Aptos Co-founder Sherry Shares Journey of Public Blockchain Technology

Against the backdrop of increasing competition in the public blockchain space, Aptos is steadily moving towards its strategic positioning as the "global trading engine" through technological innovation and ecosystem expansion. Since it first surpassed a total locked value of $1 billion last November, Aptos reached $1.03 billion by the end of March. Additionally, the market value of stablecoins also surpassed $1 billion for the first time in late March, representing a year-on-year growth of over ten times, showcasing strong ecological appeal and capital-bearing capacity.

Aptos not only achieves continuous iteration on the technical level but has also made several breakthroughs in ecological construction: a certain lending platform has completed its first deployment of a non-EVM testnet, and DeFi activity has significantly increased. To meet the rapidly growing transaction demands, the Aptos team continues to advance technologies such as Zaptos and Shardines, accelerating the construction of a foundational architecture that supports millions of TPS, reinforcing its core advantages in performance, stability, and user experience.

This article features an in-depth conversation with Sherry Xiao, one of the early founding engineers of Aptos, focusing on key topics such as the technical architecture of global trading engines, ecosystem expansion strategies, and developer support. It provides insights into how Aptos stands out in the new round of public chain competition by relying on technology as its foundation and ecosystem as its wings.

Technical Background and Advantages of Public Chains

Sherry Xiao is one of the early founding engineers of Aptos. Before joining Aptos, she worked as an engineer at Instagram, primarily focusing on scalability architecture. She later joined the blockchain project team of a social media giant, responsible for validator nodes and infrastructure construction, helping several well-known payment and e-commerce companies deploy validator nodes.

When the blockchain project faced policy obstacles, the entire team came out to start a business in 2022, establishing Aptos. In fact, many talents have come out from the blockchain team of this social media giant, some joined other public chain projects, some joined well-known venture capital's crypto teams, and some founded other startup teams.

As an engineer, Sherry believes that the greatest advantage of the Move language compared to other smart contract languages is that it was designed from the start as a language for smart contracts, providing many guarantees in asset management and security, along with formal verification tools. Move can effectively avoid many common security vulnerabilities and reduce the risk of fund loss. In addition, Move offers innovative features such as dynamic distribution, account abstraction, and permissioned signatures, enabling developers to build more advanced products.

In terms of scalability, Aptos has unique advantages. The team has extensive experience in building highly scalable systems and has been responsible for the infrastructure of large-scale social media platforms. Aptos's design is very modular, with each module having its own scalability space:

• At the consensus level, the newly released Raptr is the industry's most advanced implementation of a consensus algorithm, maximizing parallelization.
• On the execution level, Block-STM technology is also industry-leading, with many newly released public chains and L2s adopting this technology.
• In terms of storage, sharding technology has been implemented, and further research on sharding technology and related caching layers will continue in the future to further enhance system performance.

Ecological Layout and Development Strategy

The ecological layout of Aptos mainly focuses on several aspects:

First, there is infrastructure development, which already natively supports three major stablecoins. Secondly, multiple RWA projects have been launched on-chain in collaboration with institutions. At the beginning of this year, a $2 million ecosystem fund was announced to incentivize community building and support various DeFi protocols and projects. Additionally, the LFM program was introduced to help ecosystem projects plan roadmaps, conduct token generation events, connect with exchange resources, obtain venture capital, and provide marketing and KOL guidance.

In Hong Kong, Aptos is the only L1 blockchain platform participating in the e-HKD project and has been actively involved in related discussions. The team maintains close communication with banks and government departments in Hong Kong, and a consulting firm is also its partner. Aptos has many innovative collaborations with Hong Kong's Cyberport, and the official community recently held a hackathon at Cyberport, hoping to nurture local projects.

In the current market environment, Aptos will focus on supporting transaction-related sectors, paying attention to the expansion of payment and stablecoin application scenarios, as well as the DeFi sector, especially to develop leading projects in the "three-piece set" of DeFi (DEX, lending, liquidity staking). The team also hopes to collaborate deeply with large institutions and partners with distribution channels, and is focused on the integration of gaming and DeFi, as well as the application scenarios of AI agents and trading.

Developer Ecosystem and Talent Development

To attract and retain developers, the Aptos team believes that it is most important to show developers the possibilities of the future, rather than just short-term speculation. As long as they can see market prospects, demand, and opportunities, they can attract developers to continue their efforts in the blockchain field.

In terms of talent cultivation in higher education, Aptos has in-depth cooperation with several well-known university blockchain associations, including Stanford University, Berkeley University, Singapore Management University, and Tsinghua University. The team collaborates with professors to design blockchain courses, allowing students to learn Aptos technology directly. Most of the company's engineers hold PhD degrees and frequently give presentations at top universities to attract outstanding developers to join the community.

Future Outlook

Sherry's personal vision and that of the entire team remain focused on the trading and payment sectors. Since the inception of the blockchain project, the team has aimed to establish a global financial infrastructure that allows more people to enjoy the conveniences of the modern financial system.

She is particularly looking forward to seeing the innovative payment projects combined with stablecoins. For example, wage flow payments can be fully realized on Aptos—earning rewards every second of work, something that traditional financial institutions cannot achieve. Migrating traditional payment software onto the blockchain, combined with privacy protection features, can create exciting new scenarios. These innovative applications are the key to truly promoting the widespread adoption of blockchain technology.

Regarding the recent changes in the senior management team, Sherry stated that this is actually a good opportunity to reassess past plans and make adjustments. Such changes allow the team to come together and think about the direction of future layouts.