https://aptoslabs.medium.com/aptos-autumn-is-here-92a8d904eb49

We welcome everyone to participate in this movement aimed to bring the masses to web3. After more than four years of hard work, hundreds of contributions from builders, and hundreds of diverse community projects across the globe, we have arrived at Aptos Mainnet. We are proud to arrive here together, for the people.

This is step one in a long journey to create universal and fair access to decentralized applications for billions of people through a safe, scalable, and upgradable blockchain.

We believe in the need for a rapidly innovating and adaptable blockchain that serves the needs of people today and our future generations. Upgradeability, Move, and a people-first user experience are some of the core principles and unique features of the Aptos blockchain that brought this amazing, vibrant ecosystem together to bring web3 to all.

Upgradeability

Aptos supports rapid evolution of the blockchain to provide optimized user experiences for current and future use cases and allow for the integration of next-generation technological advancements. The user experience continuously improves and developers will be able to build without infrastructure constraints. We look to the vast community of users and builders to continue to evolve Aptos further into the future.

Move on Aptos

The Move language has been built, tested, and co-designed alongside the Aptos blockchain over four years. It is natively integrated for safe asset management as well as fast and secure transaction execution.

Together, Move and Aptos create a unique and developer-friendly environment for seamless building and a home for innovators and creators. Move smart contracts are upgradable and support secure evolution for all Aptos applications.

We are proud stewards of the Move language and are excited to further build higher levels of security to its development and tooling. Many of the original researchers and developers of Move are part of the Aptos team and are deeply passionate about continuing to enhance the language and expand the Move community.

People-First User Experience

Our core design principle is to focus on developer and user experience. Prioritizing a simple and relatable experience for all is the only way web3 can reach the billions of people that are online today.

Our team has built world-class safe and scalable products and infrastructure used by billions of people with decades of experience operating millions of machines. We will continue to combine this knowledge with the ability to quickly integrate new innovations such as novel key recovery, scalable sharding solutions, and intuitive parallel programming models to scale the user experience to the billions of people that will use web3.

Key Technical Innovations

There are many technical innovations behind the Aptos blockchain. Here are some that developers love and are changing the game for web3:

Pipelined and Modular Approach to Transaction Processing

To achieve high throughput, the Aptos blockchain leverages a pipelined and modular approach for the key stages of transaction processing. This fully leverages all available physical resources, improves hardware efficiency, and enables highly parallel execution.

With this modular design, Aptos supports faster and safer release cycles, as changes can be targeted to individual modules. The modular design also provides a structured path to scaling validators beyond a single machine, providing access to additional computation, network, and storage resources.

Block-STM

Block-STM is a new parallel execution engine for smart contracts built around the principles of Software Transactional Memory and optimistic concurrency control — this means faster transaction processing due to a novel approach that is core to Aptos.

Unlike existing parallel execution engines that break transaction atomicity by requiring upfront knowledge of the data to be read/written, Block-STM enables developers to code without limits, maintain composability, and achieve higher throughput and lower latency for real-world use cases.

AptosBFT Consensus

Today, the Aptos blockchain leverages the latest iteration of AptosBFT (version 4), the first production optimistically responsive BFT consensus protocol. Consensus commonly requires only two network round trips (with round trip times typically less than 300 milliseconds worldwide) and dynamically adjusts to faulty validators through a leader reputation mechanism.

This novel mechanism significantly improves performance in decentralized environments, correspondingly provides infrastructure for appropriate incentives and quickly minimizes the impact of failed validators on throughput and latency. Development of AptosBFT version 5 is already underway and will be released in a future upgrade.

Decentralized Flexibility to State Synchronization

Aptos aims to provide a high-throughput, low-latency network for the individual needs of all participants. Building a rich and diverse validator and full node community requires that state replication is flexible for different hardware environments. Aptos adapts to changing user requirements to offer new and more efficient sync strategies for inexpensive machines and higher levels of validation for those who can afford to.

Home for web3

The unique combination of focusing on the user experience, upgradeability, and state-of-the-art technology make Aptos the home for developers to build applications for generations to come.

There is already a robust ecosystem of hundreds of projects and hundreds of thousands of community members that have made Aptos their home.

We are proudly supporting a wide variety of use cases across NFT, gaming, commerce, social networks, and media & entertainment. We’re excited for the ecosystem to continue building creative and novel applications that will redefine industries and bring real value to users.

Thank You

Thank you to our community, ecosystem, and partners for creating the technical rails and cultural ethos where many developers already feel at home.