In the context of increasingly fierce competition in the public chain, Aptos is steadily moving towards the strategic positioning of "global trading engine" by virtue of technological innovation and ecological expansion. Aptos reached $1.03 billion at the end of March after topping $1 billion in total locked positions (TVL) for the first time in November last year. In addition, the market value of stablecoins also exceeded $1 billion for the first time on March 24, a year-on-year increase of more than 10 times, showing strong ecological attractiveness and capital carrying capacity.
In this context, Aptos has not only achieved continuous iterations on the technical level but has also made several breakthroughs in ecosystem development: Aave has completed its first deployment of a non-EVM environment testnet, significantly boosting DeFi activity. To meet the rapidly growing transaction demand, the Aptos team continues to advance technical solutions such as Zaptos and Shardines, accelerating the construction of an underlying architecture that supports millions of TPS, and reinforcing its core advantages in performance, stability, and user experience.
In this trend, an in-depth dialogue was conducted with Sherry Xiao, one of the early founding engineers of Aptos, focusing on key issues such as the technical architecture of global trading engines, ecological expansion strategies, and developer support, providing insight into how Aptos stands out in the new round of public chain competition with a technology-driven approach and an ecosystem as its wings.
Meta "OG" built a high-performance Blockchain.
: Please introduce your background and your role at Aptos.
Sherry: I am Sherry Xiao, one of the early founding engineers of Aptos. Before joining Aptos, I worked as an engineer at Instagram, primarily focusing on scalability architecture. Later, I joined the Libra/Diem team at Meta (formerly Facebook), where I was responsible for validation nodes and infrastructure development, helping organizations such as Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and eBay deploy validation nodes.
After the Libra project faced policy obstacles, our entire team ventured out to start a business in 2022, founding Aptos. In fact, many talents have emerged from Facebook's Blockchain team; some joined Sui, some joined a16z's crypto team, and others created their own startups, such as Lightspark founded by David Marcus. It can be said that Facebook has contributed a large number of talents to the Web3 industry.
: As an engineer, how do you evaluate the advantages of the Move language compared to other smart contract languages?
Sherry: For those with an engineering background, switching languages is second nature. The Move language is developed based on Rust, and its greatest advantage is that it was designed as a language for smart contracts from the very beginning, offering many guarantees in asset management and security, as well as providing formal verification tools.
Compared to Solidity and EVM, Move can effectively avoid many common security vulnerabilities and reduce the risk of fund losses. Among them, the Move prover tool also allows developers to verify the correctness of smart contracts written in the Move programming language. In addition, Move offers innovative features such as dynamic dispatch, account abstraction, and permissioned signatures, enabling developers to build more advanced products.
For developers familiar with programming languages and data structures, learning Move is not as difficult as one might imagine, because the fundamental principles of programming are interconnected.
: What are the existing bottlenecks that need to be iterated upon in the current technological infrastructure?
Sherry: Overall, I think there is still a lot of room for improvement in the developer experience and user experience of Web3. Taking Aptos as an example, the infrastructure is already quite complete, with its throughput, speed, and Gas fees all reduced to very low levels, but how to provide unique features on-chain that allow developers to create standout products remains a significant challenge.
We are deeply engaged in ZK-based login solutions and innovations in privacy protection. This is important because user privacy is a significant consideration for achieving large-scale payments. Recently, we launched a project in our open-source code repository that can hide transaction details, allowing users to know that a transaction occurred between Alice and Bob, but not seeing the specific amount and balance. This technology combines privacy protection with the decentralized features of Blockchain, which can create interesting products.
: What unique advantages does Aptos have in terms of scalability compared to other public Blockchains?
Sherry: Scalability is our core advantage. As an engineering team from Facebook, we have extensive experience in building highly scalable systems and have been responsible for large-scale infrastructures like Instagram and Facebook.
