Interview with Sherry, founding engineer at Aptos: Meta blockchain "OG"'s technical journey to create a "global transaction engine"

Interview: Tong, PANews

Editor: Yuliya, PANews

Against the backdrop of increasingly fierce competition in public chains, Aptos is steadily moving towards the strategic positioning of a "global trading engine" with technological innovation and ecological expansion. Since its first crossing of $1 billion in total lockout (TVL) in November last year, Aptos reached $1.03 billion at the end of March. In addition, the market value of stablecoins also exceeded US$1 billion for the first time on March 24, an increase of more than ten times year-on-year, showing strong ecological appeal and fund carrying capacity.

Against this background, Aptos not only achieved continuous iteration at the technical level, but also made many breakthroughs in ecological construction: Aave completed its first non-EVM environmental test network deployment, and the DeFi activity was significantly improved. In order to meet the rapid growth of transaction needs, the Aptos team continues to promote technical solutions such as Zaptos and Shardines, accelerate the construction of an underlying architecture that supports millions of TPS, and strengthen its core advantages in performance, stability and user experience.

Under this trend, PANews held an in-depth conversation with Sherry Xiao, an early founding engineer of Aptos, and conducted in-depth discussions on key issues such as the technical architecture, ecological expansion strategies and developer support of the global trading engine, and looked at how Aptos is based on technology and ecology, and stood out in the new round of public chain competition.

High-performance public chain created by Meta "OG"

PANews: Please introduce your background and role in Aptos.

Sherry: I am Sherry Xiao, one of the early founding engineers at Aptos. Before joining Aptos, I worked as an Instagram engineer, mainly responsible for scalability architecture. Later, I joined the Libra/Diem team of Meta (formerly Facebook), responsible for verification nodes and infrastructure construction, and helped Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, eBay and other institutions deploy verification nodes.

When the Libra project encountered policy obstacles, our entire team followed the leaders to start a business in 2022 and established Aptos. In fact, there are many talents coming out of Facebook's blockchain team. Some have joined Sui, some have joined a16z's encryption team, and some have created other entrepreneurial teams, such as Lightspark created by David Marcus. It can be said that Facebook has provided a large number of talents to the Web3 industry.

PANews: As an engineer, how do you evaluate the advantages of Move language over other smart contract languages?

Sherry: For people with engineering backgrounds, language switching is commonplace. Move language is developed based on Rust. The biggest advantage is that it has been a language designed for smart contracts from the beginning, with many guarantees in asset management and security, and provides formal verification tools.

Compared with Solidity and EVM, Move can effectively avoid many common security vulnerabilities and reduce the risk of capital loss. Among them, the Move prover tool can also allow developers to verify the correctness of smart contracts written in the Move programming language. In addition, Move provides innovative features such as dynamic distribution, account abstraction and permission signatures, allowing developers to build more advanced products.

For developers who understand programming languages ​​and data structures, learning Move is not as difficult as they imagined, because the basic principles of programming are the same.

PANews: What bottlenecks do you need to iterate on the current technical 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 has been quite complete, and its throughput, speed and gas fees have all been reduced to very low levels, but how to provide unique features on the chain allows developers to create highlights of products remains a big challenge.

We are deepening our ZK-based login solutions and innovations in privacy protection. Because if large-scale payment is to be achieved, user privacy is an important consideration. We recently launched a project in the open source code base that can hide transaction details. Users can only know that there is a transaction between Alice and Bob, but they cannot see the specific amount and balance. This technology combines privacy protection and blockchain decentralization to create interesting products.

PANews: Aptos focuses on high-performance blockchains. Compared with other public chains, what are the unique advantages of scalability?

Sherry: Scalability is our core advantage. As a team of engineers from Facebook, we have extensive experience building highly scalable systems and have been responsible for large-scale infrastructure like Instagram and Facebook.

Aptos is designed to be very modular, and each module has its own expansion space:

• At the consensus level, our latest Raptr is the industry's most advanced consensus algorithm implementation, and parallelization is achieved to the extreme;

• At the execution level, our Block-STM technology is also the industry leader. Many newly released public chains and L2 are using this technology, such as Movement, Monad, Polygon, etc.;

• In terms of storage, we have implemented sharding technology and will continue to study sharding technology and related cache layers in the future to further improve system performance.

These technologies are open source, and the community is welcome to use Aptos' technology. But even if other chains copy our technology, there will be delays. For example, when they were still using Block-STM V1, we were already doing V2; when they followed up, we launched the performance optimization of Move 2.0. So it is a smarter choice to develop directly on Aptos.

Ecological layout: stablecoins, trading and DeFi

PANews: The data on Aptos on-chain performed well, with accounts exceeding 47 million and weekly transaction volume exceeding 39 million. What aspects does this progress come from?

Sherry: Our ecological layout mainly focuses on several aspects:

First of all, infrastructure construction, we have natively supported the three major stablecoins USDT, USDC and USDE. Users generally report that transfers on Aptos are very silky, and on-chain peer-to-peer payment has become a major advantage for us.

Secondly, we have cooperated with institutions such as Franklin Templeton to launch multiple RWA projects on the chain.

