Aptos, the Solana Killer?

Aptos is the new Layer 1 birth from the ashes of Diem, considered by many the Solana killer.

Disclaimer: the article below wants to be an objective description of the Aptos project, with a few personal thoughts of mine. I am not affiliated with the project, nor I was paid to write this.

What is Aptos?

Aptos is a new generation Layer 1 based on the “Move” programming language with the promise of increased scalability, reliability, security, and usability with respect to other existing blockchain solutions.

Even though it’s not launched yet, it has generated a lot of hype and raised millions of dollars in investments, mostly because of its biological father: Diem (from Meta).

As a matter of fact, when Meta decided to close the Diem initiative to focus on the metaverses some of its employees decided to give new life to the project on their own, founding Aptos Labs.

Who is Aptos Labs?

Aptos Labs is the company behind Aptos, founded by Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, who met during the old days at Meta working on Diem.

With the venture capital market knowledge of Shaikh and blockchain software engineering expertise of Ching, Aptos Labs managed to raise over $350M from the like of Binance Labs, Andreessen Horowitz, FTX and Jump to name a few of the 23 total investors.

What is the “Move” programming language?

Move is an executable bytecode language used to implement custom transactions and smart contracts. It was initially developed by Facebook for its blockchain Diem and it is based on the Rust programming language. One of the most significant abilities of Move is to define custom resource types with semantics inspired by linear logic: a resource can never be copied or implicitly discarded, only moved between program storage locations.

For more resources on Move, check out here.

How does Aptos work?

The blockchain is not in production yet, but tests show that it can process around 130.000 transactions per second without trading-off security or reliability.
How is this possible?

• First, the Aptos blockchain natively integrates and internally uses the Move language for fast and secure transaction execution. The Move prover, a formal verifier for smart contracts written in the Move language, provides additional safeguards for contract invariants and behavior. This focus on security allows developers to better protect their software from malicious entities.

• Second, the Aptos data model enables flexible key management and hybrid custodial options. This, alongside transaction transparency prior to signing and practical light client protocols, provides a safer and more trustworthy user experience.

• Third, to achieve high throughput and low latency, the Aptos blockchain leverages a pipelined and modular approach for the key stages of transaction processing. Specifically, transaction dissemination, block metadata ordering, parallel transaction execution, batch storage, and ledger certification all operate concurrently. This approach fully leverages all available physical resources, improves hardware efficiency, and enables highly parallel execution.

• Fourth, unlike other parallel execution engines that break transaction atomicity by requiring upfront knowledge of the data to be read and written, the Aptos blockchain does not put such limitations on developers. It can efficiently support atomicity with arbitrarily complex transactions, enabling higher throughput and lower latency for real-world applications and simplifying development.

• Finally, the Aptos blockchain is experimenting with future initiatives to scale beyond individual validator performance: its modular design and parallel execution engine support internal sharding of a validator and homogeneous state sharding provides the potential for horizontal throughput scalability without adding additional complexity for node operators.

You can check out the full whitepaper here.

Aptos vs Solana

Aptos is also known as the Solana-killer, whether it is true or not, only time will tell.
The only thing we can say at the moment is that they are both running for the most performant layer 1 throne (50k-65k tps Solana vs 130k tps Aptos), and that Solana has great room for improvement for what concerns its reliability, having had some serious outages earlier this year.

So, is Aptos going to be the Solana killer? Could be, but only on paper at the moment.
Surely the premises are interesting, for example, Aptos implements a redundancy system that aims at making the chain less prone to fail, at the cost of higher hardware requirements though. So, even if a leader node should fail during block validation, another node will step in and take its place.

That being said, Solana will not be passively waiting for competitors to get its market share: the platform is evolving real quick, eating trading volumes of NFTs from Ethereum each day that goes by, and launching interesting initiatives like Solanamobile, establishing itself as a giant in the space.

Curiosity: above in the article, we mentioned the battle between Solana and Aptos as the “most performant layer 1”. As a matter of fact, we know of a layer 2, the Bitcoin Lighting Network, that is theoretically able to process up to 40M tps (check out this tweet from Blockstream’s Adam Black in March)

Where is Aptos at?

As we mentioned previously in this article, Aptos is not ready for production yet, and it is currently running a 4-stage “Aptos Incentivized Testnet” (AIT). At the time of writing, we are at AIT-3.

In this testnet developers and validators are incentivized to participate to stress test the blockchain in exchange for securing a drop of Aptos tokens when the mainnet will be officially launched. The reward for completing all objectives for AIT-3 on time is 800 Aptos.

It is not known when the mainnet will launch, likely in Q1 of 2023.

How much does it cost to run a validator?

The minimum hardware requirements to run a validator/full node are the following:

• CPU:

  • 8 cores, 16 threads

  • 2.8GHz, or faster

  • Intel Xeon Skylake or newer

• Memory: 32GB RAM.

• Storage: 1T SSD with at least 40K IOPS and 200MiB/s bandwidth.

• Networking bandwidth: 1Gbps

We can then identify the following virtual machines on the AWS and Google Cloud platforms that would satisfy such requirements:

• AWS

  • c6id.4xlarge (if use local SSD)

  • c6i.8xlarge + io1/io2 EBS volume with 40K IOPS.

• GCP

  • n2-standard-16 (if use local SSD)

  • n2-standard-32 + pd-ssd with 40K IOPS.

Based on the current prices, running a validator node would cost between $300-$500 / month.

What will the price of Aptos be?

Unfortunately, I do not have the crystal ball, sorry for that.
The tokenomics is still unknown, we don’t know the supply, the emission rate, or how many tokens will be allocated to who at launch.
Don’t get fooled by those saying they know, they do as much as me and you.

Final thoughts

Aptos is for sure a project to keep an eye on.

• The team is qualified and cautious (4-stage AIT)

• VCs have poured money into it to make it grow big

• The technical innovations seem sound and promising

Is it a good investment?
The tokenomics will tell. As with all new projects investing is risky, therefore do only with the money you can afford to lose (not financial advice).

Will it kill Solana?
In my opinion, no. Solana has grown big, despite the issues it faced, and will continue to do so.
The switching cost to move to another chain is not irrelevant, especially since Aptos is not EVM compatible and the Move programming language on the one side will lay the ground for solving common blockchain issues, but on the other will create an entry barrier for projects to deploy on Aptos.

Overall, my personal outlook is positive, but time only will tell if the promises will come true and the market will welcome the new blockchain positively.

Let’s wait for the tokenomics information and the mainnet launch date.