The design of Aptos is very modular, with each module having its own expansion space:
At the consensus layer, our latest release Raptr is the industry's most advanced implementation of consensus algorithms, pushing parallelization to the limit;
At the execution level, our Block-STM technology is also industry-leading, and many newly released public chains and L2s are adopting this technology, such as Movement, Monad, Polygon, etc.;
In terms of storage, we have implemented sharding technology and will continue to research sharding technology and related caching layers in the future to further enhance system performance.
These technologies are all open source, and the community is welcome to use Aptos's technology. However, even if other chains directly copy our technology, there will still be latency. For example, while they are still using Block-STM V1, we are already working on V2; by the time they catch up, we have already launched the performance optimization of Move 2.0. So directly developing on Aptos is a wiser choice.
Ecological Layout: Stablecoins, Trading and DeFi
: The data on the Aptos Blockchain is performing well, with the number of accounts surpassing 47 million and weekly transaction volume exceeding 39 million. What are the aspects contributing to this progress?
Sherry: Our ecological layout mainly focuses on several aspects:
First is the infrastructure construction, we have natively supported three major stablecoins USDT, USDC, and USDE. Users generally feedback that transferring on Aptos is very smooth, and on-chain peer-to-peer payments have become one of our significant advantages.
Secondly, we have collaborated with institutions such as Franklin Templeton to launch multiple RWA projects on the blockchain.
At the beginning of this year, we announced a $2 million ecological fund to incentivize community building and support different DeFi protocols and projects. This has also promoted the growth of DEX trading volume and on-chain activities.
In addition, we launched the LFM program to help ecological projects plan their roadmaps, conduct token generation events (TGE), connect with exchange resources, obtain venture capital, and provide marketing and KOL guidance. These efforts have led to stable growth in our ecosystem over the past period.
: Is the news about the Hong Kong stablecoin HKDA potentially being issued on Aptos true? What are the plans for compliant development in Hong Kong?
Sherry: Aptos is the only participating L1 Blockchain platform in the Hong Kong e-HKD project, and we have been actively involved in related discussions. We maintain close communication with banks and government departments in Hong Kong, and BCG is also our partner.
We have a lot of innovative collaborations with Hong Kong Cyberport. Our official community organization Movemaker just held a hackathon event at Cyberport a few weeks ago, hoping to nurture local projects.
Although we do not have a large office in Hong Kong, we have established the co-creation space Aptos Space in a prime location through Movemaker, providing a venue for builders to collaborate and gather, while actively hosting offline events to attract Web3 talent. We place great importance on the vibrancy of the developer ecosystem in the Asia-Pacific region, as many high-quality ecological projects come from the Chinese-speaking area. Our layout in the Asia-Pacific region will become deeper, investing more resources, and continuing to achieve more cooperation in this area to encourage better development teams to join our ecosystem.
: Which tracks will Aptos focus on supporting in the ecosystem under the current market environment?
Sherry: As we can see from the global trading engine we recently launched, the trading-related track is a direction we value highly. We focus on payment, the expansion of stablecoin application scenarios, and the DeFi track, especially on developing the leading projects of the DeFi "trinity" (DEX, lending, and liquidity staking).
We also hope to cooperate deeply with large institutions and partners with distribution channels. Aptos has obvious advantages in transfers—low latency and low cost, making it very suitable for large-scale payment businesses. We are also focusing on the combination of games and DeFi, as well as the application scenarios of AI agents and trading.
: How will Aptos' recent announcement to build a global trading engine be realized?
Sherry: In the past few years, we have been deploying the infrastructure for a global trading engine. We believe that the infrastructure of Blockchain has been addressed quite well, and we are now focusing on innovations at the user experience level:
For example, Keyless is a technology based on zk that allows users to log in directly using their Google, Facebook, or Apple accounts, addressing the pain points of private key management and mnemonic phrase memory.
We have implemented account abstraction ( account abstraction ) and permission sign ( permission sign ) functions, allowing DeFi developers to better control user authentication and onboarding processes;
In the Move language, we have added features such as dynamic script ( and dynamic dispatch ) to help DeFi or trading applications achieve functional innovation.
These technical points combine to form our vision: to build a global trading engine and invite developers to utilize this infrastructure to create innovative applications.
