Participated · Equity · Mar 2022

Aptos Labs was formed by former Meta employees who worked on the Diem payment project and is developing a next‑generation Layer 1 blockchain that uses Diem technology and the Move smart‑contract language. The company emphasizes security, speed, scalability and a developer experience intended to reduce outages and support mass Web3 adoption. Aptos is running incentivized testnets with developer rewards and has announced a grant program to accelerate ecosystem growth ahead of a planned mainnet launch later this year. The team says Move improves security, speeds transactions and cuts costs for developers and users. Aptos has announced partnerships and integrations with Google Cloud, Binance, Coinbase, Livepeer and Rarible to support node deployment and application development. Financially, the company has completed a seed round in March and a new $150M Series A, bringing total funding to $350M. Aptos is developing a Layer 1 blockchain intended to deliver faster transactions, lower fees, and greater reliability for large clients and developers. The core stack leverages the Move programming language (originating at Meta) and an optimistically responsive Byzantine Fault Tolerance protocol the team says has shown no downtime in private testing. The company has launched a developer devnet and aims for a public release in Q3. Founders are ex‑Meta employees who left in December and position the project as an independent continuation of work first done on Diem. Aptos is engaging multiple ecosystem partners — Anchorage, Binance, Coinbase, Livepeer, Moonclave, Paxos, Paymagic, Rarible, and Streaming Fast — for feedback and code contributions. The team has stated it will not license or use Diem IP owned by Silvergate as it builds its network. The company describes its target as serving billions of users while catering to large corporate customers early on.