Interview: Tong, PANews

Editor: Yuliya, PANews

In the context of increasingly fierce competition among public chains, Aptos is steadily moving towards its strategic positioning as a "global trading engine" through technological innovation and ecological expansion. Since first surpassing a total locked value (TVL) of $1 billion last November, Aptos reached $1.03 billion by the end of March. Additionally, the market capitalization of stablecoins also surpassed $1 billion for the first time on March 24, growing more than tenfold year-on-year, demonstrating strong ecological appeal and capital capacity.

Against this backdrop, Aptos has not only achieved continuous iteration at the technical level but has also made several breakthroughs in ecological construction: Aave completed its first non-EVM environment testnet deployment, significantly enhancing DeFi activity. To meet the rapidly growing trading demands, the Aptos team continues to advance technical solutions such as Zaptos and Shardines, accelerating the construction of an underlying architecture that supports millions of TPS, reinforcing its core advantages in performance, stability, and user experience.

In this trend, PANews conducted an in-depth dialogue with Sherry Xiao, an early founding engineer of Aptos, discussing key topics such as the technical architecture of the global trading engine, ecological expansion strategies, and developer support, revealing how Aptos stands out in the new round of public chain competition with technology as its foundation and ecology as its wings.

High-Performance Public Chain Built by Meta "OG"

PANews: Please introduce your background and your role at Aptos.

Sherry: I am Sherry Xiao, one of the early founding engineers of Aptos. Before joining Aptos, I worked as an engineer at Instagram, primarily focusing on scalability architecture. Later, I joined Meta (formerly Facebook) on the Libra/Diem team, responsible for validating nodes and infrastructure construction, helping organizations like Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and eBay deploy validation nodes.

When the Libra project faced policy obstacles, our entire team followed our leaders to start a new venture and established Aptos. In fact, many talents have emerged from Facebook's blockchain team; some joined Sui, some joined a16z's crypto team, and others created their own startups, such as Lightspark founded by David Marcus. It can be said that Facebook has supplied a large number of talents to the Web3 industry.

PANews: As an engineer, how do you evaluate the advantages of the Move language compared to other smart contract languages?

Sherry: For those with an engineering background, switching languages is quite common. The Move language is developed based on Rust, and its biggest advantage is that it was designed as a language for smart contracts from the beginning, providing many guarantees in asset management and security, along with formal verification tools.

Compared to Solidity and EVM, Move can effectively avoid many common security vulnerabilities, reducing the risk of fund loss. The Move prover tool also allows developers to verify the correctness of smart contracts written in the Move programming language. Additionally, Move offers innovative features such as dynamic dispatch, account abstraction, and permission signatures, enabling developers to build more advanced products.

For developers familiar with programming languages and data structures, learning Move is not as difficult as one might imagine, as the basic principles of programming are interconnected.

PANews: What bottlenecks still need to be iterated upon in the current technical infrastructure?

Sherry: Overall, I believe there is still significant room for improvement in the developer experience and user experience in Web3. Taking Aptos as an example, the infrastructure is already quite mature, with its throughput, speed, and gas fees reduced to very low levels, but providing unique on-chain features that allow developers to create standout products remains a major challenge.

We are deeply exploring ZK-based login solutions and innovations in privacy protection. Achieving large-scale payments requires careful consideration of user privacy. Recently, we launched a project in our open-source codebase that can hide transaction details, allowing users to know that a transaction occurred between Alice and Bob, but not the specific amount or balance. This technology combines privacy protection with the decentralized characteristics of blockchain, enabling the creation of interesting products.

PANews: Aptos focuses on high-performance blockchain; what unique advantages does it have in scalability compared to other public chains?

Sherry: Scalability is our core advantage. As a team of engineers from Facebook, we have rich experience in building highly scalable systems, having been responsible for large-scale infrastructures like Instagram and Facebook.

Aptos is designed to be highly modular, with each module having its own expansion space:

• At the consensus level, our latest release, Raptr, is the industry's most advanced consensus algorithm implementation, pushing parallelization to the extreme;

• At the execution level, our Block-STM technology is also industry-leading, with many newly launched public chains and L2s adopting this technology, such as Movement, Monad, and Polygon;

• In terms of storage, we have implemented sharding technology and will continue to research sharding and related caching layers to further enhance system performance.

These technologies are all open-source, and we welcome the community to use Aptos's technology. However, even if other chains replicate our technology, they will still face latency issues. For example, while they are still using Block-STM V1, we are already working on V2; by the time they catch up, we will have released performance optimizations for Move 2.0. Therefore, developing directly on Aptos is a wiser choice.

Ecological Layout: Stablecoins, Trading, and DeFi

PANews: The data on the Aptos chain looks good, with the number of accounts exceeding 47 million and weekly transaction volume surpassing 39 million. What are the driving factors behind this progress?

Sherry: Our ecological layout mainly focuses on several aspects:

First is infrastructure construction; we have natively supported the three major stablecoins: USDT, USDC, and USDE. Users generally report that transferring on Aptos is very smooth, and on-chain peer-to-peer payments have become one of our significant advantages.

