Wormhole Chains — Aptos

Welcome to the latest edition of the Wormhole Chains series, where we discuss some of the latest chains that have been added to the Wormhole network. Today, we’re talking Aptos.

Update Oct 18th: Aptos mainnet is now live, and Wormhole has been supporting it from Day 1.

1. What is Aptos?

Aptos is a recently launched L1 blockchain designed around three key principles — scalability, safety, and upgradeability. Aptos is being developed by Aptos Labs, a team consisting of former Meta developers who worked on the Diem project that was discontinued in January 2022.

Aptos’ vision is to deliver fair and universal access to decentralization for all and offers thoughtful innovations in consensus, smart contract design, system security, performance, and decentralization.

2. What else do you need to know?

Aptos utilizes and includes core creators of Move, a Rust-inspired programming language built for smart contract development, independently developed over the last three years by much of the Aptos team. Move is a new smart contract programming language that brings safety and provability to coding, making it dramatically easier for developers to build scalable and user-friendly applications.

Aptos Labs aims for the network to process over 160k TPS (transactions per second) using a technique called “parallel execution”, which results in very low transaction costs.

This technique is very different from most blockchains, which usually execute transactions sequentially i.e. every time a transaction is made, the data of that transaction is added to a single long ledger containing every single transaction ever conducted. Adding transactions sequentially can be extremely time-consuming and is the reason for most blockchains’ slow settlement and restricted TPS.

Aptos, on the other hand, processes transactions simultaneously and validates them afterward. If transactions fail, they are aborted and then re-executed, with so-called STM (software transactional memory) libraries that detect and manage conflicts. The parallel execution model for Aptos is different from others since it does not put restrictions on programmers to declare upfront the known read and write locations. Programmers can program freely with Aptos, and Block-STM will take advantage of possible parallel opportunities. These technologies improve the network’s throughput capacity, which has been a significant bottleneck for other Layer-1 blockchains.

To learn more, check out Aptos’ whitepaper.

3. Wormhole plans to support Aptos from Day 1!

Update Oct 18th: Aptos mainnet went live on October 18th and, at the same time, went live on the Wormhole network.

As soon as the Aptos mainnet goes live, Wormhole plans to allow generic message passing (including token transfers) between all connected chains and Aptos. Why should this matter to you?

⚬ liquidity will be able to flow in from EVMs and non-EVMs and will allow the bootstrapping of upcoming Aptos projects

⚬ devs will enjoy enhanced composability with Wormhole’s ultralight clients (e.g. directly deposit assets from a Metamask account into Martian without the need to fund a new wallet)

⚬ access to oracle pricing through Pyth’s Wormhole integration

⚬ devs are able to build with xChain in mind and onboard users from other chains without doing extra smart contract development

⚬ access to already established NFT markets

4. Who’s on the Team?

Aptos Labs is co-founded by Mo Shaikh (CEO) and Avery Ching (CTO). Both are former Meta employees with years of experience as a strategic partnerships lead and a senior developer/engineer, respectively.

The Aptos team is made up of a highly-accomplished team of engineers, researchers, strategists, designers, and builders. Much of the Aptos team is credited with developing and testing the technical innovations that power the Aptos blockchain and beyond — including the original creators of the Move language, Move Prover, Bullshark and Narwhal & Tusk mechanisms.

5. Anything else?

Markets

Argo Fi
Liquidswap

Wallets

Martian
Pontem Wallet
Petra

Block Explorer

Aptos Explorer

Programming Languages

Move

Testnet

AIT (Aptos Incentivized Testnet) 1–3
Since Aptos launched its developer testnet in March, tens of millions of transactions have been conducted, more than 20,000 nodes went up, and over 100 projects started building on the chain. Check out their latest testnet update.

Documentation & GitHub

Docs
GitHub

Contact & Socials

Stay up to date with Aptos by following their social channels:

Website | Twitter | Discord | Blog

6. Wormhole Noob? No problem!

If you’re new to Wormhole, here’s what you need to know:

⚬ The protocol’s total volume stands at over $40B, with several million transactions completed.

⚬ Currently, several thousand messages are submitted each day.

Check out Chase M., a Wormhole contributor, explaining more about Wormhole below:

7. Wormhole’s supported networks

Wormhole allows users to send assets to and from any of the supported chains without double-wrapping the asset. It enables seamless access to each network’s vibrant DeFi & NFT ecosystems!

Aptos is the latest addition to Wormhole’s network of supported chains — check out the Portal bridge to see which chains you can bridge to!

8. Join the ever-growing Wormhole community

If you have questions, need support, or just want to connect, join the Wormhole community and keep up to date with our upcoming announcements. We’re always happy to hear feedback — join our Discord, and drop us a comment!

Twitter | Discord | Medium | Telegram | Website