Starting out in the crypto market is difficult, especially given the massive number of potential tokens whose prices can spike as quickly as they fall. However, keeping a closer eye on trending crypto tokens can be a lucrative endeavor. Here, we are talking about the Aptos token, which recently displayed excellent potential with its prices surging 500% in the past few weeks.

While 2022 was a bearish year for the crypto market due to disasters, collapses, and bankruptcies, 2023 began with the meteoric rise of the Aptos token. Well, the best thing that came out of last year was the revolutionary Ethereum Merge upgrade and top stories on businesses, brands, and biggies setting their foothold in the Web3 space.

Cutting its way through all the havoc and setting a historic price pump, Aptos emerged as the most-hyped blockchain project ever. Crypto players at large are opting to focus on Aptos since its token, $APT, has solid community backing and innovative use cases that provide the basis for rapid growth.

The optimism for Aptos is such that many are positioning this emerging layer-one protocol as a “Solana killer”. The bullish arguments are also going as far as touting Aptos for outperforming Ethereum. In this article, we will understand what Aptos is, how it works, and how it has the potential to further fuel the rise in its $APT price. 

Aptos is a scalable layer-1 proof-of-stake blockchain that uses the Move programming language and promises increased reliability, usability, and security. The Aptos genesis took place on October 12, 2022, with its mainnet “Aptos Autumn” launched on October 17, 2022. 

The key features of Aptos are a parallel execution engine, low transaction costs, and high-level security features. The Aptos blockchain has been in the headlines since its launch for both positive and negative reasons. It began with the crypto community backlashing Aptos for being centralized and heavily venture capital-backed with no transparent tokenomics. 

However, soon the hype took over and went past all the critics to come out as a promising layer-1 protocol. Aptos garnered attention due to its star-studded founders, namely Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, combined with its claim to offer technological breakthroughs and be the most secure and scalable decentralized blockchain.

The driving force of Aptos’ popularity was also its strong social media presence that spread across the crypto community like wildfire, resulting in the widespread discussion. 

Consequently, its official Twitter handle raked in over 365k followers and interest among people peaked with many becoming its early adopters. Given its history and team, it became a contender in the race among layer-1 blockchains. 

Aptos was founded by a former Meta’s (Facebook) abandoned Web3 project ‘Diem’ team headed by Mo Shaikh who now serves as Aptos’ CEO and Avery Ching who at present is its CTO. Aptos’ mainnet and token launch were hugely anticipated owing to being created by Diem developers who spent over three years for a successful launch. This means, Aptos already has a solid foundation, to begin with. The team behind Aptos works under the name “Aptos Labs”

The Aptos’ connection with Meta gained so much attention and it made many waves for the claims it made. The key element that “Aptos Labs” proposed was cloud infrastructure as a scalable and cost-efficient platform for building widely-used applications. 

Currently, Aptos enables over 19 DeFi projects on the Aptos ecosystem including decentralized exchanges, lending protocols, and liquid staking. Aptos has already raised over $350 million in funding and successfully handled millions of transactions and thousands of nodes. 

The funding included a $200 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz and another $150 million Series A funding round led by FTX and Jump Crypto. Soon after, Binance also made a follow-on strategic investment to boost the Aptos ecosystem. Speaking of the Aptos ecosystem, it’s time to understand how Aptos work. 

The development of the Aptos ecosystem is still in the nascent stages. However, the Aptos blockchain has noticed an uptick in activity due to NFT and DeFi projects with more than 94% of transactions being for $APT transfers. Though the Aptos blockchain has negligible DApps activity, its native token $APT reached an all-time high with a 500% rally.

As it has limited activity and ecosystem growth, the future price movements might not be favorable as opposed to its overblown market capitalization. While some experts are predicting a sharp decline in prices as the Aptos token has reached its peak, some analysts have a positive attitude toward the network’s growth. Aptos Labs has made many claims to position Aptos as the safest and most reliable network possible. 

One of the most widespread claims is that the Aptos blockchain can theoretically reach 160,000 transactions per second while maintaining security and reliability. Aptos is perceived as more reliable than its rival Solana which has been fairly prone to failures due to outages and downgrades. 

On the other hand, Aptos blockchain has already managed to outperform Ethereum in terms of speed. Ethereum’s reliability is unarguably superior but Aptos has the potential to secure its rank under top blockchain platforms in the future. The pressing question here is: what ties Aptos to a hope of being among the best blockchains? Let’s understand its underlying technologies. 

The Aptos blockchain operations are primarily led by the superior technology narrative. Aptos is still under development to handle over 160k transactions per second using its parallel execution engine (Block-STM) which results in low transaction costs for users. 

However, it currently only processes 7 transactions per second as opposed to what it claimed. Aptos also became a meme for over-promising and under-delivering in its first week of trading. Regardless, it is too early to assess how it will perform in the future as the blockchain is still in its infancy. 

Most blockchains execute smart contracts either sequentially or with the help of a massive parallel workload for improved performance, resulting in huge power consumption. Unlike other blockchains, a single failed transaction will not hold the entire chain, instead, Aptos processes all transactions simultaneously and validates them afterward. 

The failed transactions are aborted and re-executed by its STM (software transactional memory) libraries which manage such conflicts in the network. As per its whitepaper, Aptos employs a flexible programming language “Move”, modified data sharding technology, PoS consensus mechanism, and state machine to achieve a fast, scalable, and secure system.