Aptos Founding Engineer Sherry: The Technological Journey of Building a "Global Trading Engine"

In the context of increasingly fierce competition among public chains, Aptos is steadily moving towards its strategic positioning as a "global trading engine" through technological innovation and ecological expansion. Since first breaking through a total locked value of $1 billion last November, Aptos reached $1.03 billion by the end of March. In addition, the market capitalization of stablecoins also surpassed $1 billion for the first time on March 24, a year-on-year growth of more than ten times, demonstrating strong ecological appeal and funding capacity.

To meet the rapidly growing trading demand, the Aptos team continues to promote technical solutions such as Zaptos and Shardines, accelerating the construction of an underlying architecture that supports millions of TPS, strengthening its core advantages in performance, stability, and user experience.

High-performance public chain born from Meta

Sherry Xiao is one of the early founding engineers of Aptos. Before joining Aptos, she worked as an engineer at Instagram, primarily focusing on scalability architecture. She later joined Meta's Libra/Diem team, where she was responsible for building validation nodes and infrastructure, helping several well-known institutions deploy validation nodes.

After the Libra project encountered policy obstacles, the entire team came out to start a business together in 2022 and established Aptos. Meta has supplied a large number of talents to the Web3 industry, some of whom joined other projects, while others created new entrepreneurial teams.

As an engineer, Sherry believes that the advantage of the Move language compared to other smart contract languages is that it was designed for smart contracts from the very beginning, with many guarantees in asset management and security, and it provides formal verification tools. Move can effectively avoid many common security vulnerabilities, reducing the risk of fund loss. Additionally, Move offers innovative features such as dynamic distribution, account abstraction, and permissioned signatures, allowing developers to build more advanced products.

On top of the technical infrastructure, Sherry believes there is still a lot of room for improvement in the developer experience and user experience of Web3. Aptos is deeply focused on ZK-based login solutions and innovations in privacy protection. Recently, it launched a project that can hide transaction details, combining privacy protection with the decentralized characteristics of blockchain.

Scalability is a core advantage of Aptos. The team has extensive experience in building highly scalable systems, and Aptos's design is very modular, with each module having its own expansion space. At the consensus layer, the recently released Raptr is the industry's most advanced consensus algorithm implementation; at the execution layer, Block-STM technology is also industry-leading; in terms of storage, sharding technology has been implemented, and further research on sharding technology and related caching layers will continue in the future to further enhance system performance.

Ecological Layout: Stablecoins, Trading and DeFi

The ecological layout of Aptos mainly focuses on several aspects: infrastructure construction, collaboration with institutions to launch RWA projects, ecological fund incentives for community building, and the LFM plan to support the development of ecological projects. These efforts have enabled Aptos's ecosystem to achieve stable growth over the past period.

Aptos is the only L1 blockchain platform participating in Hong Kong's e-HKD project, maintaining close communication with banks and government departments in Hong Kong. Through Movemaker, it has established the co-creation space Aptos Space in Hong Kong, providing a venue for collaboration and gatherings for builders, and actively hosting offline events to attract Web3 talent.

In terms of ecological support, Aptos focuses on transaction-related tracks, including payment, expansion of stablecoin application scenarios, and the DeFi track. It is also paying attention to the combination of gaming and DeFi, as well as the application scenarios of AI agents and trading.

Recently, Aptos announced the creation of a global trading engine, focusing on innovations in user experience. It has launched features such as Keyless, account abstraction, and permissioned signatures, and added dynamic scripts and dynamic distribution functions to the Move language to help developers create innovative applications.

Talent Development: Developer Ecosystem Construction and Cooperation with Universities

In attracting and retaining developers, Sherry believes that the most important thing is to let developers see the possibilities of the future. As long as they can see the market prospects, demands, and opportunities, they can be attracted to continue working hard in the blockchain field.

Aptos places great importance on cultivating talent in universities and has in-depth collaborations with several well-known universities' blockchain associations to design blockchain courses, allowing students to learn Aptos technology directly. The company's engineers frequently give presentations at universities to attract outstanding developers to join the community.

For the future development of Web3, Sherry's personal and team's vision remains focused on the trading and payment sectors, hoping to establish a global financial infrastructure that enables more people to enjoy the conveniences of the modern financial system. She looks forward to seeing innovative payment projects combined with stablecoins, such as implementing payroll flow payments on Aptos.

Finally, regarding the recent changes in the senior management team, Sherry expressed that this is a good opportunity to reassess past plans and make adjustments, allowing the team to unite and think about the future layout direction.