Disclaimer：This article is written by MEXC community member. This is for industry information sharing only, and does not represent MEXC’s opinions or any investment advice.
During the last bull market, top public chains, like Solana had amazing performance.MEXC listed Solana(SOL/USDT) since the token issued, with the highest gain of SOL/USDT was 34000%.
However,in the beginning of August, $8 million in Solana was stolen from Slope, a company that holds crypto assets for its users. Slope’s centralized server stored seed phrases that belonged to its users. Hackers accessed the server, stole the phrases, and drained wallets，approximately 7,767 wallets have been affected by the exploit. Solana’s sol token, one of the largest cryptocurrencies after bitcoin and ether, fell about 8% in the first two hours after the hack was initially detected, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
Before that, employees from Solana jumped to Aptos, including Austin Virts, former Head of Marketing at Solana.Not only Solana staff but a lot of hardcore Solana proponents jumped ship for Aptos as well.
Aptos, on the other hand, has raised $150 million in a Series A financing round led by Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto. Earlier in March, Aptos also received $200 million in funding from a16z, Tiger Global, and Multicoin Capital, among many other venture capitals. The company is reported to have brought its valuation to more than $2 billion after its recent funding round, which has doubled since March.
MEXC has been deployed in top public chains all the time. Fantom(FTM/USDT) was initially listed on MEXC global, other top public chain projects,like Aptos, will be listed on MEXC in time after issuing. The below chart compares the price changes of the top public chain projects on MEXC from2020 to 2022.
What is Aptos?
Aptos is a proposed Layer 1 blockchain that uses the Move programming language. The cryptocurrency promises users increased scalability, reliability, security and usability.
Aptos is still in the very early stages of planning. It hasn’t generated any Aptos coins yet or published an official white paper. However, crypto experts are already beginning to discuss the Aptos blockchain, and it’s raised millions of dollars from investors. Aptos will be a Layer 1 blockchain built with a Rust-based programming language called Move. Planned features include a parallel execution engine, high-level security features and low transaction costs.
Aptos’s key feature is parallel execution. Most blockchains use a method of transaction ordering called sequential, or serial execution, in which a single chronology of transactions is continually updated: every time you make a trade or buy something, that transaction is added to a single long ledger containing every transaction ever executed on the network and updated via thousands of nodes.
The Aptos blockchain is generating all this hype because of its intriguing past. The blockchain is based on the Diem blockchain initiative (from Meta) that was recently abandoned. The Aptos crypto is being created by Diem developers, and will use the programming language originally created for Diem. It will still focus on Diem’s original goal of creating a scalable, fast blockchain. In addition, it hopes to offer additional features that will make crypto more accessible to average users.
There are several factors contributing to Aptos’ impressive ability to get funding.
- Experienced, reputable founders: One of the main factors behind Aptos’ success is its founders. The co-founders of Aptos Labs have years of experience producing impressive work. Not only do they have a solid reputation for creating crypto and other projects, but they also have a collective background in venture capitalism that’s helped them connect to investors.
- Unique architecture: Venture capitalists are usually on the lookout for the new and original. This is an area where the Aptos blockchain really shines: The combination of Block-STM technology, Move programming and BFT consensus sets it apart from other Layer 1 blockchains looking for funding.
- Impressive performance: Aptos really started to pick up steam after launching their testnets. Users began reporting TPS and time-to-finality rates that blew other cryptos out of the water. With the ability to process up to 160,000 TPS and finalize transactions in less than a second, Aptos has the potential to quickly outrank its competitors.
- Facebook-related background: Aptos’ connection to Diem is another reason that investors feel the company is a solid bet. It’s essentially a continuation of a project that Meta/Facebook launched before pivoting to focus on their “metaverse” instead. Aptos’ origins have investors feeling confident about what the company is offering.
However, Aptos still has many weaknesses:
- First, Aptos is not an EVM chain, and its primary programming language is Move. This will cause many difficulties for new developers who want to develop projects on this new blockchain, especially when the infrastructure to support developers is not much.
- Another disadvantage of non-EVM chains is that users of that chain will have to be exposed to a completely new set of tools, hindering them in the process of exposure and use. This weakness will cause fewer users to use Aptos when they launch the mainnet.
Aptos vs Solana
Different public chains were born , due to the scalability problem of Ethereum.As public chains such as Ethereum and Solana still have their own problems after the full bull-bear transition, the market needs new projects and stories to fill out.The emergence of Libra-based public chains such as Aptos makes VCs and developers on Solana choose to migrate to Aptos.If we put aside the technology, it will essentially be a capital migration .
One of the Aptos blockchain’s main competitors will be Solana, which is currently the hottest high-performance Layer 1 available. So far, both Aptos and Solana have similar levels of speed because they both rely on engines that can run computations in parallel. However, when comparing the Solana and Aptos blockchains, Aptos seems to be more reliable. Solana has been fairly prone to failure, having had notable outages and downgrades.
The Aptos blockchain adds redundancy to its network, rendering it less prone to failure. Each block in Aptos is synced with leader nodes and nearby nodes. In case the leader node fails, one of the other nodes can take over. This results in slightly more computational requirements, so Aptos’ hardware needs are a little larger than Solana’s. Ultimately, Aptos manages more reliability than Solana in exchange for slightly higher hardware requirements.
Can Aptos be the next Solana?
During the last bull market, VCs fully used Solana to earn interest . After Solana’s technology had been broken through, all the VCs, along with the developer team and even employees, began to turn to Aptos.
Aptos has been focusing on driving the growth of their ecosystem. Since Aptos launched their developer testnet in March, millions of transactions have been carried out, tens of thousands of nodes have been put up, and more than 1,500 have forked the Aptos-core repository. The codebase is open-source and the project has onboarded well over 100 projects. Teams such as Pontem Network, Protagonist, PayMagic, MartianDAO, Solrise Finance and more have already begun building and testing on the network. Furthermore, Aptos also has a grant program to offer project teams and individuals non-dilutive funding in order to further develop the ecosystem. One thing is certain that the earliest projects to develop on a blockchain are the ones that tend to moon if the blockchain is successful.
Aptos announced that their mainnet will launch around the end of September, and if things go well, early bulls will have made a healthy profit margin. Just look at Solana in 2021, which made whopping gains of 9,848% since launch.
With the narrative of Aptos being the next Solana, communities are speculating whether investors actually believe in their tech long-term, or it is simply a pump and dump for VCs and whales to make back their money due to the series of liquidation across the market. VC-heavy projects should be considered a red flag, but in the case of Aptos, there is more than meets the eye.
Risk for investing in Aptos
There are still huge uncertainties in new public chain projects, such as slow development of the Move language, less than expected ecosystem development, unsatisfied tokenomics design, large investors selling pressure after listing to cause poor price performance, etc.
However, Aptos’ testnet has been performing very well, which shows that they are focused on creating a viable product. They have a very enthusiastic community of developers and builders who are interested in building on top of Aptos to leverage its potential. Whether Aptos will truly be a moon-shot project or a flop, we will have to wait and see in September after their mainnet launch.
About MEXC
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