Silvergate Capital purchased the Diem technological assets for $182 million earlier this year, ending Facebook’s grandiose plan to create a crypto payments network. The transaction demonstrated how Facebook, now Meta, is left with few regulator-approved ways forward to be a significant player in the blockchain ecosystem, a fact that has cost the business a slew of top people, including cryptocurrency chief David Marcus.

Some former Meta employees are taking up the open-source Diem blockchain to actualize the idea of a decentralized network that, according to them, is created to serve billions of users and is geared to cater to substantial corporate customers from the start. Aptos, a startup founded by ex-Meta workers who left the business in December, has already received unicorn money from Andreessen Horowitz and a slew of other prominent web3 investors.

“We are the original developers, researchers, designers, and builders of Diem, the first blockchain created for this purpose. While the world never saw what we built, Aptos CEO Mo Shaikh noted in a blog post last month that “our job is far from over.”

Facebook cryptocurrency libra

The business has closed a $200 million “strategic” investment led by a16z and includes Tiger Global, Katie Haun, Multicoin Capital, 3 Arrows Capital, FTX Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures. Silvergate Capital is another notable first-round investor, yet the Aptos team insists that they neither license nor use any of Silvergate’s Diem IP while developing their blockchain.

The founders didn’t say how much the company was worth, but they did say they were “far off into unicorn territory.” The Aptos team was adamant about not disclosing the specific data.)

The Aptos blockchain will be a Layer 1 system, which means it will not be meant to sit on top of current blockchains such as Ethereum or Solana but instead will create its decentralized network. Along with the investment announcement, Aptos also announced the debut of its “devnet,” which will allow developers to experiment with and build on the Aptos blockchain before a public release, which the team intends to happen in Q3.

Also, read – Why Facebook and Microsoft’s in race for Metaverse?

Anchorage, Binance, Coinbase, Livepeer, Moonclave, Paxos, Paymagic, Raible, and Streaming Fast, according to the Aptos team, are already interacting with the startup, providing feedback and contributing code to devnet.

Aptos aims to create a more scalable blockchain than today’s major networks, with faster transactions and reduced costs. The founders aspire to create a more dependable and predictable network for large clients interested in adopting blockchain technology.

Blockchains can only be scaled in so many ways. Rollups and sharding — processes that divide blockchains into smaller bits and then re-connect them — are being touted by supporters of Ethereum and its scalability solutions.

However, other players believe there is a better way to handle this problem.

In an interview, Aptos CTO Avery Ching remarked, “Current blockchains are just not as stable as conventional financial rails; we’ve experienced instances of downtime and outages that continue for hours.”

According to Kyle Samani, managing partner of Multicoin Capital, a venture capital firm known for being an early backer of several blockchains, including Solana, the approach, as mentioned earlier, increases latency technical complexity for developers makes cross-chain apps “inherently fragile,” and breaks composability.

“The crypto industry presents this topic in a binary manner. There is, however, nuance. These methods do not have to be used in tandem. While most in the industry have typically advocated for breaking up the state into numerous pieces, we have advocated for maximizing the design space for composable crypto apps by enhancing single-shard performance. “We tripled down on Solana in 2019 and 2020 and held through a parabolic climb in 2021,” he wrote in a blog post.

While Diem supporters like Andreessen Horowitz may unite around a team attempting to carry on the tradition of what Facebook was trying to achieve with Diem and Libra, others in the crypto community are less optimistic about attaining a web3 vision imagined by Facebook.

In an interview, Shaikh stated, “To be clear, we have no formal relationship with Facebook and no financing from them.”

“A shared vision for the web3 world excites us tremendously.” One advantage of our being external is that we can now focus on everyone rather than simply Meta. Our goal is to collaborate with some of the world’s most well-known brands and IT firms to create a web3 environment for the masses.”

Another challenge/opportunity that Aptos will have is attracting developers quickly enough. The company seeks to attract engineers by utilizing Move, an open-source programming language created by Meta. “Move is built for safe resource management; it’s deterministic and metered,” Ching explained, adding that the language is well-suited to stringent auditing and verification procedures.

“Second, our team has spent several years developing the lowest latency optimistically responsive Byzantine Fault Tolerance protocol, which we have extensively tested and audited.” “We are on the fourth iteration of this protocol, and we have pushed upgrades to the protocol,” he stated, asserting that the protocol has never gone down in private net testing throughout the years.

“The Move programming language has been rigorously battle-tested and is a perfect environment for constructing safe, production-grade contracts capable of serving billions of people,” Multicoin Capital’s Samani said in a statement. We fully expect Aptos to hit the ground running and quickly establish itself as a competitive rival in the Layer 1 war.”

Aptos evaluates various pathways for Ethereum and Solidity compatibility on its network to make things more appealing to developers.

“I have a strong connection to the Ethereum community.” People have constructed bridges, solutions that are either addressing for scalability or can move from one L1 to another in the chase of more significant markets,” said Shaikh, who formerly led strategic partnerships for Meta’s wallet Novi.

“We’ve heard from Solidity and Ethereum developers that they’re running into constraints, that they’re running into issues where they have to spend hours auditing their smart contracts.” Those issues continue to be a source of discomfort. Smart contract auditors currently have a finite amount of capacity. They’re seeking for other L1s to develop natively on top of instead of just moving things across or going through bridges, which might compromise security.”