In order to create their own version of the failed cryptocurrency aptos project Diem, former Meta staffers have acquired a sizable fundraising round from crypto venture capital titans.
Last year, Meta (previously Facebook) abandoned its ambitious intentions to establish a virtual currency. But it did sell the remaining properties to Silvergate Capital earlier in 2022 for $182 million.
In late February, the team behind the original Diem project made the announcement that they were developing a new blockchain named Aptos. They announced a significant fundraising round from crypto VCs on March 15.
A $200 million strategic investment in the firm was completed, including participation from Tiger Global, Multicoin Capital, Three Arrows Capital, FTX Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures, among others. The investment was headed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
Creating a blockchain of their own
Because they created their own blockchain, the Aptos team indicated that they will not be using or licensing any of the Diem intellectual property that Silvergate holds, according to Tech Crunch. The company’s worth was not made public, but according to the founders, it is probably above $1 billion and well “into the unicorn region.”
With another layer-1 blockchain, Aptos competes with Solana and Ethereum. It employs a programming language called Move in an effort to draw many developers from current networks.
We want to be a part of that ecosystem,” said Aptos CEO Mo Shaikh, who previously worked on Meta’s wallet Novi and has strong contacts to the Ethereum community. We’re not necessarily here to compete. The issues [the community] encounters, like as the recent wormhole occurrence, show us clearly that responsible construction must begin from the bottom up if we are to complement [them].”
In Q3: Aptos Mainnet
Additionally, Aptos has officially opened its devnet, enabling developers to test out and create blockchain-based applications. The group anticipates that the mainnet will go live in Q3.
A number of well-known cryptocurrency companies have reportedly already interacted with it, including Anchorage, Binance, Coinbase, Livepeer, Moonclave, Paxos, Paymagic, and Rarible, according to the source.
In relation to Solana’s several recent breakdowns, Aptos CTO Avery Ching stated that “current blockchains are just not as dependable as conventional financial rails, we’ve witnessed issues of downtime and outages that continue for hours.”
Aptos is entering a congested market where other blockchain networks are already effectively doing the same function.
