Aptos Ecosystem Overview (2022)

Key Insights:

• Aptos has not mainnet yet and is expected to announce the mainnet in Q3 2022.
• Basic sectors on Aptos are quite complete, but the completion of those sectors are not high because most of the projects are in the development stage as Aptos has not yet mainnet.
• Aptos raised $350 million in the last 6 months from big ventures in the market.
• More research is needed when the mainnet event takes place in Q3 2022 to find investing opportunities.

Aptos Overview

Aptos is a new layer-1 blockchain project that focuses on providing the most secure blockchain and to be available to a large number of users worldwide. Aptos promises to become a layer-1 blockchain surpassing its two seniors, Ethereum and Solana, with a strong development team that has served for big projects like Diem and Novi.

Currently, Aptos has not launched a token, and there is no document about the project’s token. Aptos has not launched the mainnet yet, so there are no details about the mainnet of this blockchain.

Aptos highlights

Highlight features of the Aptos blockchain compared to other layer-1s include:

• The Move programming language: Aptos’ programming language is a central focus of the project, designed for secure management of resources, and for easy verification of commands on the blockchain.
• Low latency Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) mechanism: Team Aptos focused to complement their BFT mechanism for a long time, ensuring the safety of the network if even the nodes are manipulated and attack the network.
• Ability to change the private key to increase security level for users.
• High TPS: In laboratory conditions, if ignoring many factors about storage, consensus mechanism, network,… Aptos’s TPS can reach 125,000 – 160,000 transactions per second.
• Network Upgradability: Aptos’s team believes that in order to adapt to the rapidly changing market, the network must have excellent upgradability. Therefore, they created Aptos with the ability to upgrade the network without downtime to accommodate continuous network upgrades in the future.
• Validators can run diverse nodes: Validators can choose to run nodes at many different levels, with the simplest node running level reduced so that validators only need to meet the basic requirements, from there, they can rapidly increase the number of validators for the network.

Investors and Partners

Currently, Aptos has gone through many rounds of funding, invested by many large investment funds.

On July 25, 2022, Aptos announced to receive $150 million Series A investment from major funds including FTX Ventures, Jump Crypto, Apollo, Griffin Gaming Partners, Franklin Templeton, Circle Ventures, Superscrypt, and 2 investors from the previous private round (a16z crypto and Multicoin).

The first investment round of Aptos was on March 15, 2022, with 200 million invested from a16z, Tiger Global, Katie Haun, Multicoin Capital, Three Arrows Capital, FTX Ventures and Coinbase Ventures.

Currently, Aptos has just announced a single partner, Google Cloud, which they use to store data to make it easier for validators to run the node (it only takes 15 minutes for a node to be installed and started).

Roadmap and Development Progress

Aptos has had a long development phase, but public events have only occured since the beginning of 2022 so far:

• 2022 Q1 (March 15) – Testnet for developers: Improve the Move programming language to be more developer-friendly, enabling developers.
• April 21, 2022: Using Google Cloud as a data storage application makes running nodes easier. However, this affects the decentralization of the blockchain when Aptos decides to use Google’s services.
• 2022 Q2 – Incentivized testnet launch: The first time the testnet is public for the community to use and run nodes.
• Q3 2022 – Mainnet public: This will be the next big milestone for Aptos. After successfully raising $350M, the Aptos mainnet event is highly anticipated by the community.
• Q4 2022 – Q1 2023: Aptos continues to grow its network with new updates.

Aptos ecosystem analysis

An overview of important sectors on Aptos will be introduced and analyzed in the following section, according to the categories in the ecosystem.

Information is collected through skinning in the Aptos ecosystem on the project’s social networking channels (July 28, 2022). Although the project has not yet launched the mainnet, there are many projects ready to launch on Aptos when the network goes live.

AMM DEXs

Projects about DEX on the Aptos ecosystem include:

• Pontem: The project is invested by Delphi, Alameda, Mechanism, Animoca Brands, Aptos Labs and many others, with a round worth of $4.5 million. The project is in testnet stage and has a total of 75,000 testers at the moment.

• Laminar, Econia, Empo, Hanson: The DEXs on Aptos have not been announced much. The project is in the development phase. In which the majority of DEXs operate under the AMM mechanism, except for Econia which operates under the orderbook mechanism.
• In addition, there is a project working on a trading aggregator Hippo – helping users to trade on a single interface and achieve the best trade price.

The AMM DEX sector is the first one to be completed in any ecosystem to prepare the future for other segments. The Aptos system is in the early stages of perfecting the DEX section, in the early stages of developing the biggest players.

Currently, the biggest player is Pontem and the rest of the projects are in the devnet stage, and it is likely that they will soon open liquidity mining programs as well as other programs to attract liquidity in the near future.

Users can participate in product use programs, airdrops or liquidity mining to make profits for themselves!

Lending & Borrowing

Lending & Borrowing projects on the Aptos ecosystem include:

• Vial: Currently the project has launched devnet, users can try the project’s products.
• Njord Finance: The project does not have much information, but is supported by Twitter of Aptos Labs.
• Ultima: Lending project won 3rd prize Aptos hackathon 2022. The project is under development.

