MAKE YOUR MOVE WITH APTOS

The rise of blockchains as a new Internet infrastructure has led to developers deploying tens of thousands of decentralized applications at rapidly growing rates. Unfortunately, blockchain usage is not yet ubiquitous due to frequent outages, high costs, low throughput limits, and numerous security concerns. To enable mass adoption in the web3 era, blockchain infrastructure needs to follow the path of cloud infrastructure as a trusted, scalable, cost-efficient, and continually improving platform for building widely-used applications.

Aptos Foundation presents the Aptos blockchain, designed with scalability, safety, reliability, and upgradeability as key principles, to address these challenges. The Aptos blockchain has been developed over the past three years by over 350+ developers across the globe. It offers new and novel innovations in consensus, smart contract design, system security, performance, and decentralization.

The combination of these technologies will provide a fundamental building block to bring web3 to the masses:

• First, the Aptos blockchain natively integrates and internally uses the Move language for fast and secure transaction execution. The Move prover, a formal verifier for smart contracts written in the Move language, provides additional safeguards for contract invariants and behavior. This focus on security allows developers to better protect their software from malicious entities.

• Second, the Aptos data model enables flexible key management and hybrid custodial options. This, alongside transaction transparency prior to signing and practical light client protocols, provides a safer and more trustworthy user experience.

• Third, to achieve high throughput and low latency, the Aptos blockchain leverages a pipelined and modular approach for the key stages of transaction processing. Specifically, transaction dissemination, block metadata ordering, parallel transaction execution, batch storage, and ledger certification all operate concurrently. This approach fully leverages all available physical resources, improves hardware efficiency, and enables highly parallel execution.

• Fourth, unlike other parallel execution engines that break transaction atomicity by requiring upfront knowledge of the data to be read and written, the Aptos blockchain does not put such limitations on developers. It can efficiently support atomicity with arbitrarily complex transactions, enabling higher throughput and lower latency for real-world applications and simplifying development.

• Fifth, the Aptos modular architecture design supports client flexibility and optimizes for frequent and instant upgrades. Moreover, to rapidly deploy new technology innovations and support new web3 use cases, the Aptos blockchain provides embedded on-chain change management protocols.

• Finally, the Aptos blockchain is experimenting with future initiatives to scale beyond individual validator performance: its modular design and parallel execution engine support internal sharding of a validator and homogeneous state sharding provides the potential for horizontal throughput scalability without adding additional complexity for node operators.

The Aptos vision
The Aptos vision is to deliver a blockchain that can bring mainstream adoption to web3 and empower an ecosystem of decentralized applications to solve real-world user problems. Their mission is to advance the state-of-the-art in blockchain reliability, safety, and performance by providing a flexible and modular blockchain architecture. This architecture should support frequent upgrades, fast adoption of the latest technology advancements, and first-class support for new and emerging use cases.

Aptos envision a decentralized, secure, and scalable network governed and operated by the community that uses it. When infrastructure demands grow across the world, the computational resources of the blockchain scale up horizontally and vertically to meet those needs. As new use cases and technological advances arise, the network should frequently and seamlessly upgrade without interrupting users. Infrastructure concerns should fade into the background. Developers and users will have access to many different options for key recovery, data modeling, smart contract standards, resource usage tradeoffs, privacy, and composability. Users know that their assets are secure, always available, and can be accessed with near at-cost fees. Anyone can safely, easily, and immutably transact with untrusted parties worldwide. Blockchains are as ubiquitous as cloud infrastructure.

Aptos experiences building, developing, advancing, and deploying the Diem blockchain (the predecessor of the Aptos blockchain) over the past three years have proven that a network can continually upgrade its protocols without disrupting its clients. The Diem mainnet was deployed to more than a dozen node operators with multiple wallet providers in early 2020. Over the following year, Aptos team issued two major upgrades that changed the consensus protocol and the core framework. Both upgrades completed without downtime for users. With the Aptos blockchain, they have made a series of radical improvements to the technology stack while also incorporating safe, transparent, and frequent upgrades as a core feature, as inspired by the Diem blockchain. In particular, they highlight novel methods of transaction processing and new approaches to decentralization and network governance.


The Aptos blockchain is comprised of a set of validators that jointly receive and process transactions from users using a byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT), proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. Token holders lock up, or stake, tokens in their selected validators. Each validator’s consensus voting weight is proportionate to the amount staked into it. A validator can be active and participate in consensus. Likewise, a validator may also be inactive if it does not have enough stake to participate, rotates out of the validator set, elects to be offline as it synchronizes blockchain state, or is deemed not participating by the consensus protocol due to poor historical performance. Clients are any part of the system that need to submit transactions or query the state and history of the blockchain. Clients can choose to download and verify validator signed proofs of queried data. Full nodes are clients that replicate the transaction and blockchain state from the validators or from other full nodes in the network. They may elect to prune transaction history and blockchain state as desired to reclaim storage. Light clients only maintain the current set of validators and can query partial blockchain state securely, typically from full nodes. Wallets are a common example of a light client.

To meet the needs of safe, fast, reliable, and upgradeable web3 infrastructure for widespread adoption, the Aptos blockchain is built on the following core design principles:

• Fast and secure execution along with simple auditability and mechanical analyzability via a new smart contract programming language. Move originated with the predecessor to the Aptos blockchain and continues to progress with the evolution of this project.

• Extremely high throughput and low latency through a batched, pipelined, and parallelized approach to transaction processing.

• Novel parallel transaction processing that efficiently supports atomicity with arbitrarily complex transactions through Block-STM, unlike existing parallel execution engines that require upfront knowledge of data locations to be read and written.

• Optimizations for performance and decentralization via rapid, stake-weight validator set rotation and reputation tracking.

•Upgradeability and configurability as first-class design principles to embrace new use cases and the latest technology.

• Modular designs that enable rigorous component level testing along with appropriate threat modeling and seamless deployment, all ensuring highly secure and reliable operations.

• Horizontal throughput scalability while preserving decentralization, where sharding is a first-class concept exposed to users and native to the programming and data model.

As a result Aptos is the blockchain network with everything you need to build your big idea. Let’s Move.
Your big idea meets its match. Bring it to life on Aptos.