Aptos Early Founding Engineer Sherry: From Meta to Web3, a Technological Journey to Build a Global Trading Engine

Against the backdrop of increasing competition in public chains, Aptos is steadily moving towards the strategic positioning of "global transaction engine" through technological innovation and ecosystem expansion. Since breaking the total locked value of 1 billion USD for the first time last November, Aptos reached 1.03 billion USD by the end of March. Additionally, the market value of stablecoins also exceeded 1 billion USD for the first time on March 24, with a year-on-year growth of over ten times, demonstrating strong ecological appeal and capital carrying capacity.

Aptos has not only achieved continuous iteration on the technical level but also made multiple breakthroughs in ecological construction: Aave has completed its first non-EVM environment testnet deployment, significantly boosting DeFi activity. To meet the rapidly growing transaction demand, the Aptos team continues to promote technologies such as Zaptos and Shardines, accelerating the construction of a foundational architecture that supports millions of TPS and strengthening its core advantages in performance, stability, and user experience.

This article conducts an in-depth dialogue with Sherry Xiao, an early founding engineer of Aptos, exploring key topics such as the technical architecture of the global trading engine, ecological expansion strategies, and developer support. It provides insights into how Aptos stands out in the new round of public chain competition, with technology as its foundation and ecology as its wings.

The high-performance public chain created by Meta "OG"

Sherry Xiao is one of the early founding engineers of Aptos. Before joining Aptos, she worked as an engineer at Instagram, primarily focusing on scalability architecture. She later joined Meta's Libra/Diem team, where she was responsible for validator nodes and infrastructure development, assisting several large institutions in deploying validator nodes.

After the Libra project faced policy obstacles, the entire team came out to start a business in 2022, founding Aptos. In fact, many talents have emerged from Meta's blockchain team; some have joined other projects, some have joined the crypto teams of venture capital firms, and others have created their own startup teams. It can be said that Meta has contributed a large number of talents to the Web3 industry.

As an engineer, Sherry believes that the biggest advantage of the Move language is that it was designed as a language for smart contracts from the very beginning, providing many guarantees in asset management and security, and offering formal verification tools. Compared to other smart contract languages, Move can effectively avoid many common security vulnerabilities and reduce the risk of fund loss. In addition, Move provides innovative features such as dynamic dispatch, account abstraction, and permissioned signatures, enabling developers to build more advanced products.

On top of the technical infrastructure, Sherry believes that there is still significant room for improvement in the developer experience and user experience of Web3. Taking Aptos as an example, the infrastructure is already quite mature, but providing unique features on-chain to allow developers to create standout products remains a major challenge. The team is focusing on ZK-based login solutions and innovations in privacy protection. Recently, they launched a project in the open-source code repository that can hide transaction details, allowing users to know only the parties involved in the transaction, but not the specific amounts or balances.

In terms of scalability, Aptos's design is highly modular, with each module having its own expansion space. At the consensus level, the recently released Raptr is the industry's most advanced consensus algorithm implementation; at the execution level, Block-STM technology is also industry-leading; in terms of storage, sharding technology has been implemented, and further research on sharding technology and related caching layers will continue in the future to further enhance system performance.

Ecological Layout: Stablecoins, Trading, and DeFi

The ecological layout of Aptos mainly focuses on several aspects: first is infrastructure construction, which has natively supported three major stablecoins; secondly, in collaboration with multiple institutions, several RWA projects have been launched on-chain; in addition, a $2 million ecological fund has been announced to incentivize community building and support different DeFi protocols and projects; the LFM program has also been launched to help ecological projects plan roadmaps, conduct token generation events, connect resources, and more. These efforts have led to stable growth in the Aptos ecosystem over the past period.

In terms of development in Hong Kong, Aptos is the only L1 blockchain platform participating in the Hong Kong e-HKD project and has been actively involved in related discussions. There are also many innovative collaborations with Hong Kong's Cyberport, and the official community organization Movemaker recently held a hackathon event at Cyberport. Although there is no large office in Hong Kong, a co-creation space called Aptos Space has been established in a prime location in Hong Kong through Movemaker, providing a place for builders to collaborate and gather.

In the current market environment, Aptos focuses on supporting trading-related sectors, paying attention to the expansion of payment and stablecoin application scenarios, as well as the DeFi sector. It hopes to collaborate deeply with large institutions and partners with distribution channels. Aptos has a clear advantage in transfers, making it very suitable for large-scale payment business. It is also looking at the combination of gaming and DeFi, as well as the application scenarios of AI agents and trading.

Talent Development: Developer Ecosystem Construction and Cooperation with Universities

In the context of AI becoming a popular direction, Sherry believes that there are still many developers interested in cryptography, decentralization, and blockchain, features that AI cannot fulfill. For developers, the most important thing is to see the possibilities of the future, rather than just short-term speculation. As long as they can see the market prospects, demand, and opportunities, developers can be attracted to continue making efforts in the blockchain field.

Aptos places great importance on the cultivation of talent in higher education. It has in-depth collaborations with blockchain associations of several well-known universities and works with professors to design blockchain courses, allowing students to learn Aptos technology directly. Most of the company's engineers hold doctoral degrees, and they frequently give presentations at universities to attract outstanding developers to join the community.

Regarding the future development of Web3, Sherry's personal vision and that of the entire team still focus on the fields of trading and payment. Since the inception of the Libra project, there has been a desire to establish a global financial infrastructure that allows more people to enjoy the conveniences of the modern financial system. There is particular anticipation to see innovative payment projects combined with stablecoins, such as implementing payroll flow payments on Aptos. Migrating traditional payment software onto the blockchain, combined with privacy protection features, can create exciting new scenarios.

Finally, regarding the recent changes in the senior management team, Sherry stated that this is quite normal for many teams. It is actually a good opportunity to reassess past plans and make adjustments, allowing the team to come together and think about the future strategic direction.