Meta (formerly Facebook) threw in the towel on its grand plans to create a digital currency last year. Earlier in 2022, though, it sold the remaining assets to Silvergate Capital for $182 million.
The team behind the original Diem project announced they were working on a new blockchain called Aptos in late February. On March 15, they announced massive crypto-VC funding.
The startup has closed a $200 million strategic investment led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from Tiger Global, Multicoin Capital, Three Arrows Capital, FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, among others.
Build their own blockchain
The Aptos team said it will not license or use any of Diem’s intellectual properties held by Silvergate because it has built its own blockchain, according to Tech Crunch. The company’s valuation was not disclosed, but it is expected to top $1 billion according to the founders, who said it was well “in unicorn territory.”
Aptos is another layer-1 blockchain that puts it in competition with Ethereum and Solana. It uses a coding language called Move, with which it aims to attract a large number of developers from existing networks.
Aptos CEO Mo Shaikh, who previously worked on Meta’s wallet, Novi, said he has strong ties to the Ethereum community, which the team wants to be a part of:
“We want to be part of that ecosystem. We’re not here to necessarily compete. We want to complement [them] and the challenges [the community faces] — whether it’s something like the wormhole event that took place — give us clear indication that things have to be built responsibly from the ground up,”
Q3 Aptos Mainnet
Additionally, Aptos has officially launched its devnet, allowing programmers to experiment and build applications on the blockchain in advance. The team expects the mainnet to launch in Q3.
The report added that a number of prominent crypto firms have already engaged with it, including Anchorage, Binance, Coinbase, Livepeer, Moonclave, Paxos, Paymagic, and Rarible.
Aptos CTO Avery Ching said that “current blockchains are simply not as reliable as existing financial rails, we have seen issues with downtime and outages that last for hours,” probably in reference to the multiple recent Solana outages.
Aptos is entering an increasingly crowded space that already has countless blockchain networks essentially doing the same thing.