Currently, there are three lending projects in development on Aptos and one project is in the devnet period, users can join and try the beta products out.

NFT Marketplace

Projects about NFT Marketplace on the Aptos ecosystem include:

• Curiosity: The project is in devnet stage, supported by Aptos communication on Twitter.
• Topaz: The project is in devnet stage.

Currently, the NFT Markets have not come into operation because Aptos mainnet event has not happened yet. After the mainnet in Q3 2022 takes place, these markets will be the focus of NFT projects, in which more attention is being focused on Curiosity because this project has the media support of Aptos Labs.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure projects on the Aptos ecosystem include:

• Wallets on Aptos: Pandoraland, Martian, Fewcha, Aptos Wallet, Hive – these wallets support the Aptos ecosystem, and are developing their products as extensions, apps on iOS and Android. Pontem Network – the project with the most interest in AMM DEX – is also developing their own wallet for Aptos.
• Oracle on Aptos: The first and only Oracle to announce working on Aptos at the moment is Switchboard. The largest oracles in the market like Chainlink, Band Protocol have not announced support on this blockchain yet.
• Explorer on Aptos currently has a devnet explorer, but this explorer does not show much information and is also in the development stage.
• Bridge: There is currently no information on which bridges will support Aptos. This is an extremely important area for money to flow into the ecosystem, and needs to be watched more in the future.

The infrastructure section on Aptos is in the early stages of development, so there are many shortcomings. In addition, it is a chain that does not support EVM, so connecting to the user file of existing EVM chains will be difficult. Not only that, the infrastructure tools will have to develop from scratch with a new programming language (Move), so building the tools will take some time.

During mainnet preparation in Q3 2022, Aptos’ infrastructure segment will need to develop a lot to make it easy for users to use.

Others

Other projects on the Aptos ecosystem include:

• Fund Management: Solrise is the first and only project at the moment working on Fund Management on the Aptos system. This project was originally developed on Solana, and now expanded to Aptos.
• Payment: Paymagic works on payments on Aptos, this project has worked on many ecosystems and is expanding to support DAOs and projects on Aptos.
• Liquid Staking: Zaptos is a project that allows users to profit from farming on Aptos, and is in development.
• Domain Name Service: Aptos Name Service – a project about Name Service with domain names ending in “.aptos”.
• Messaging project: Dialect – Multi-chain messaging project and now they will support Aptos in the near future.

In general, the Aptos ecosystem has had a certain completion of projects working in different fields. However, most of the projects are still in the development stage because Aptos is not yet mainnet, and will need to research this ecosystem more when they go to mainnet at the end of Q3 2022 according to the roadmap.

Overview and future projection of the Aptos ecosystem

The Aptos ecosystem conclusion

Looking at the overview of the ecosystem, Aptos has had leading projects in most important areas, except for the bridge segment, there are no projects announced to develop on the system. Basic DeFi sections on the system have appeared (including DEXs, Lending), basic infrastructure projects such as explorer, oracles, wallets are also in the process of being completed.

Aptos also has a large number of projects from other chains expanding to such as Solrise, Pontem Network, etc. Finally, Aptos has a large backer, which has gained great attention from the market as well as support. of VCs to develop the ecosystem.

However, this ecosystem still has some disadvantages:

• First, Aptos is not an EVM chain, and their primary programming language is Move. This will cause many difficulties for new developers who want to develop projects on this new blockchain, especially when the infrastructure to support developers is not much.
• Another disadvantage of non-EVM chains is that users of that chain will have to be exposed to a completely new set of tools, hindering their use. This weakness will cause fewer users to use Aptos when they launch the mainnet.
• For small investors, the fact that the project has raised a lot of capital at a high valuation will make it more difficult to invest in tokens to find profits.

Predictions about the Aptos  ecosystem

In the near future, the Aptos ecosystem is likely to have the following developments for growth:

• Since they use a new programming language, they need to attract more developers to the platform. Hackathons can be opened, with many programs to attract developers and projects from other chains to increase the number of projects, as well as develop tools to make programming on Aptos easier.
• The mainnet is promised to launch in Q3 2022, so it is highly likely that before October 2022, users will be able to experience the project’s applications, along with many opportunities for airdrops and farming on Aptos.
• The bridges will support Aptos after they launch the mainnet, to circulate the money in and out of the ecosystem. The system’s Explorer will be improved to be more user-friendly and feature more features.
• After the mainnet, the projects will one by one launch their products, and will form the leading projects and become the mainstay in the Aptos ecosystem.

Conclusion

The Aptos system is getting a lot of attention after successfully raising $350 million in the past 6 months. In the near future, the project’s mainnet event and token release will certainly be very noticeable because they have both a large number of projects on the system and many large backers to support the development of the ecosystem.

When this blockchain mainnet, there are many opportunities for investors to earn profit including farming and airdrop hunting.