Eight Driving Forces Behind the Development of the Aptos Network

Aptos, as one of the blockchains with the lowest latency and highest throughput in the crypto market, has brought significant changes to developers building web3 applications. This article will introduce 8 key innovations driving the rapid development of the Aptos network.

1. Move language provides a better development environment

Aptos uses the Move programming language, providing developers with more efficient development conditions. Move is a language specifically designed for secure asset management, expressive and easy to use. Aptos shares many core design concepts with Move, making it an ideal platform for Move development.

Aptos has significantly improved the Move ecosystem by adding multiple features, including a comprehensive security architecture, detailed gas metering, and code upgradability. Move validators provide additional security guarantees for smart contracts. Many early researchers of the Move language are still working within the Aptos ecosystem, continuously enhancing the Move language and its community.

2. Block-STM provides greater programming freedom

Block-STM is a new type of smart contract parallel execution engine that accelerates transaction processing speed without compromising the development experience. Unlike other parallel execution engines, Block-STM allows developers to code without restrictions, achieving higher throughput and lower latency for practical applications.

Developers can easily build highly parallelized applications using Block-STM. It supports richer atomicity than other parallel environments without the need to split operations into multiple transactions, thereby enhancing the user experience.

3. On-chain governance promotes decentralization

Aptos has a built-in on-chain governance mechanism that supports seamless network and virtual machine configuration changes. Since its launch, the Aptos community has been able to create and vote on proposals that affect blockchain behavior, including adjustments to epoch duration, validator equity requirements, core code upgrades, and more.

4. AptosBFTv4 Provides Efficient Consensus

AptosBFTv4 is the first production-grade blockchain BFT protocol with strict correctness proofs. It reduces the submission delay from 3 steps to 2 based on Hotstuff, lowering the delay by 33% without sacrificing communication efficiency.

AptosBFTv4 adopts a secure, rigorous, and scalable implementation approach, clearly separating invariants for auditing. The same software has undergone 4 upgrades and has been tested in a live network, demonstrating the thoroughness and robustness of its development process.

5. Flexible Key Management Enhances User Confidence

Aptos accounts support flexible key management, including key rotation, encryption agility, and hybrid custody models. The decoupling of accounts and keys allows Aptos to seamlessly add new digital signature algorithms. The hybrid custody model supports advanced recovery solutions, helping to bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3.

To further enhance user experience, Aptos has limited the validity of each transaction and employs triple protection through serial numbers, expiration times, and chain IDs to guard against potential risks.

6. Modular Architecture for Future Networks

Aptos adopts a modular and flexible design philosophy, supporting frequent upgrades to rapidly adopt the latest technological advancements. Its architecture is optimized for zero-downtime upgrades, which has been validated in previous mainnet iterations and testnets.

Aptos also includes an embedded on-chain change management protocol that enables the rapid deployment of new technological innovations and supports new Web3 application scenarios.

7. Proposal-Based Reward System

Aptos has implemented a proposal performance-based staking reward system to promote greater decentralization. Compared to voting-based systems, this approach is less sensitive to inter-regional delays and helps improve the reward rate for nodes in remote areas, mitigating the impact of geographical location.

8. High-Performance Sparse Merkle Tree

Aptos uses the Jellyfish Merkle Tree (JMT) design, achieving a practical balance between CPU, I/O, and storage usage. In addition to JMT, Aptos also employs an in-memory, lock-free sparse Merkle tree implementation, specifically designed for caching and parallelization, working in conjunction with Block-STM to achieve high-performance global state updates.

These innovations have jointly driven the rapid development of the Aptos network, providing developers and users with an efficient, secure, and flexible blockchain platform.