"New New Public Chain" War Reignited? A Preliminary Overview of the Aptos Ecosystem

Written by: angelilu, ForesightNews

The public chain project Aptos launched its Incentive Testnet 2 on July 12, just a few weeks after Incentive Testnet 1. The official statistics for Incentive Testnet 2 have not yet been released, but the popularity of participation in Incentive Testnet 1 already indicates the new wave of public chains sparked by Aptos. The officials candidly stated at the end of Incentive Testnet 1 that they never expected to have 30,000 registrations, and before the testnet was ready, the number of full nodes connected to the devnet reached 18,000.

The reasons for the enthusiastic participation in Aptos can be summarized as follows:

1. The development team comes from Meta (formerly Facebook)'s cryptocurrency project Diem. Aptos's co-founder and CTO Avery Ching served as a chief software engineer at Facebook for over 10 years and was the technical lead for the Novi team under Meta, focusing on the development of various aspects of blockchain technology while also maintaining the Diem blockchain. Most of the developers and researchers in the team, such as Alden Hu and David Wolinsky, participated in the development of Diem and Novi.
2. Support from top investment institutions. In March of this year, Aptos completed a $200 million financing round led by a16z, with participation from Tiger Global, Katie Haun, Multicoin Capital, FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Binance Labs, PayPal Ventures, and others. The massive financing and support from top institutions have officially brought Aptos into the public eye since March.
3. Part of Aptos's development is built on the publicly developed technology from Diem over the past three years, using Diem's programming language Move (you can click here to view a basic introduction to Move) and Diem-BFT consensus. Diem was sold to Silvergate Bank earlier this year, but its Move programming language and Move Virtual Machine are available for everyone to use. This shows that the new public chain has a strong technical guarantee even before its launch, with a design focus on absolute security, scalability, and trusted neutrality, with the ultimate goal of being able to process 100,000 or even 160,000 transactions in one second.

Aptos's roadmap includes four rounds of Incentive Testnets:

• AIT1: Decentralized Launch
• AIT2: Staking
• AIT3: Governance and Upgrades
• AIT4: Dynamic Validator Topology

Currently, it is in the second round of testing. Although there are still a few months until Aptos is expected to launch its mainnet at the end of September, many companies and projects are already participating in the chain. The Aptos team stated during the March financing that several companies, including Anchorage, Binance, Coinbase, Livepeer, Moonclave, Paxos, Paymagic, Rarible, and Streaming Fast, have already collaborated with them to provide feedback and contribute code on the devnet. Aptos has also partnered with Google Cloud to further decentralize the Aptos network.

Aptos has held one Aptos hackathon and launched an ecological funding program at the end of June to develop its ecosystem. According to Aptos, there are already over 100 projects building on the network according to this tweet, with use cases covering DeFi, NFTs, gaming, and more. This book outlines several projects in the Aptos ecosystem that are taking shape.

Image source: @MrAme34090868

Projects Native to Aptos

Pontem Network

Pontem Network is a product development studio that collaborates with Aptos to build foundational dApps and other infrastructure, such as development tools, EVM, AMM, etc. Pontem aims to help developers who want to build projects on Aptos learn the Move programming language and incubate applications native to Move, while also building backend and customer-facing products for the Aptos ecosystem. The Move VM developed by Pontem can achieve cross-chain interoperability, compatible with blockchains like Polkadot and Cosmos. Additionally, Pontem is developing an automated market maker DEX Liquidswap modeled after Uniswap and Curve on Aptos.

Screenshot of Liquidswap page

Econia

Econia is a super-parallel order book protocol running on the Aptos blockchain. Econia is designed for network-scale performance, aiming to provide equal global market access by leveraging Aptos's optimistic concurrency to scale trading between and within trading pairs. According to its article:

Econia utilizes a key technological innovation of the Aptos blockchain, known as the optimistic concurrency execution method called Block-STM, which queues orders in a single market, referred to as paraqueues. In short, Amy's order on pair 1 can be queued simultaneously with Bud's order on pair 1, and Econia's matching engine periodically batches all trades in all paraqueues, then reorders them chronologically and connects buyers and sellers accordingly to guide the funds.

