Former Meta employees and top makers of the defunct Diem stablecoin project have raised $200 million to scale up a new project called Aptos.
Aptos was co-founded by former head of strategic partnerships at Novi – Meta’s cryptocurrency unit – Mo Shaikh and chief technology officer Avery Ching. The duo is now the CEO and CTO of the new company. Both left the company in December, before Diem was sold to Silvergate Capital in February of this year.
The team is building a decentralized layer 1 blockchain that is based in part on Move, the coding language initially developed for Diem.. The company is now in the process of growing its developer ecosystem and attracting projects to the blockchain, which it says will be a cheap, secure and scalable network.
According to an announcement made on Wednesday, Aptos’ $200 million strategic funding round was led by venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), along with backing from major firms including Three Arrows Capital, FTX Ventures, Paxos and Coinbase Ventures.
The funding will be used to hire new staff and to support “companies, brands, and builders” looking to develop projects on the Aptos blockchain.. The startup has been hinting that several projects in decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFT), Web3, social media, and payments are already underway.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Aptos declined to disclose a specific valuation but suggested it is “well placed in unicorn territory” at around $1 billion.
Along with the funding announcement, Aptos has also launched a public development network with an open source foundation.. The team told the publication that big names like Anchorage, Binance, and Coinbase have been providing guidance and contributing code to the devnet. The ad said:
“Later in Q2 there will be an incentivized testnet to help scale the network and stress test it as it moves to Mainnet. We invite validators and other infrastructure providers to join our community now in anticipation of this.”
Aptos expects Mainnet to launch in the third quarter of this year, giving developers about six months to build projects before the network is available to the public.
In a blog post late last month, Aptos highlighted that its blockchain approach is based on “absolute security, extensible scalability, and credible neutrality,” while being able to work on your ideas without the intense scrutiny of regulators as in the case of Diem:
“Since leaving Meta (formerly Facebook) we have been able to get our ideas off the ground, cut through the red tape, and build from scratch a whole new network to bring them to fruition.”
“Aptos uses Move, the secure and reliable language originally developed for Diem. The ideas we came up with then are still relevant and will serve as an important foundation for a secure, scalable and updatable Web3. Our decentralization and permissionless access plans are moving quickly and will be developed in the open,” add the post.
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