TL; DR Breakdown
- Diem developers raised $200 million to finance Aptops blockchain
- Atops lauches its devnet
Aptos Labs, a startup founded by members of the blockchain team behind the now-defunct payment system Diem developed by Meta Platform Inc., has today announced that it has raised $200 million in strategic funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Coinbase, Multicoin Capital, 3 Arrows Capital, ParaFi Capital, and other investors participated in the funding round.
Aptos raises $200 million from a16z, Coinbase, others
A cryptocurrency project known as the Diem Association was developed by Meta to create a highly accessible cross-border payment system. However, because of regulatory concerns about the proposed cryptocurrency called Diem, the project was later abandoned by Meta, and Silvergate Capital Corp later bought the shares of Diem for about $182 million in January.
The new initiative, Aptos, was created to construct a secure and scalable blockchain network free of the red tape that caused Diem’s downfall. The team is building a decentralized layer-1 blockchain partly based on Move, the coding language initially developed for Diem. The company is now in the process of growing its developer ecosystem and attracting projects to the blockchain, which it touts will be a cheap, secure, and scalable network.
Aptos team said they would not use or license any of the Diem intellectual property that Silvergate owns since they created their own blockchain. The company’s worth was undisclosed; however, it is likely to be over $1 billion, according to the founders, who called it “well into the unicorn realm.”
The CEO of Aptos Mo Shai, who previously worked on Meta’s wallet Novi, boasted close ties with the Ethereum community and said he had personal knowledge of the project:
“We’d want to be a part of that environment,” says CEO Mo Shaikh. “We’re not here to compete with them; we’d want to compliment them and the problems they face, whether it’s as serious as the wormhole event or something else gives us a clear indication that things have to be built responsibly.”
Aptos launch its Devnet
Aptos has launched its devnet formally, making it possible for programmers to experiment and construct apps on blockchain ahead. Furthermore, the teams have high expectations that the mainnet will be introduced sometime in Q3. The report stated that several prominent cryptocurrency businesses have already begun working with it, including Anchorage, Binance, Coinbase, Livepeer, Moonclave, Paxos, Paymagic, and Rarible.
The Aptos CTO Avery Ching pointed out that “current blockchains are not as dependable as traditional financial rails,” referring to Solana’s numerous recent outages.
