Aptos’ native token Apt has been one of the most eye-catching cryptocurrencies this year, with its price nearly having doubled in the past month, from its lowest point of 3.08$ to its highest point of over 20$ at one point.
The surge of Apt could be attributed to a variety of factors. On one hand, the crypto market has started to pick up again, with more and more supporters for various crypto projects. On the other hand, the Aptos project has been gaining attention over the past year. Firstly, it has close ties with Facebook (now rebranded as Meta), and the founding team is largely based on the Meta Diem project. Additionally, Aptos has also pioneered many interesting features, such as its unique programming language Move which has been endorsed by many investors; its block-stm smart contract parallel execution engine which can effectively improve the efficiency of transactions, etc.
The Korean Pickles Premium Effect of Aptos Global Station is highlighted
As one of the hottest crypto trading markets in the world, the Korean market often has higher prices for crypto assets than other countries, a phenomenon known as “Kimchi Premium”. The main reason for this phenomenon is the shortage of crypto assets supply. Due to the large number of people in Korea who want to buy crypto assets, the price of crypto assets is rising. In addition, Korea is an energy-poor country itself, and the mining activities of crypto assets are not active in the country, which leads to it can only introduce a large number of foreign mining crypto assets for trading, and the Korean government restricts the large-scale flow of related funds for fear of crypto assets being used for money laundering, further exacerbating the shortage of crypto assets supply and high prices in Korea.
According to reports, in the past year, the prices of crypto assets in the Korean market are on average 10%-20% higher than international market prices. The higher the premium, the greater the space for investors to make profits. In addition, with the strong atmosphere of coin speculation in Korea, the Korean market has always been a must-win place for crypto assets.
After the collapse of terra, there was a vacuum in the local crypto market in Korea, in need of a new protagonist, then aptos seized the opportunity to enter the Korean market. From a detail, it can be seen that aptos attaches great importance to the Korean market. In the white paper released simultaneously on the aptos official website, Korean is the only language besides English. In addition, aptos also started the global tour hackathon aptos world tour hackathon in 2023, with the first stop in Seoul, Korea, from February 1st to 3rd. At that time, there will be aptos core engineers personally participating in the three-day hacker attack and demonstration.
Aptos’s series of moves has also won the favor of the Korean market. According to Coingecko’s data, about half of the 2 billion US dollars in trading volume in the past day came from the Korean won trading pair of the Korean exchange Upbit, with most of the funds engaging in arbitrage trading, buying at low prices and then selling at high prices, driving up aptos’s defi trading volume. According to data from Defi Llama, the defi trading volume of aptos has risen from 14 million US dollars last month to 51 million US dollars, and this data is still increasing rapidly. The Korean power behind this has played an important role in the price of aptos rising nearly 7 times in just one month.
Aptos is constantly discussed and the public’s expectations continue to increase.
In addition to the crypto market beginning to warm up and the Korean forces driving, the most important factor behind the surge of aptos token apt was that aptos, as a star public chain, has continued to cause heated discussions in the past year, and the public’s expectations for it have generally increased, which is also the main reason supporting apt’s continued rise.
As a meta-system public chain, aptos has close ties with Facebook (formerly known as Meta). Because of this connection, aptos has been favored by capital, and the seed round financing in March last year valued aptos project at 2 billion US dollars, with a financing amount of 200 million US dollars. At the end of July, aptos completed another 150 million US dollars A-round financing, led by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto. Compared with the other two meta-system public chains, Sui and Linera, aptos has the greatest advantage in terms of financing scale and marketing publicity, so it has the best development and is the most popular in the market.
Well-known institutions competing to cooperate, aptos is constantly hot
In the past year, aptos has not only won the favor of capital, but also its excellent performance in community governance and ecological system has attracted many well-known institutions to join the aptos ecosystem.
