Aptos Early Founding Engineer Sherry Xiao Talks About Global Trading Engines and Technological Innovation

In the context of increasingly intense competition among public chains, Aptos is steadily moving towards the strategic positioning of "global trading engine" through technological innovation and ecological expansion. Since breaking through a total locked value (TVL) of $1 billion for the first time last November, Aptos reached $1.03 billion by the end of March. Additionally, the market value of stablecoins also surpassed $1 billion for the first time on March 24, a year-on-year increase of over ten times, demonstrating strong ecological appeal and capital-bearing capacity.

Against this backdrop, Aptos has not only achieved continuous iteration at the technical level but has also made several breakthroughs in ecological construction: Aave has completed its first deployment of a non-EVM test network, significantly enhancing DeFi activity. To meet the rapidly growing transaction demands, the Aptos team continues to advance technical solutions such as Zaptos and Shardines, accelerating the construction of a foundational architecture that supports millions of TPS, thereby strengthening its core advantages in performance, stability, and user experience.

Technical Advantages of High-Performance Public Chains

Sherry Xiao, as one of the early founding engineers of Aptos, previously worked as an engineer at Instagram, focusing on scalability architecture. She later joined Meta's Libra/Diem team, where she was responsible for validation nodes and infrastructure development. When the Libra project encountered policy obstacles, the entire team together founded Aptos in 2022.

When it comes to the advantages of the Move language, Sherry pointed out that the Move language is developed based on Rust and was designed from the beginning as a language for smart contracts. It has many guarantees in asset management and security, and provides formal verification tools. Compared to other smart contract languages, Move can effectively avoid many common security vulnerabilities, reducing the risk of financial loss. In addition, Move offers innovative features such as dynamic dispatch, account abstraction, and permission signing, allowing developers to build more advanced products.

In terms of scalability, Aptos has unique advantages. Sherry emphasized that Aptos's design is highly modular, with each module having its own expansion space. At the consensus level, the recently released Raptr is the most advanced consensus algorithm implementation in the industry; at the execution level, the Block-STM technology is also leading in the industry; 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 and Development Strategy

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

In terms of development in Hong Kong, Aptos is the only L1 blockchain platform participating in the e-HKD project, maintaining close communication with banks and government departments in Hong Kong. It has established the co-creation space Aptos Space in the core area of Hong Kong through Movemaker, providing a venue for builders to collaborate and gather.

Sherry stated that Aptos focuses on transaction-related sectors, including payment, the expansion of stablecoin application scenarios, and the DeFi sector. They also hope to collaborate deeply with large institutions and partners with distribution channels, while paying attention to the combination of gaming and DeFi, as well as the application scenarios of AI agents and trading.

Vision of the Global Trading Engine

Aptos recently announced the creation of a global trading engine, and Sherry explained the path to realizing this vision. They focus on innovations in user experience, including zk-based Keyless technology, account abstraction, and permissioned signature features, as well as dynamic scripts and dynamic dispatch capabilities on the Move language. These technical points come together to form Aptos's vision: to build a global trading engine and invite developers to use these infrastructures to create innovative applications.

Talent Development and Developer Ecosystem

In attracting and retaining developers, Sherry believes the most important thing is to let developers see the possibilities of the future. Aptos places great importance on cultivating talent from universities and has in-depth cooperation with several well-known university blockchain associations to design blockchain courses, allowing students to directly learn Aptos technology.

Regarding the future development of Web3, Sherry stated that they are still focused on the fields of trading and payments, hoping to build a global financial infrastructure. He is particularly looking forward to seeing innovative payment projects combined with stablecoins, such as payroll flow payments, which are innovative applications that traditional financial institutions are unable to achieve.

Finally, when it comes to the changes in the senior management of the team, Sherry believes this is a good opportunity to reassess past plans and make adjustments, allowing the team to unite and think about the direction of future layout.