Earlier this year, we announced a $2 million eco-fund to inspire community building and support different DeFi protocols and projects. This also contributed to the growth of DEX trading volume and on-chain activity.

In addition, we have launched the LFM program to help ecological projects plan a roadmap, conduct token generation events (TGE), connect exchange resources, obtain venture capital, and provide marketing and KOL guidance. These efforts have enabled our ecosystem to achieve steady growth over the past period of time.

PANews: Is the news about the possible issuance of Hong Kong stablecoin HKDA on Aptos true? What are the plans for Hong Kong’s compliance development?

Sherry: Aptos is the only L1 blockchain platform to participate in the Hong Kong e-HKD project, and we have been actively participating in related discussions. We maintain close communication with banks and government departments in Hong Kong, and BCG is also our partner.

We also have a lot of innovation cooperation with Hong Kong Cyberport. Our official community organization, Movemaker, just held a hackathon event in Cyberport a few weeks ago, hoping to cultivate local projects.

Although we do not have a large office in Hong Kong, through Movemaker, we have set up a co-creation space Aptos Space in the core area of ​​Hong Kong, providing builders with a place for collaboration and gatherings, and actively hosting offline events to attract Web3 talents. We attach great importance to the activity of the developer ecosystem in the Asia-Pacific region, because many high-quality ecological projects come from the Chinese-speaking areas. Our layout in the Asia-Pacific region will become more and more in-depth, invest more resources, continue to reach more cooperation in this region, and promote better development teams to join our ecosystem.

PANews: In the current market environment, what track projects will Aptos focus on supporting in terms of ecological aspects?

Sherry: From our recently released global trading engine, we can see that trading-related tracks are the directions we attach great importance to. We focus on the expansion of payment and stablecoin application scenarios, as well as the DeFi track, especially the leading projects of DeFi "three-piece set" (DEX, lending, and liquidity pledge).

We also hope to work in-depth with large institutions and partners with distribution channels. Aptos has obvious advantages in transfers - low latency and low cost, which is very suitable for large-scale payment services. We are also paying attention to the combination of games and DeFi, as well as the application scenarios of AI agents and transactions.

PANews: Aptos recently announced the creation of a global trading engine. How will this vision be realized?

Sherry: We have been deploying the infrastructure of global trading engines over the past few years. We believe that the infrastructure of blockchain has been solved quite well and are now focusing on innovation at the user experience level:

• For example, Keyless is a zk-based technology that allows users to log in directly using Google, Facebook or Apple accounts, solving the pain points of private key management and mnemonic word memory;

• We have implemented account abstraction and permission signing functions, allowing DeFi developers to better control user authentication and entry processes;

• In the Move language, we have added functions such as dynamic scripts and dynamic distribution dynamic dispatch to help DeFi or transaction applications achieve functional innovation.

These technical points are connected to form our vision: to build a global transaction engine and invite developers to use these infrastructures to create innovative applications.

Talent training: Developer ecological construction and cooperation with

universities

PANews: How does Aptos attract and retain developers when AI becomes a popular direction?

Sherry: There are indeed developers that are attracted to popular fields, but each application scenario has its own developer base. Even with the popularity of AI, many developers are still interested in cryptography, decentralization and blockchain, which are not something AI cannot satisfy.

The most important thing for developers is to see the possibilities of the future, not just short-term speculation. Developers all have dreams to create products that can be widely used. As long as we can let them see market prospects, demands and opportunities, we can attract developers to continue to make efforts in the blockchain field.

PANews: What measures does Aptos have taken to cultivate talents in colleges and universities?

Sherry: We attach great importance to the cultivation of talents in colleges and universities. As a team of Facebook engineers, we know that universities are the largest talent pool. We have in-depth cooperation with the blockchain associations of Stanford University and Berkeley University, and have cooperation projects in Singapore with SMU and China with Tsinghua University.

We collaborate with professors to design blockchain courses to enable students to learn Aptos technology directly, using Aptos as the first lesson to enter blockchain. Most of our company's engineers have doctoral degrees. They often preach in MIT, UC and other universities to attract outstanding developers to join the community.

During the recent hackathon event held in Hong Kong, the team from Zhejiang University and Tsinghua University Blockchain Association showed off very excellent projects and we look forward to their future growth.

PANews: What are your personal expectations for the future development of Web3?

Sherry: My personal and overall vision remains focused on the areas of transactions and payments. Since the beginning of the Libra project, we hope to establish a global financial infrastructure so that more people can enjoy the convenience of the modern financial system.

I'm particularly looking forward to seeing innovative payment projects combined with stablecoins. For example, on Aptos, streaming payments can be fully realized - working every second and getting paid every second, which is something that traditional financial institutions cannot do.

Migrating traditional payment software to the chain and combining privacy protection functions can create exciting new scenarios. These innovative applications are the key to truly promoting the popularization of blockchain technology.

PANews: What impact will the recent changes in team senior management have on Aptos?

Sherry: Personnel changes are normal for many teams. For the team, it is actually a great opportunity to re-examine past plans and make adjustments. In the past, we have been working hard, and such changes have allowed us to unite and think about the future layout direction.

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