) Talent Development: Developer Ecosystem Construction and University Cooperation
: How does Aptos attract and retain developers in the context of AI becoming a popular direction?
Sherry: Indeed, there will be developers attracted by popular fields, but each application scenario has its own developer base. Even in the heat of AI, there are still many developers interested in cryptography###, decentralization, and Blockchain, which are features that AI cannot fulfill.
For developers, the most important thing is to see the possibilities of the future, not just short-term speculation. Developers all have dreams of creating products that can be widely used. As long as we can show them the market prospects, demand, and opportunities, we can attract developers to continue to make efforts in the Blockchain field.
: What measures does Aptos take in talent cultivation in universities?
Sherry: We place great emphasis on talent cultivation in higher education. As a team with a background of engineers from Facebook, we understand that universities are the largest talent pool. We have in-depth cooperation with the Blockchain Associations at Stanford University and Berkeley University, and we also have collaborative projects with SMU in Singapore and Tsinghua University in China.
We collaborated with professors to design a Blockchain course that allows students to directly learn Aptos technology, using Aptos as the first lesson to enter Blockchain. Most of our company's engineers hold PhDs and often give lectures at universities such as MIT and UC to attract outstanding developers to join the community.
Recently, at the hackathon held in Hong Kong, the teams from Zhejiang University and Tsinghua University Blockchain Associations showcased outstanding projects, and we look forward to their future growth.
: What are your personal expectations for the future development of Web3?
Sherry: My personal vision and that of the entire team still focuses on the trading and payment sectors. Since the Libra project, we have aimed to establish a global financial infrastructure that allows more people to enjoy the conveniences of the modern financial system.
I am particularly looking forward to seeing innovative payment projects combined with stablecoins. For example, streaming payment can be fully realized on Aptos—getting paid every second for work done every second, which is something traditional financial institutions cannot achieve.
Migrating traditional payment software onto the blockchain, combined with privacy protection features, can create exciting new scenarios. These innovative applications are the key to truly promoting the adoption of Blockchain technology.
: What impact will the recent changes in the senior management team have on Aptos?
Sherry: Personnel changes are quite normal for many teams. For the team, this is actually a good opportunity to reassess past plans and make adjustments. Previously, we were focused on our tasks, and such changes allow us to come together and think about the direction of future layouts.
The content is for reference only, not a solicitation or offer. No investment, tax, or legal advice provided. See Disclaimer for more risks disclosure.
Exclusive interview with Sherry, the founding engineer of Aptos: The technical journey of Meta Blockchain "OG" in building a "global trading engine".
Interview: Tong,
Editor: Yuliya,
In the context of increasingly fierce competition in the public chain, Aptos is steadily moving towards the strategic positioning of "global trading engine" by virtue of technological innovation and ecological expansion. Aptos reached $1.03 billion at the end of March after topping $1 billion in total locked positions (TVL) for the first time in November last year. In addition, the market value of stablecoins also exceeded $1 billion for the first time on March 24, a year-on-year increase of more than 10 times, showing strong ecological attractiveness and capital carrying capacity.
In this context, Aptos has not only achieved continuous iterations on the technical level but has also made several breakthroughs in ecosystem development: Aave has completed its first deployment of a non-EVM environment testnet, significantly boosting DeFi activity. To meet the rapidly growing transaction demand, the Aptos team continues to advance technical solutions such as Zaptos and Shardines, accelerating the construction of an underlying architecture that supports millions of TPS, and reinforcing its core advantages in performance, stability, and user experience.
In this trend, an in-depth dialogue was conducted with Sherry Xiao, one of the early founding engineers of Aptos, focusing on key issues such as the technical architecture of global trading engines, ecological expansion strategies, and developer support, providing insight into how Aptos stands out in the new round of public chain competition with a technology-driven approach and an ecosystem as its wings.
Meta "OG" built a high-performance Blockchain.
: Please introduce your background and your role at Aptos.
