After the failure of the Diem (formerly Libra) project, the former engineers at Meta (formerly Facebook) have kept pursuing the idea of creating the infrastructure for the future blockchain as they describe it.
With this goal in mind, some of them came together to create the Aptos Project. Aptos is on a mission to create global and equitable access to decentralised assets for billions of people.
If this phrase sounds like an old tune, that’s because Aptos is trying to pick up where the previous blockchain project Diem left off. With the successful funding of nearly $200 million raised from defunct funds like FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and many more, Aptos has been on the rise lately.
What is the Aptos Project?
Aptos is a layer one blockchain that promises scalability of up to 100,000 transactions per second, so you don’t run out of bandwidth if billions of concurrent users use the network.
Aptos network is based on two basic concepts that we will discuss in some detail later, namely:
- Transactions: The exchange of data between accounts on the blockchain.
- States: A state represents a version of the blockchain at a particular time, and when a transaction is executed, the state of the blockchain changes regularly.
With the goal of making their network accessible to as many people as possible, Aptos has used the language of Move. This language, widely talked about for its wide scalability and security, is emerging as the language of the future for large-scale distributed networks.
In fact, this language offers greater accessibility and security than Solidy (used by Ethereum), in particular thanks to its validation system, which makes it very interesting for developers. It is worth noting that the Aptos project cooperated with the Binance network.
How Does Aptos Work?
To deliver on its promise of 100,000 transactions per second, Aptos operates in several ways, most notably:
- Bulk Transaction Processing: Aptos aims to use batch transaction processing, providing batch (or block) evidence to reduce significantly the cost of storage and verification, usually at a detailed transaction level.
- Network pressure: Network bandwidth often becomes a bottleneck in peer-to-peer networks, and Aptos is no exception. Currently, a pre-order of state synchronization can bring about 45,000 transactions per second into the development network before the bandwidth is exhausted. Fortunately, Aptos uses standard compression that reduces the amount of data transferred by more than ten times.
- Faster Storage: Currently, state synchronization throughput needs to be improved by the time it takes to hold blockchain data in storage. Aptos is actively looking at various improvements it can make to remove this bottleneck, including more efficient data structuring, more optimized storage configurations, and alternative storage engines.
- Parallel Data Processing: Until now, Aptos enforced state synchronisation that processed data serially.
However, it may avoid many existing approaches and exploit parallel processing of data to increase throughput, such as segmentation.
What is State Synchronization in an Aptos project?
The Aptos blockchain leverages a wide range of innovative technologies to deliver verified state synchronisation with high throughput and low latency in a decentralised network noting that state synchronisation is an important yet often overlooked aspect when designing blockchain networks.
Most blockchain networks today are organised hierarchically, with a group of active validators at the heart of the network, where the validators grow the blockchain by executing transactions, producing blocks, gaining consensus and the rest of the peers in the network (ex: full nodes and clients) replicating the blockchain data it generates Validators (eg: blocks, transactions).
State synchronization is the protocol that allows non-validating peers to distribute, verify, and persist this blockchain data and ensures that all peers in the ecosystem are synchronised.
The bottom line is that state synchronisation has significant performance and security implications, where state synchronisation is of paramount importance for distributed networks.
This is because when new transactions are executed, state synchronisation propagates the data to peers and clients. This means that if synchronisation is slow, unreliable, or not optimised, peers will notice long delays in processing transactions, which will artificially inflate the time to finish transactions. This has a significant impact on user experience. For example, decentralised applications (dApps), decentralised exchange (DEX) platforms and payment processors will all be much slower.
Aptos Ecosystem
Validators, which lag or lag behind the rest of the validator pool, rely on state synchronization to get up to speed (i.e. sync with the latest state of the blockchain). If state synchronization can process transactions as fast as they are made, failed validators can catch up. State synchronization also plays a crucial role in system decentralization.
In fact, fast and scalable state synchronization enables faster pool turnovers, since active validators can enter and leave consensus more freely, and it provides more potential validators to choose from in the network and more full nodes to go online quickly and offline. The need for long waiting times and reduced resource requirements.
All these factors enhance the network’s decentralisation and make it possible to develop blockchain networks.
The state synchronizer is also responsible for verifying the accuracy of all blockchain data. This prevents peers and malicious network actors from modifying, censoring, or fabricating transactional data and presenting it as valid.
The primary goals, set by Aptos regarding state synchronization, are as follows:
- High throughput: Syncing has to increase the number of transactions that have to be synced by each peer per second.
- Low latency: Because state synchronization should reduce the time it takes for peers to sync new transactions supervised by validators, this all impacts the overall completion time perceived by customers.
- Fast startup time: State synchronization should reduce the time it takes for new peers (or fewer peers) to sync with the latest state on the blockchain.
- Resilience: In the face of failures and malicious actors, state synchronization must be resilient in the face of failures (e.g., device and network failures) and tolerant of malicious actors in the network. This means defeating various attacks, for example, fabricated transaction data, or modifying or replaying network messages.
APT Digital Currency
On October 17, 2022, Aptos announced its own APT token. The initial total number of APT tokens will be 1 billion APT. At launch, more than 82% of these cryptocurrencies are in storage.
Announcing its Digital Currency issue, Aptos predicts that the supply is expected to increase to over 1.6 billion tokens in 2032 (10 years after launch) with a maximum annual inflation rate of 7%/year upon launch