Secondly, we have collaborated with institutions like Franklin Templeton to launch several RWA projects on-chain.

Earlier this year, we announced a $2 million ecological fund to incentivize community building and support various DeFi protocols and projects. This has also promoted the growth of DEX trading volume and on-chain activities.

Additionally, we launched the LFM program to help ecological projects plan their roadmaps, conduct token generation events (TGE), connect with exchange resources, obtain venture capital, and provide marketing and KOL guidance. These efforts have led to stable growth in our ecosystem over the past period.

PANews: Is the news about the Hong Kong stablecoin HKDA possibly being issued on Aptos true? What are the plans for compliant development in Hong Kong?

Sherry: Aptos is the only L1 blockchain platform participating in the Hong Kong e-HKD project, and we have been actively involved in related discussions. We maintain close communication with banks and government departments in Hong Kong, and BCG is also our partner.

We have many innovative collaborations with Hong Kong's Cyberport, and our official community organization, Movemaker, recently held a hackathon event at Cyberport, aiming to nurture local projects.

Although we do not have a large office in Hong Kong, we have established a co-creation space called Aptos Space in a prime location through Movemaker, providing a venue for builders to collaborate and gather, and actively hosting offline events to attract Web3 talent. We place great importance on the vibrancy of the developer ecosystem in the Asia-Pacific region, as many high-quality ecological projects come from Chinese-speaking areas. Our layout in the Asia-Pacific region will deepen, with more resources invested and continued collaboration to bring better development teams into our ecosystem.

PANews: In the current market environment, which sectors of projects will Aptos focus on supporting ecologically?

Sherry: As seen from our recently launched global trading engine, trading-related sectors are a direction we value highly. We focus on payment, stablecoin application scenarios, and the DeFi sector, particularly on developing leading projects in the DeFi "trio" (DEX, lending, liquidity staking).

We also hope to collaborate deeply with large institutions and partners with distribution channels. Aptos has clear advantages in transfers—low latency and low cost, making it very suitable for large-scale payment businesses. We are also looking at the combination of gaming and DeFi, as well as the application scenarios of AI agents and trading.

PANews: Aptos recently announced the creation of a global trading engine. How will this vision be realized?

Sherry: Over the past few years, we have been deploying the infrastructure for the global trading engine. We believe that the foundational construction of blockchain has been addressed quite well, and we are now focusing on innovations at the user experience level:

• For example, Keyless is a zk-based technology that allows users to log in directly using their Google, Facebook, or Apple accounts, addressing the pain points of private key management and mnemonic phrase memory;

• We have implemented account abstraction and permission signing features, allowing DeFi developers to better control user authentication and entry processes;

• On the Move language, we have added features like dynamic scripts and dynamic dispatch to help DeFi or trading applications achieve functional innovation.

These technical points come together to form our vision: to build a global trading engine and invite developers to leverage this infrastructure to create innovative applications.

Talent Development: Developer Ecosystem Building and University Collaboration

PANews: In the context of AI becoming a hot direction, how does Aptos attract and retain developers?

Sherry: Indeed, some developers may be attracted to hot fields, but each application scenario has its own developer base. Even in the heat of AI, many developers remain interested in cryptography, decentralization, and blockchain—features that AI cannot fulfill.

For developers, the most important thing is to see the possibilities of the future, not just short-term speculation. Developers have dreams and hope to create products that can be widely used. As long as we can show them the market prospects, demand, and opportunities, we can attract developers to continue their efforts in the blockchain field.

PANews: What initiatives does Aptos have for talent development in universities?

Sherry: We place great importance on talent development in universities. As a team with a background in Facebook engineering, we understand that universities are the largest talent pool. We have in-depth collaborations with blockchain associations at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, and we also have cooperative projects with SMU in Singapore and Tsinghua University in China.

We work with professors to design blockchain courses, allowing students to directly learn Aptos technology, making Aptos their first lesson in entering the blockchain space. Most of our company's engineers hold PhDs, and they often give presentations at universities like MIT and UC to attract outstanding developers to join the community.

Recently, at a hackathon held in Hong Kong, teams from the blockchain associations of Zhejiang University and Tsinghua University showcased excellent projects, and we look forward to their future growth.

PANews: What are your personal expectations for the future development of Web3?

Sherry: My personal vision, along with the entire team's, still focuses on the fields of trading and payments. Since the Libra project, we have hoped to establish a global financial infrastructure that allows more people to enjoy the conveniences of the modern financial system.

I particularly look forward to seeing innovative payment projects combined with stablecoins. For example, streaming payments can be fully realized on Aptos—earning wages every second worked, something 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.

PANews: What impact will recent changes in the team's senior management have on Aptos?

Sherry: Personnel changes are quite normal for many teams. For the team, this is actually a good opportunity to reassess past plans and make adjustments. Previously, we were focused on our work, and such changes allow us to unite and think about the future direction of our layout.

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