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Multicoin Capital: On the ruins of Meta, the public chain Aptos returns with Move

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Sharding and non-sharding is a huge technical divergence in the history of public chains. Solana is a successful non-sharding blockchain, and Aptos may be the second.

Original title: "Move Move Move"

Original author: Kyle Samani, Multicoin Capital partner

Original translation: Hu Tao, Chain Catcher

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to think about scaling blockchains: break them up into smaller pieces and try to connect them together, or optimize and scale individual shards.

Rollups and sharding are prime examples of breaking blockchains up into smaller pieces. These approaches create several second-order problems:

1. They break composability

2. They increase latency

3. They increase technical complexity for developers

4. They increase social coordination costs between many uncoordinated developers

5. The cross-chain applications they make are inherently fragile

The other approach is to optimize and scale individual shards. The biggest problem with this approach is that at a fixed point in time, there must be a certain cap on overall system performance (however, hardware continues to get faster).

The crypto industry has framed this debate in a relatively binary way. But there is nuance. These approaches are not mutually exclusive. While most in the industry have traditionally advocated for breaking up state into multiple pieces, we advocate for optimizing single-shard performance to optimize UX, DX, and maximize the design space of composable crypto applications. This belief led us to make three investments in Solana during 2019 and 2020, and a rapid rise in 2021. This leads us to Aptos.

I’m excited to announce that Multicoin Capital has participated in Aptos Labs’ $200 million strategic round. The round was led by a16z crypto, with participation from Katie Haun's fund, Three Arrows Capital, ParaFi Capital, IronGrey, Hashed, Variant, Tiger Global, BlockTower, FTX Ventures, Paxos, Coinbase Ventures, and others.

Aptos Labs is building a new layer 1 blockchain focused on security, scalability, and upgradeability. The team is led by Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, two of the main builders of Meta's Libra/Diem and Calibra/Novi. Unfortunately, Diem was blocked from launching, which prevented their work from seeing the light of day. Rather than abandon years of work, Mo and Avery left Meta and built a new network called Aptos (which aptly means "the people") based on the open source Diem codebase. After leaving Meta, Mo and Avery came together with many Diem and Novi core developers to form one of the most impressive teams in crypto.

It’s important to note that Meta and the Diem Association are not investors in Aptos. No one at Meta — including David Marcus, Mark Zuckerberg, or any current Meta leadership — has invested in the project. This separation is important. However, given the maturity of the team and technology, it’s not starting from scratch. In fact, as part of today’s funding announcement, several brands including Anchorage, Binance, Blockorus, Coinbase, Livepeer, Moonclave, Paxos, Paymagic, Rarible, and Streaming Fast have expressed plans to build on Aptos in the near future.

The Aptos team believes in scaling monolithic performance as described above. Beyond that, the Aptos technology prioritizes a few key things:

· Given how easy it is to write a flawed smart contract, security is imperative. It’s clear that code written today will be used to protect trillions of dollars of value in a few years. Since the release of Move, the programming language used by Aptos, three years ago, it has been widely praised as an excellent VM and development environment. It is comparable to the efficiency of Rust and C++, while providing many security features, which makes it more difficult to write smart contracts with vulnerabilities. In addition, Move Prover makes it very simple to formally verify Move contracts, providing very strong security guarantees. We have always believed in the importance of optimized and opinionated development environments, and believe that Move will be one of the most important development environments in the coming year.

· Hotstuff consensus, now in its fourth major iteration. Like Move, Hotstuff is also well received and formally verified. Hotstuff is fast, provides battle-tested security performance, and has low overhead.

Building an organic community around a new public chain is difficult. Given our experience with Solana, we learned that one of the best things a Layer 1 team can do is to launch with a custom programming environment, not just another EVM chain. Move is an outstanding technology that we believe will attract developers from a variety of technical backgrounds and accelerate the growth of the crypto ecosystem more broadly.

Due to its emphasis on security, we think it will help many developers and companies get out of the way and build. No one wants to be the person advocating for a project that ends up being full of bugs and causing people to lose money. Move meaningfully reduces this risk, and we expect many developers to write their first smart contracts in Move deployed on Aptos.

Aptos has hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D funding and is a mature technology. Developers can build on the Aptos testnet starting March 15th. Aptos will launch an incentivized testnet and mainnet in Q2 and Q3 of this year. The Aptos team already has more than 20 people, and with years of knowledge of this codebase, they are moving fast and hiring like crazy.