Sherry: I am Sherry Xiao, one of the early founding engineers of Aptos. Before joining Aptos, I worked as an engineer at Instagram, primarily focusing on scalability architecture. Later, I joined the Libra/Diem team at Meta (formerly Facebook), where I was responsible for validation nodes and infrastructure development, helping organizations such as Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and eBay deploy validation nodes.
After the Libra project faced policy obstacles, our entire team ventured out to start a business in 2022, founding Aptos. In fact, many talents have emerged from Facebook's Blockchain team; some joined Sui, some joined a16z's crypto team, and others created their own startups, such as Lightspark founded by David Marcus. It can be said that Facebook has contributed a large number of talents to the Web3 industry.
: As an engineer, how do you evaluate the advantages of the Move language compared to other smart contract languages?
Sherry: For those with an engineering background, switching languages is second nature. The Move language is developed based on Rust, and its greatest advantage is that it was designed as a language for smart contracts from the very beginning, offering many guarantees in asset management and security, as well as providing formal verification tools.
Compared to Solidity and EVM, Move can effectively avoid many common security vulnerabilities and reduce the risk of fund losses. Among them, the Move prover tool also allows developers to verify the correctness of smart contracts written in the Move programming language. In addition, Move offers innovative features such as dynamic dispatch, account abstraction, and permissioned signatures, enabling developers to build more advanced products.
For developers familiar with programming languages and data structures, learning Move is not as difficult as one might imagine, because the fundamental principles of programming are interconnected.
: What are the existing bottlenecks that need to be iterated upon in the current technological infrastructure?
Sherry: Overall, I think there is still a lot of room for improvement in the developer experience and user experience of Web3. Taking Aptos as an example, the infrastructure is already quite complete, with its throughput, speed, and Gas fees all reduced to very low levels, but how to provide unique features on-chain that allow developers to create standout products remains a significant challenge.
We are deeply engaged in ZK-based login solutions and innovations in privacy protection. This is important because user privacy is a significant consideration for achieving large-scale payments. Recently, we launched a project in our open-source code repository that can hide transaction details, allowing users to know that a transaction occurred between Alice and Bob, but not seeing the specific amount and balance. This technology combines privacy protection with the decentralized features of Blockchain, which can create interesting products.
: What unique advantages does Aptos have in terms of scalability compared to other public Blockchains?
Sherry: Scalability is our core advantage. As an engineering team from Facebook, we have extensive experience in building highly scalable systems and have been responsible for large-scale infrastructures like Instagram and Facebook.
The design of Aptos is very modular, with each module having its own expansion space:
These technologies are all open source, and the community is welcome to use Aptos's technology. However, even if other chains directly copy our technology, there will still be latency. For example, while they are still using Block-STM V1, we are already working on V2; by the time they catch up, we have already launched the performance optimization of Move 2.0. So directly developing on Aptos is a wiser choice.
Ecological Layout: Stablecoins, Trading and DeFi
: The data on the Aptos Blockchain is performing well, with the number of accounts surpassing 47 million and weekly transaction volume exceeding 39 million. What are the aspects contributing to this progress?
Sherry: Our ecological layout mainly focuses on several aspects:
First is the infrastructure construction, we have natively supported three major stablecoins USDT, USDC, and USDE. Users generally feedback that transferring on Aptos is very smooth, and on-chain peer-to-peer payments have become one of our significant advantages.
Secondly, we have collaborated with institutions such as Franklin Templeton to launch multiple RWA projects on the blockchain.
At the beginning of this year, we announced a $2 million ecological fund to incentivize community building and support different DeFi protocols and projects. This has also promoted the growth of DEX trading volume and on-chain activities.
In addition, we launched the LFM program to help ecological projects plan their roadmaps, conduct token generation events (TGE), connect with exchange resources, obtain venture capital, and provide marketing and KOL guidance. These efforts have led to stable growth in our ecosystem over the past period.
: Is the news about the Hong Kong stablecoin HKDA potentially being issued on Aptos true? What are the plans for compliant development in Hong Kong?
Sherry: Aptos is the only participating L1 Blockchain platform in the Hong Kong e-HKD project, and we have been actively involved in related discussions. We maintain close communication with banks and government departments in Hong Kong, and BCG is also our partner.