In terms of infrastructure. Shortly after the launch of the aptos main network, Google Cloud announced its cooperation with aptos to launch the Accelerator Program, and Google Cloud will provide support for some of its verification nodes and other services. At the same time, the aptos blockchain will be indexed and integrated into Google Cloud’s BigQuery service. In addition, Google and the aptos Foundation will launch the Accelerator Program and co-host a hackathon next year.
Game. Aptos has reached a cooperation with Korea 3A grade game studio npixel, npixel chose to build their latest web3 project metapixel based on aptos chain, which marks an important step for aptos in the game field.
Payment. Aptos has teamed up with web3 financial technology firm moonpay to integrate its ecosystem project petra. Moonpay will help users join the aptos ecosystem through its system, starting with a digital asset wallet petra, which is expected to be reflected in other projects on the aptos network in the future, providing users with frictionless web3 on-machine services.
Content generation. Decentralized streaming platform livepeer announced its integration with the aptos network. Developers based on aptos can now use the video stream supported by the livepeer network. For creators, with the integration of livepeer and aptos, decentralized streaming services expand the scope and quality of web3 creativity — giving creators more power!
Aptos high-speed development is based on strong technical support
Aptos’s vision is to provide a blockchain that brings mainstream applications to Web3 and empowers an decentralized application ecosystem to solve user pain points in the real world. In order to realize this vision, aptos has made two major upgrades to its consensus protocol and core framework in the past year, and has made a series of thorough improvements to its tech stack. At the same time, inspired by the diem blockchain, it takes security, transparency and frequent upgrades as core functions. Behind aptos’s rapid development, its strong technical support has played a critical role.
Simple and powerful move programming language
Currently, the most well-known blockchain development languages are three: 1. Solidity; 2. Wasm; 3. Move. Compared to Solidity, Move is more flexible and convenient; compared to Wasm, it is more specialized and secure.
Traditional transaction-based methods require corresponding transaction objects for transactions, and require the presence of A and B addresses. In order to ensure that A will not “double spend” tokens, each transaction must be checked against all other transactions to avoid conflicts, which undoubtedly slows down the transaction speed. Move’s resource-based approach is radically different. Move does not record the transaction from A to B, but records the transfer of the object (or resource) and updates the corresponding attribute accordingly. Importantly, the resource is an atomic entity — the existence of resource x does not depend on any other existing resources. Therefore, Move language is very suitable for the characteristics of blockchain assets, and is more friendly to blockchain practitioners.
At the core of aptos is Move language, which can be said to be the source of most of aptos’ potential. The advantages of Move programming language are mainly reflected in four aspects:
First, Move programming language is derived from meta’s libra stable currency project, which has strong security performance and fast speed;
Second, the Move virtual machine supports parallel computing and development, which greatly improves the running efficiency of the blockchain compared to the current sequential execution;
Third, Move language implements asset-determined issuance standards, and the issued assets are unique, then the whole chain tracks the assets, and the issuance standards can be upgraded;
Fourth, Move language supports contract upgrade, which can realize smart contract upgrade without users completely aware of it, which greatly improves user experience.
Block-Stm intelligent contract parallel execution engine
Smart contract execution has always been the main bottleneck limiting the throughput of blockchain. Currently, blockchain either executes sequentially or requires parallel sequential execution (i.e. no internal conflicts) to improve performance. Sequential execution cannot be well scaled, which limits the upper limit of its throughput, while parallel execution engines usually require users to declare dependencies in advance to address this problem, but this restricts what transactions can do and may require interrupting or retrying transactions.
Block-Stm is also a parallel execution engine, but unlike previous parallel execution engines, it is built around aptos’s software transactional memory and optimistic concurrency control principles. This new transaction parallelism method can realize faster transaction processing without affecting developer experience. During the transaction process, transactions are grouped into blocks, and each block execution must produce the same deterministic results. Block-stm further forces the results to be consistent with the transactions executed in accordance with the preset order, using this order to dynamically detect dependencies and avoid conflicts during speculative transaction execution. Block-Stm’s core is a novel and low-overhead execution and verification task collaboration scheduling program.
Flexible key management and transaction transparency.
