Aptos launched in October 2022, just months before Sui, as the other major blockchain born from Meta’s Diem project. Founded by Mo Shaikh (CEO) and Avery Ching (CTO), both former Diem engineers, Aptos also uses the Move programming language but makes different architectural choices than Sui. While Sui focused on object-centric design, Aptos pursued a more traditional account-based model with its own parallel execution engine called Block-STM.
Block-STM is Aptos’s key innovation: it optimistically executes all transactions in parallel, then detects and re-executes any conflicting transactions. This approach — inspired by software transactional memory from computer science — achieves high throughput (claims of 160,000+ TPS in testing) without requiring users or developers to declare transaction dependencies upfront. In practice, Aptos mainnet consistently processes thousands of TPS with sub-second finality.
Aptos raised over $400 million in venture funding, one of the largest raises for any Layer 1 chain. The money went toward aggressive business development: partnerships with Microsoft (for AI integration), Google Cloud (as a validator), and NBCUniversal. South Korean adoption was particularly strong — Aptos became one of the most traded tokens on Korean exchanges, and Korean projects like Thala, Pontem, and Aries Markets became ecosystem anchors.
The protocol faced criticism for its token launch: a large percentage allocated to insiders and investors, perceived as unfair compared to chains that distributed tokens more broadly. The Aptos Foundation attempted to address this through grants and ecosystem incentive programs. By 2024, Aptos’s TVL grew to over $1 billion, driven primarily by DeFi protocols and gaming. The competition between Aptos and Sui — both Move-based, both from Diem alumni, both launched within months of each other — became one of crypto’s most-watched rivalries, with each chain’s community fiercely loyal and dismissive of the other.
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