We have a lot of innovative collaborations with Hong Kong Cyberport. Our official community organization Movemaker just held a hackathon event at Cyberport a few weeks ago, hoping to nurture local projects.
Although we do not have a large office in Hong Kong, we have established the co-creation space Aptos Space in a prime location through Movemaker, providing a venue for builders to collaborate and gather, while actively hosting offline events to attract Web3 talent. We place great importance on the vibrancy of the developer ecosystem in the Asia-Pacific region, as many high-quality ecological projects come from the Chinese-speaking area. Our layout in the Asia-Pacific region will become deeper, investing more resources, and continuing to achieve more cooperation in this area to encourage better development teams to join our ecosystem.
: Which tracks will Aptos focus on supporting in the ecosystem under the current market environment?
Sherry: As we can see from the global trading engine we recently launched, the trading-related track is a direction we value highly. We focus on payment, the expansion of stablecoin application scenarios, and the DeFi track, especially on developing the leading projects of the DeFi "trinity" (DEX, lending, and liquidity staking).
We also hope to cooperate deeply with large institutions and partners with distribution channels. Aptos has obvious advantages in transfers—low latency and low cost, making it very suitable for large-scale payment businesses. We are also focusing on the combination of games and DeFi, as well as the application scenarios of AI agents and trading.
: How will Aptos' recent announcement to build a global trading engine be realized?
Sherry: In the past few years, we have been deploying the infrastructure for a global trading engine. We believe that the infrastructure of Blockchain has been addressed quite well, and we are now focusing on innovations at the user experience level:
These technical points combine to form our vision: to build a global trading engine and invite developers to utilize this infrastructure to create innovative applications.
) Talent Development: Developer Ecosystem Construction and University Cooperation
: How does Aptos attract and retain developers in the context of AI becoming a popular direction?
Sherry: Indeed, there will be developers attracted by popular fields, but each application scenario has its own developer base. Even in the heat of AI, there are still many developers interested in cryptography###, decentralization, and Blockchain, which are features that AI cannot fulfill.
For developers, the most important thing is to see the possibilities of the future, not just short-term speculation. Developers all have dreams of creating products that can be widely used. As long as we can show them the market prospects, demand, and opportunities, we can attract developers to continue to make efforts in the Blockchain field.
: What measures does Aptos take in talent cultivation in universities?
Sherry: We place great emphasis on talent cultivation in higher education. As a team with a background of engineers from Facebook, we understand that universities are the largest talent pool. We have in-depth cooperation with the Blockchain Associations at Stanford University and Berkeley University, and we also have collaborative projects with SMU in Singapore and Tsinghua University in China.
We collaborated with professors to design a Blockchain course that allows students to directly learn Aptos technology, using Aptos as the first lesson to enter Blockchain. Most of our company's engineers hold PhDs and often give lectures at universities such as MIT and UC to attract outstanding developers to join the community.
Recently, at the hackathon held in Hong Kong, the teams from Zhejiang University and Tsinghua University Blockchain Associations showcased outstanding projects, and we look forward to their future growth.
: What are your personal expectations for the future development of Web3?
Sherry: My personal vision and that of the entire team still focuses on the trading and payment sectors. Since the Libra project, we have aimed to establish a global financial infrastructure that allows more people to enjoy the conveniences of the modern financial system.
I am particularly looking forward to seeing innovative payment projects combined with stablecoins. For example, streaming payment can be fully realized on Aptos—getting paid every second for work done every second, which is something traditional financial institutions cannot achieve.
Migrating traditional payment software onto the blockchain, combined with privacy protection features, can create exciting new scenarios. These innovative applications are the key to truly promoting the adoption of Blockchain technology.
: What impact will the recent changes in the senior management team have on Aptos?
Sherry: Personnel changes are quite normal for many teams. For the team, this is actually a good opportunity to reassess past plans and make adjustments. Previously, we were focused on our tasks, and such changes allow us to come together and think about the direction of future layouts.