Aptos founding engineer Sherry shares the journey of global trading engine technology

Against the backdrop of increasingly fierce competition in the public blockchain space, Aptos is steadily moving towards its strategic positioning as a "global trading engine" through technological innovation and ecosystem expansion. Since first surpassing a total locked value of $1 billion in November last year, Aptos reached $1.03 billion by the end of March. In addition, the market value of stablecoins also surpassed $1 billion for the first time on March 24, a year-on-year increase of over ten times, demonstrating strong ecosystem attractiveness and capital carrying capacity.

To meet the rapidly growing trading demands, the Aptos team continues to advance technologies such as Zaptos and Shardines, accelerating the construction of underlying architecture that supports millions of TPS, and strengthening its core advantages in performance, stability, and user experience.

High-performance public blockchain created by Meta "OG"

Sherry Xiao is one of the early founding engineers of Aptos. Before joining Aptos, she worked as an engineer at Instagram, primarily focusing on scalability architecture. She later joined Meta's Libra/Diem team, where she was responsible for validator nodes and infrastructure development, assisting several institutions in deploying validator nodes.

After the Libra project encountered policy obstacles, the entire team ventured out to start a business in 2022, founding Aptos. Many talents emerged from Facebook's blockchain team; some joined other projects, some joined the crypto teams of investment institutions, and others created their own startup teams.

As an engineer, Sherry believes that the biggest advantage of the Move language compared to other smart contract languages is that it was designed specifically for smart contracts from the start, providing many safeguards in asset management and security, as well as formal verification tools. Move can effectively avoid many common security vulnerabilities and reduce the risk of financial loss. In addition, Move offers innovative features such as dynamic distribution, account abstraction, and permissioned signatures, enabling developers to build more advanced products.

On top of the technical infrastructure, Sherry believes that there is still significant room for improvement in the developer experience and user experience of Web3. Aptos is deeply engaged in ZK-based login solutions and innovations in privacy protection. They recently launched a project in their open-source code repository that can hide transaction details, allowing users to know only the parties involved in the transaction without seeing specific amounts and balances.

In terms of scalability, Aptos's design is very modular, with each module having its own expansion space:

• At the consensus layer, the newly released Raptr is the industry's most advanced consensus algorithm implementation, pushing parallelization to the extreme;
• In terms of implementation, Block-STM technology is also industry-leading, with many newly released public chains and L2 adopting this technology;
• In terms of storage, sharding technology has been implemented, and further research on sharding technology and related caching layers will continue in the future to further enhance system performance.

Ecological Layout: Stablecoins, Trading, and DeFi

The ecological layout of Aptos mainly focuses on several aspects:

1. Infrastructure construction, natively supports the three major stablecoins USDT, USDC, and USDE.
2. Collaborated with financial institutions to launch multiple RWA projects on-chain.
3. Launch an ecological fund to incentivize community building and support different DeFi protocols and projects.
4. Launch the LFM program to assist ecological projects in planning roadmaps, conducting token generation events, connecting resources, obtaining funding, and providing marketing and KOL guidance.

Aptos is the only L1 blockchain platform participating in the Hong Kong e-HKD project and has been actively involved in related discussions. They maintain close communication with banks and government departments in Hong Kong and have many innovative collaborations with Hong Kong Cyberport.

In terms of ecological support, Aptos focuses on transaction-related sectors, including payment, expansion of stablecoin application scenarios, and the DeFi sector. They hope to collaborate deeply with large institutions and partners with distribution channels to explore the combination of gaming and DeFi, as well as the application scenarios of AI agents and trading.

Talent Development: Developer Ecosystem Construction and Collaboration with Universities

Aptos places great importance on cultivating talent in universities. They have in-depth collaborations with blockchain associations from several well-known universities and work with professors to design blockchain courses, allowing students to directly learn Aptos technology. Most of the company's engineers hold doctoral degrees and frequently give presentations at universities to attract outstanding developers to join the community.

Regarding the future development of Web3, Sherry's personal vision and that of the entire team remain focused on the trading and payment sectors. They hope to establish a global financial infrastructure that allows more people to enjoy the conveniences of modern financial systems. They are particularly looking forward to seeing innovative payment projects combined with stablecoins, such as implementing payroll flow payments on Aptos.

Migrating traditional payment software to the blockchain, combined with privacy protection features, can create exciting new scenarios. These innovative applications are the key to truly promoting the widespread adoption of blockchain technology.