Binance Labs, the venture capital arm and accelerator of Binance, has made a strategic investment in Aptos Labs, a next-generation layer-1 blockchain “built with safety and user experience in mind.”
This is “a follow-on investment that comes after the first round of funding announced in March this year and further expands Binance Labs’ commitment to infrastructure building.”
Yi He, Co-Founder of Binance and Head of Binance Labs, said:
“We’re excited to be working closely with the Aptos team. At Binance, we’ve always believed in the power of blockchain technology to benefit the masses, just like the Internet. However, infrastructure building remains a bottleneck within the industry. We believe that the technological competitiveness of the Aptos team could bring increased scalability to the blockchain infrastructure while also supporting novel use cases for Web3.”
To continue building a secure and scalable blockchain, Aptos will “use the funds raised to expand the team and support the development of its innovative layer-1 infrastructure.”
The team will also “build out ecosystem initiatives and tooling to further grow the Aptos community.”
Mo Shaikh, CEO of Aptos, said:
“Aptos is inherently designed to address today’s key challenges around mainstream Web3 adoption. Our goal is to deliver the most performant, production-ready blockchain through a flexible, modular architecture designed for people-first usability and engineered to upgrade and evolve. The continued strategic support of the Binance Labs team helps us further empower our ecosystem to create next-generation applications that solve existing consumer challenges, and the challenges still to come.”
Danny F., Investment Director at Binance Labs, commented:
“Blockchain infrastructures are a key component that will allow Web3 developers to deploy decentralized applications safely and easily. However, this sector still faces many headwinds such as hacks and frequent outages. The technologies the Aptos team is building could bring innovations in transaction processing, system performance, assets security, and more. We’re excited about this partnership and look forward to working with the Aptos team to bring Web3 to the global audience.”
Aptos has been “developing its blockchain over the past three years with more than 350 developers deployed globally.”
The Aptos blockchain is “designed to be upgradeable and will continuously evolve to support current and emerging Web3 use cases.”
Aptos is “creating a home for the world’s most innovative developers to build future-proof applications at scale.”
There are several key building blocks:
- The Aptos blockchain natively integrates Move, a flexible programming language used to implement custom transactions and smart contracts. It ensures that resources can never be implicitly discarded, facilitating secure execution and simple auditability.
- To provide a secure user experience, Aptos implements a data model that supports hybrid custodial and key management options. It also offers timestamp-based state proofs to allow users to verify the validity of specific data points.
- The Aptos blockchain utilizes a parallelized and pipelined approach to manage the key stages of a transaction. The dissemination of information, metadata ordering, batch storage, ledger certification, and other operations can all be executed concurrently. This design maximizes the utilization of available physical resources and improves hardware efficiency.
The team is designing “a parallel execution engine that can handle over 160K non-trivial smart contract transactions per second.”
This efficiency is possible “because the system can automatically adapt to the workload and manage all access conflicts related to on-chain transactions internally.”
Aptos’ modular design “increases the development speed and accelerates release cycles because changes can be applied to an individual node.” It also provides “a structured path to scaling validators so additional computational and network resources can be accessed.”
The Aptos team is also “experimenting with performance optimization and horizontal throughput scalability.”
It supports homogeneous state sharding, which “means that data can be transferred between shards via a homogeneous bridge.” This mechanism not only “offers performance benefits to validators, but also delivers the simplicity of a unified smart contract platform.”
Since 2018, Binance Labs has “invested in more than 200 projects from over 25 countries.”
It has also “incubated about 50 goal projects that are native to Web3 via the Binance Labs Incubation Program, including Polygon, Perpetual Protocol, Dune Analytics, and more.”
As the venture capital arm and accelerator of Binance, Binance Labs is “on the continued lookout for the next big Web3 innovation.”
