Aptos

Aptos is a Layer 1 blockchain built by former members of the team behind Diem, the payments project Meta attempted to launch and later shut down. When that project ended, several of its engineers continued the underlying technical work independently, and Aptos launched its mainnet in October 2022.

The most distinctive inheritance from Diem is Move, a programming language designed specifically for handling digital assets. Move treats assets as resources that cannot be copied or accidentally destroyed, enforced at the language level rather than by the developer remembering to check. This addresses a category of bug that has caused significant losses on other platforms.

Performance design

Aptos executes transactions in parallel using an approach called Block-STM, which optimistically runs transactions simultaneously and detects conflicts afterward, re-executing only where two transactions actually touched the same state. Because most transactions in a block are unrelated, this recovers most of the benefit of parallelism without requiring developers to declare dependencies in advance.

The network uses a proof-of-stake consensus with a validator set that produces blocks and finalizes them, and token holders can delegate their stake to validators to share in rewards.

Supply

APT has a maximum supply of 2.1 billion tokens, with total supply currently at roughly 1.21 billion and circulating supply around 857 million. Emission adds new tokens as staking rewards, and a large portion of the initial allocation to the foundation, team, and investors has been subject to multi-year vesting, so unlock schedules remain relevant to supply.

The project raised substantial venture funding before launch, and that concentrated early ownership has been a recurring point of discussion around its distribution.