Aptos account supports flexible key management, including support for key rotation, encryption agility, and hybrid hosting models. Users can delegate the ability to rotate account private keys to one or more hosting parties and other trusted entities, and then define a policy through the move module to enable these trusted entities to rotate keys under specific circumstances. For example, the entity can be a kout-of-n multi-sign key held by many trusted parties, providing a key recovery service to prevent user key loss. Compared to other key recovery solutions such as cloud backup and social recovery, the key management scheme of aptos is on-chain and more open and transparent.
In addition to flexible key management, aptos also provides transaction pre-execution services to implement transaction transparency, which can display transaction results intuitively to users before user signature. This transaction pre-execution service can be combined with known attacks and malicious intelligent contracts to greatly reduce the risk of fraud users may encounter. In addition, aptos also allows wallets to set restrictions on transactions during execution, and transactions that violate the restrictions will be terminated, which can further prevent users from being attacked by malicious programs.
The challenges faced by Aptos
Aptos has achieved high-speed development in the past year due to the star founding team, the favor of capital and strong technical support, but there are still many hidden dangers behind its glory.
The launch of the main network did not meet expectations, causing public criticism.
Last October, the performance of the main online network of Aptos Autumn was unsatisfactory, according to the official data of Aptos, it can achieve 100,000 TPS, but according to the browser data, the network throughput of Aptos is only 4 TPS, far from the target value. Furthermore, most of these transactions are not actual transactions, they are just verifier communication and setting block checkpoints and writing metadata into the blockchain. The slow speed of the main network is not as expected, and may bring more risks in the future, such as some projects with high requirements may not be able to deploy and go online on time, even if they go online, the user experience will be poor, which is very unfavorable for the ecological layout of Aptos in the future.
The ecology has not yet taken off, and there is a lack of advantageous projects.
The success of the L1 public chain mainly depends on the projects built on it. At this point, Aptos has not formed its own advantages yet. Compared with the other two public chains of Meta series, Aptos has certain advantages in ecological construction, but due to the highly similar technology, it may cause multi-chain deployment and redundancy of ecological projects. Such as LiquidSwap Dex, Topaz NFT market, etc. Although these projects are products that any blockchain ecology needs, they are not unique enough for the design of Aptos. These projects are like a small village’s grocery store, school and hospital, although these are necessary for the operation of the village, they do not give the village any other unique features. Lack of innovation and lack of competitive projects are the most prominent problems of the Aptos ecology at present.
In addition, due to the high overlap with Solana in technology, capital, ecological developers, etc., Aptos also needs to face the competition pressure from Solana, and in the ecological layout, Solana’s advantages are more obvious than Aptos, it has several advantages projects, such as Stepn project, it fully utilizes the parallel advantages of Solana, which not only brings huge users and high transaction volume to it, but also brings considerable income to Solana. At one point, Stepn accounted for about 20% of Solana’s paid users. Therefore, if Aptos wants to replicate or exceed Solana, it needs to find a series of unique projects to make full use of the parallel execution engine of Aptos, and these projects cannot be completed on Ethereum or even Solana. This is a considerable challenge for Aptos.
Overestimated value and excessive speculation of tokens
Since its launch, Aptos has become a favorite of capital as a star public chain. In the financing in July 2022, Aptos’s valuation reached 2.75 billion US dollars. From the bear market status, Aptos’s valuation is slightly high. Excessive capitalization is not a good thing for the blockchain industry that pays attention to technological research and development. Capital often sacrifices long-term goals for short-term interests, especially the Korean market’s crazy purchases triggered by the crazy surge in Aptos’s native token Aptos, such an amazing surge may attract some speculators to short sell, which is also extremely detrimental to the development of Aptos projects.
summary
Aptos is the first and only L1 chain based on Move to launch on the mainnet, which has a great first-mover advantage in the new generation of public chains. It represents the crystallization of the efforts of Meta engineers to solve the scalability bottleneck of Ethereum for many years. Therefore, although Aptos still has many imperfections at present, its future is still worth looking forward to.