Fewcha Wallet

Fewcha Wallet is a non-custodial Web3.0 wallet on the Aptos blockchain, featuring support for token launches and transactions, as well as NFT minting and transfers. Fewcha Wallet released a beta version of its plugin wallet in May this year, which can be downloaded from the Chrome store and will be available on mobile devices in Q3 2022. According to Fewcha's Twitter, the download count for Fewcha Wallet reached 3,200 as of July 8. The following image shows the development roadmap for Fewcha Wallet.

Martian Wallet

Martian Wallet is also a wallet on the Aptos chain, with its development team Martian DAO building various products on the Aptos chain. Martian Wallet is a crypto wallet built using the team's Aptos web3.js module version, and they are also developing an NFT marketplace called Curiosity. Martian Wallet can be used to manage digital assets and access decentralized applications on the Aptos blockchain, and it also supports minting NFTs on the Aptos devnet. Currently, a Chrome plugin wallet has been launched, with an iOS version to follow.

Zaptos Finance

Zaptos Finance is a liquid staking platform on the Aptos chain. Currently, this project is in a very early stage, and the official information is limited. Twitter hints that a Discord will be established.

Other Ecological Projects

In addition to the five projects native to the Aptos chain currently under development, there are also some tools and teams listed by Aptos as part of its ecosystem:

• Protagonist is a $100 million crypto fund launched by Dylan Macalinao and Ian Macalinao, founders of the cross-chain decentralized exchange Sabre Labs. Protagonist is headquartered in Miami and plans to invest in and incubate early Web3 protocols and startups across verticals, including gaming, infrastructure, security, and privacy. Its current portfolio includes Layer 1 public chain Aptos, Solana-based NFT utility protocol Cardinal, and digital banking platform Cogni, among others.
• Paymagic is an automated DAO rewards and payment platform that provides tools for sending bulk transfers, airdrops, vesting schedules, streaming payments, and more. Paymagic is not a native application of Aptos, but its tools will assist Aptos-based DAOs and NFT projects.
• The team behind Solrise Finance, which is a non-custodial digital asset management platform based on Solana, has developed a product line that includes the Solana wallet Solflare and the KYC framework Pulse DEX on Solana. Previously, the team's development focused on the Solana ecosystem, and they have not yet disclosed what they are building on the Aptos chain.
• Nutrios has also appeared in Aptos documentation as an ecological project, but currently, there is no official information available.

Early Projects in the Aptos Forum

In the Aptos forum, seven projects have submitted project introductions. In comparison, these projects are currently at an earlier stage of development or have not been part of Aptos for long. Although there are currently only seven projects, the number of projects in the forum will continue to grow:

• Aptosscan: Aptos's blockchain explorer.
• Topaz.so: Aptos NFT marketplace, currently in beta, expected to launch in Q3 2022.
• Dapptos View: Aiming to establish an open-source platform for the Aptos ecosystem with educational, news, job opportunities, metrics, and project dashboard features. The team consists of four founders who are also coordinators of the Aptos French community. The first version has been delivered, and updates will begin in Q3 to integrate the educational and metrics sections, with an open-source migration on GitHub.
• Aptos Crown Masks: Aiming to become a generative NFT project with an Aptos theme, offering 100,000 generative free NFTs for minting on the day of the Aptos mainnet launch.
• ONTO Wallet: A decentralized cross-chain wallet that was incubated by Ontology four years ago and is now an independent wallet, serving as a multi-chain mobile + web wallet. ONTO has helped the community launch a project called Ivy Market and has developed a bulk airdrop tool called Anydrop.
• Aptoschina: The Chinese community for the Aptos blockchain, planning to launch the Aptos Chinese Blockchain Explorer and an Aptos cross-border payment project soon.
• Aptos Egg with Witch: An NFT project planning to launch 5,616 NFTs ten days after the Aptos mainnet goes live, creating new magical creatures through a burn system after the NFTs sell out.

Conclusion

Aptos has not yet officially launched, and currently, only four applications in its ecosystem have detailed introductions and development roadmaps: Pontem Network, Econia, Fewcha Wallet, and Martian Wallet, focusing on wallet infrastructure and DEX applications.

Aptos previously participated in the NFT.NYC conference and introduced a solution in its blog post that can solve large-scale NFT minting. Tests have shown that Aptos devnet can mint millions of NFTs in an hour while remaining fully decentralized. It can be inferred that a major use case on Aptos will be NFTs, and its performance may attract a large number of high-quality NFT projects after the mainnet launch.