axelar developed the Axelar Virtual Machine (AVM) in 2024 and launched a variety of development tools, allowing Axelar to evolve from a cross-chain layer responsible for message and asset transfer to a layer that can program and deploy smart contracts to execute more complex Cross-chain layer of operations. The project is currently developing well, with transaction volume and the number of users growing steadily. If we can rely on the concept of inter-chain to expand an entire ecosystem in the future, we will have a good competitive advantage in this track.

Note: This article was first published on https://first.vip on 2024-02-05
At the time of publication, $PANDORA was trading at 2376
#pandora

Simplified interpretation

Pandora is an NFT fragmentation project launched on February 2. Its core technology is the ERC404 token standard. Users can purchase the project's token of the same name PANDORA on Uniswap V3 to obtain ERC404 tokens, which is equivalent to holding its NFT in fragments - Pandora Replicants. In addition, users can also purchase Pandora Replicants directly on OpenSea. The current price of PANDORA is US$2,375.76, with a 24-hour trading volume of US$5.365 million; the trading volume of Pandora Replicants is 48 ETH.

Note: This research report was first published on the official website of First Class Warehouse on 2024-01-30
$JUP #jupiter #solana
Jupiter is a deal aggregator built on the Solana network. Jupiter was launched in October 2021 and has become the most popular trading front-end for Solana users. It aggregates more than half of Solana's transaction volume. The development of Jupiter's transaction aggregation function is close to the ceiling. The agreement launched the Launchpad platform Jupiter Start and the incubator Jupiter Labs for horizontal expansion. Jupiter has a large user base and resources, and the project quality of the Launchpad platform is guaranteed to a certain extent. And its Jupiter Labs derivatives project has high TVL and trading volume. To sum up, we choose to focus on Jupiter.

#DePin , as a long-standing track in the encryption field, has regained great attention from the market in 2023. In the 2024 outlook reports of Messari, Coinbase, Spartan and other institutions, they all regard DePin as the most popular in the 2024 encryption market. One of several important narratives, unanimously optimistic about its performance in the next bull market.

The current valuation of the entire DePin track is approximately US$9 billion, and Messari estimates that it is expected to grow to US$3.5 trillion in 2028.

👀👇 Let’s give a brief introduction to the industry,

DePin, Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks, decentralized network hardware infrastructure, this concept was proposed by Messari. It aims to bring real-life storage, computing, rendering and other infrastructure to the blockchain using cryptoeconomic incentives.

Note: This article was first published on https://first.vip on 2023-10-20
$BEAMX
Merit Circle (MC) is a decentralized DAO chain game guild built on Ethereum and BSC. Different from traditional chain game guilds, Merit Circle invests in the primary market of chain games, cooperates in game development, and builds chain game market distribution channels. Platforms, infrastructure construction and other methods have gradually expanded to the upper and middle reaches of the chain gaming industry. In summary, this project deserves attention.
Investment Summary [1]
Merit Circle (MC) is a decentralized DAO chain game guild built on Ethereum and BSC. Initially, Merit Circle was a scholarship guild similar to YGG. It also has scholarship business[2], SubDao model[3], etc., but Considering the sustainability and limitations of the scholarship business, and the fact that these businesses are almost suppressed by YGG, we began to transform the structure and positioning of the DAO in March 2022, hoping to build it into a game DAO. Merit Circle divides DAO into multiple sectors (vertical fields). Currently, its main sectors are investment, studio (building and incubating new projects), games (chain game market distribution channel platform) and infrastructure (Beam based on Avalanche Game Chain, the mainnet was launched on August 18 this year), and the game NFT platform Sphere, which is still in the research and development stage, was once one of the four major sectors. Due to market factors, the release was delayed and replaced by the infrastructure sector.

Let’s take a look at some of the data updates for #zkSyncEra last month:

The total zkSync Era lock-up amount increased from approximately US$470 million to approximately US$493 million in November, an increase of approximately 4.9% (L2BEAT data)

In November, the daily trading volume of DEX on zkSync Era decreased from approximately 69.15 million US dollars to approximately 44.68 million US dollars, a decrease of approximately 35.4%; the number of daily active addresses increased from approximately 203,000 to approximately 226,000, an increase of approximately 11.3%; daily transactions The number of transactions decreased from approximately 639,000 to approximately 598,000, a decrease of approximately 6.4% (Artemis data)

The total value of zkSync cross-chain bridge storage (TVB) has reached 2,522,529 ETH, and the number of cross-chain bridge addresses is 2,603,217 (Dune Analytics data)