▲圖片標題(來源：Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch)

Facebook’s audacious attempt at creating a crypto payments network met an unceremonious end earlier this year when Silvergate Capital acquired the Diem technology assets for $182 million. The deal showcased how Facebook, now Meta, is left with few regulator-blessed paths forward to become a central player in the blockchain ecosystem, a realization which has also cost the company plenty of talent, including crypto boss David Marcus.

Some ex-Meta employees are beginning to take up the mantle of the open source Diem blockchain in an effort to realize the vision of a decentralized network that they say is built to serve billions of users and is designed to cater to large corporate customers early-on. One such effort, called Aptos — led by ex-Meta employees who only departed the company in December — has already banked unicorn funding from Andreessen Horowitz and scores of other top web3 investors.

“We are the original creators, researchers, designers, and builders of Diem, the blockchain that was first built to serve this purpose. While the world never got to see what we built, our work is far from over,” Aptos CEO Mo Shaikh wrote in a blog post last month.

The startup tells TechCrunch that it has closed a $200 million “strategic” investment led by a16z, with participation from Tiger Global, Katie Haun, Multicoin Capital, 3 Arrows Capital, FTX Ventures and Coinbase Ventures among others. Another investor of note in the maiden round is Silvergate Capital, though the Aptos team swears they will not be licensing or utilizing any of the Diem IP that Silvergate owns as they build out their blockchain.

The founders did not disclose the valuation, but said they were “well off into the unicorn territory.” (The equity valuation of the round is $1 billion, according to an investor memo obtained by TechCrunch, but after taking into account the tokens, it’s considerably more than that. The Aptos team declined to share the exact figures.)

The Aptos blockchain will be a so-called Layer 1 system, meaning it will not be designed to sit on top of existing blockchains like Ethereum or Solana and will instead build out its own decentralized network. Alongside the company’s funding news, Aptos also shared that it has formally launched its “devnet,” which will allow developers to experiment and build on the Aptos blockchain ahead of a public release, which the team hopes will happen sometime in Q3.

The Aptos team said a number of companies, including Anchorage, Binance, Coinbase, Livepeer, Moonclave, Paxos, Paymagic, Rarible and Streaming Fast, are already engaging with the startup, providing feedback and contributing code on devnet.

Aptos is aiming to build a more scalable blockchain with faster transactions and lower fees than today’s mainstream networks allow. The founders’ hope is that they can design a network that is more reliable and predictable for large clients interested in embracing the blockchain.

There are only so many ways to scale blockchains. Proponents of Ethereum and its scaling solutions, for instance, are betting on using rollups and sharding — techniques that break blockchains into smaller pieces and then re-connects them — for scaling.

But some other players believe there’s a better approach to tackle this challenge.

轉貼自： Tech Crunch

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