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Former Meta employees and key players behind the company's defunct stablecoin project Diem have raised $200 million to expand a new project called "Aptos."
Aptos was co-founded by the old novi crypto unit — meta — strategic partnerships lead mo shaikh and tech lead avery ching. The arenow duet serving as CEO and cto for the new company. Both left the company in December, prior to Diem being sold to Silvergate Capital in February this year.
The team builds a decentralised layer 1 blockchain which is partly based on movement, the coding language originally developed for diem. The company is now in the process of growing its developer ecosystem and attracting projects to the blockchain, which it boasts will be a cheap, secure and scalable network.
According to a March 16 announcement, Aptos’ $200 million strategic funding round was led by capital venture giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), along with backing from top firms such as Three Arrows Capital, FTX Ventures, Paxos and COINBASE Ventures.
The funding will be used to hire new staff and to support "companies", brands and manufacturers" interested in developing projects on the aptos blockchain, with start teasing that many challenges, nft, web3, social media and payment initiatives are already under development.
Speaking with Techcrunch, aptos has refused to disclose a specific valuation, but has suggested that he is "comfortable in the unicorn territory" of about $1 billion.
Aptos has also launched a public devnet with an open-source database. The team told the release that big names like anchorage, BINANCE and coinbase have provided guidance and contributed code for the devnet. The advertisement read:
"Later in Q2, there will be an incentive partnership to help expand and test the network as it progresses to the main network. We invite validators and other infrastructure providers to join our community now in advance of that."
Aptos expects the core network to be launched in the third quarter later this year, giving developers approximately six months to build projects before the network is made public.
Related: Vale Diem: How Facebook’s ambitious stablecoin project came to an end
In a blog post late last month, Aptos emphasized that the focus of its blockchain is based on “absolute safety, extensible scalability, and credible neutrality,” while being able to work on its ideas without intense scrutiny from regulators like in the case of Diem:
“Since departing Meta (formerly Facebook) we have been able to put our ideas into motion, ditch bureaucratic red tape, and build an entirely new network from the ground up that brings them to fruition.”
'aptos uses move, the safe and dependable language originally developed for diem. The ideas we then designed are still relevant and will serve as an important basis for a secure, scalable and scalable web3. Our plans for decentralisation and unauthorized access are progressing fast and will be developed in public,' the post adds.
