Former employees of Meta, along with backers of the defunct Diem project, plan to expand upon the project after raising US$200 million. The new project dubbed Aptos was founded by former employees of Meta with the goal of building the “safest and most scalable Layer 1 blockchain” able to scale to billions of people.
Aptos will be based on the technology utilized by the former Diem project before it was scrapped by Meta in January of this year. The plans to build a decentralized layer 1 blockchain will be partly based on Move, a coding language that was developed for the Diem project.
Move is an open-source programming language, which pairs with the announcement of a “public devnet” for the Aptos blockchain. “Aptos Devnet is live today. Jump in, contribute, provide feedback, help us make it better,” says Aptos CEO, Mo Shaikh.
“Openness is the only way to achieve credible neutrality…Come build with us.”
Mo Shaikh, on Medium
Aptos Raising $200 Million
Aptos announced that they have “raised $200 million in a strategic round led by a16z crypto with participation from Multicoin Capital, Katie Haun, 3 Arrows Capital, ParaFi Capital, IRONGREY, Hashed, Variant, Tiger Global, BlockTower, FTX Ventures, Paxos, and Coinbase Ventures”
Without disclosing any serious numbers, Aptos founders told TechCrunch they were “well off into the unicorn territory,” this means the company is valued at a minimum of $1 billion.