Aptos

Origins

Aptos was launched in October 2022 by former Meta engineers — Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching — who had worked on the Diem (formerly Libra) project before Meta shut it down. The team carried the Move programming language and several core technical ideas from Diem into a permissionless Layer 1 blockchain, attracting major venture funding ahead of mainnet (a16z, Multicoin, FTX Ventures) at a peak valuation around $4 billion.

What's different about it

Two things stand apart from the EVM-compatible competition:

• The Move language. Originally designed at Meta, Move treats digital assets as first-class objects rather than as account-balance entries in a contract. Tokens have an explicit owner, can't be duplicated by buggy code, and are passed around via type-checked transfers. The trade-off: developers must learn a new language, ecosystem tooling is smaller than EVM, and there's no automatic compatibility with the existing dApp universe.
• Block-STM parallel execution. Most blockchains process transactions sequentially. Aptos uses optimistic concurrency control to execute non-conflicting transactions in parallel, then re-runs only the ones that touch the same state. In benchmarks, this delivers materially higher throughput than serial-execution chains, though real-world load patterns rarely hit the theoretical maximum.

Use and adoption

Aptos has carved out a respectable mid-tier ecosystem — a handful of stablecoins, a few DEXes, some gaming projects — but has struggled to dislodge attention from the EVM-compatible options (Arbitrum, Base) or its closest non-EVM competitors (Solana, Sui).

Sui — also Move-based, also founded by ex-Meta engineers from the same Diem team — splintered off and competed for the same niche, splitting Move-developer mindshare. As of early 2025, Solana dominates the high-performance non-EVM L1 narrative; Aptos and Sui both trail in TVL, daily active addresses, and stablecoin presence.

Tokenomics

The native token, APT, is used for transaction fees and staking. Initial supply was around 1 billion with no hard cap; new APT is minted as staking rewards. The token launch in 2022 was contentious — tokenomics weren't disclosed before listing, and a large initial unlock for insiders coincided with broader market weakness, leading to a sharp early sell-off.