Aptos Lab is a blockchain technology company headquartered in California, USA. It adopts a decentralized office model and has employees all over the world. This article will provide an in-depth introduction to Aptos Lab’s founding team, funding status, technical framework and its core technologies, combined with SEO optimization, to let more people understand this emerging blockchain platform.
team introduction
The founding team members of Aptos Lab are all from top technology companies and research institutions, and have rich experience in blockchain technology development.
Founder and CEO: Mo Shaikh
Mo Shaikh graduated from Hunter College with an accounting degree and received an MBA from the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester. He has worked at institutions such as KPMG, Blackstone and the Boston Consulting Group, focusing on real estate investment analysis and equity investment analysis. In 2017, he founded Meridio, a blockchain-based platform for investing and trading liquid fractions of real estate. From May 2020 to December 2021, he was responsible for strategic partnerships at Meta and Novi. From December 2021 to present, he serves as the founder and CEO of Aptos.
Co-founder and CTO: Avery Ching
Avery Ching holds a PhD in computer engineering from Northwestern University. He has served as a principal software engineer at Yahoo, Facebook, and Novi, focusing on the development of all aspects of blockchain technology. He served as a principal software engineer at Facebook for more than 10 years from September 2011 to December 2021, and was the technical lead of the Novi team, the original Meta-owned encryption platform. From December 2021 to present, he serves as the founder and CTO of Aptos.
Other core members
Yuxuan Hu: Founding team member and software engineer, holds a master's degree in computer science from Harbin Institute of Technology. He has worked at Baidu, Instagram, Novi and Aptos. His main research interests are distributed storage and system efficiency issues.
Alin Tomescu: Founding team member and cryptography scientist, he worked as a research assistant at MIT, focusing on areas such as cryptocurrency and secure communications.
Rati Gelashvili: Founding team researcher, holds a PhD from MIT and has expertise in concurrency, parallel and distributed algorithms.
Josh Lind: Founding team engineer, holds a PhD from Imperial College London and focuses on using trusted hardware to improve security and privacy in large-scale distributed systems.
Aptos has a strong team, including experts from top Internet companies and research institutions. According to information disclosed on LinkedIn, Aptos currently has 64 employees and is expanding rapidly.
Funding status
As of October 18, Aptos Lab has raised more than $350 million in three rounds of funding, according to Crunchbase. Well-known institutions A16Z, FTX Ventures, Jump Crypto and Binance led the investment and are fully funded. In addition, Dragonfly partner Haseeb revealed on Twitter on September 29, 2022 that Dragonfly made a strategic investment in Aptos.
Technical Framework and Vision
Aptos' goal is to build a scalable, secure, trustworthy and upgradeable smart contract platform. This goal implies an understanding and response to the "impossible triangle" problem of public chains, that is, public chains cannot achieve scalability, decentralization, and security at the same time, and can only achieve two of them.
Core technical means
The technical framework of Aptos mainly focuses on the following aspects:
safety
Move Programming Language: Designed for secure resource management and verifiable execution on blockchains.
Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocol: production-grade, low-latency.
Multiple tests: Run a large number of validators in different environments to test the operation of the Move module and Move VM.
Account key recovery and rotation protocol.
Scalability
The consensus protocol is decoupled from transaction execution: the consensus protocol focuses on transaction ordering, while transaction execution focuses on improving computational efficiency.
Block-STM parallel execution engine: achieved over 160,000 transactions per second using 32 cores in testing.
Synchronization status management: fast and flexible, nodes can choose different modes according to needs.
Upgradeability
Blockchain needs to be continuously upgraded to adapt to new needs, and at the same time, the network should not be disrupted by upgrades. Aptos has performed multiple major upgrades over the past few years without any downtime.
Move programming language
Move is a new smart contract programming language originally developed and designed by Facebook for secure, sandboxed, and formally verified programming. The first use case for Move is the Diem blockchain, which provides the basis for its implementation. Aptos emphasizes the safety and flexibility of the language, and the Move ecosystem includes compilers, virtual machines, and many other development tools.
Move is inspired by the Rust programming language, making data ownership explicit in the language through concepts like linear types. Move emphasizes resource scarcity, preservation, and access control. For example, in Solidity, token assets are no different from other numbers. They are all a string of data that can be modified at will. Hackers may attack to modify the number of digital tokens issued to unlimited. In Move, digital tokens are assets with a fixed quantity. It is basically impossible to attack the number of issuances. Digital tokens cannot be copied and can only be transferred.
Conclusion: Aptos Lab has a strong team from top technology companies and research institutions, and has received multiple rounds of financing and is fully funded. Its technical framework and core technical means are designed to solve the "impossible triangle" problem of blockchain and provide a scalable, safe, trustworthy and upgradeable smart contract platform. With the continued expansion of the team and continuous innovation of technology, Aptos is expected to achieve greater breakthroughs in the blockchain field.