Diem Developers Launch New Blockchain

They just announced a new layer 1 blockchain called Aptos, which is “more secure and scalable”.

“Aptos is a new, standalone project to fulfill our vision of delivering the most secure, production-ready blockchain in the world,” reads the project announcement.

Diem Developers Launch Blockchain Aptos

According to the team behind Aptos, while blockchains have come a long way, they still face challenges. In that sense, the Aptos’ idea is to solve problems of trust, security and usability.

According to the announcement, Aptos was designed with an emphasis on absolute security, extensible scalability and credible neutrality.

“We’ve had the luxury of thinking through these issues alongside some of the most brilliant engineers in the world for years. Since leaving Meta (formerly Facebook), we’ve been able to put our ideas into practice, ditch the bureaucracy and build a whole new network from scratch that brings them to fruition,” Aptos CEO Mo Shaikh said in the announcement.

The Aptos blockchain will be built in part on the technology developed in recent years by the team. In addition, the platform will use the Move language, originally developed for Diem. The idea of ​​the project is that it serves as the basis for a secure, scalable and updatable Web3.

In the coming weeks, the Aptos devnet will be launched, providing developers with an ecosystem to explore.

There will then be an incentivized testnet followed by the mainnet, which is slated to launch sometime in 2022. The team further said that it will soon begin announcing some of the partners it has already committed to building with Aptos.

“We will quickly implement many key innovations in performance, functionality, and overall user experience improvements, and leverage our ability to make major upgrades seamlessly in the process,” they concluded.

Focus on NFTs

The founder of Aptos is Avery Ching, an expert in building scalable distributed systems. Ching previously worked at Meta’s Novi cryptocurrency subsidiary. Furthermore, he is credited with co-creating the DiemBFT consensus protocol on the Diem blockchain.

The other founder, Mo Shaikh, is also ex-Novi. But previously, he spent nearly three years as chief strategy officer at ConsenSys.

According to sources heard by CoinDesk, the group is targeting investments of $200 million for a valuation of $2 billion. Andreessen Horowitz and several other crypto venture capital firms are reportedly involved in the deal.

Apparently, the project has been presented to investors as “Libra without Facebook”. According to CoinDesk, the team will target NFTs as a primary starting point.