Episode 272 - The Move into Web3 with Aptos’ Avery Ching

Transcript

foreign welcome to zero knowledge I'm your host Anna Rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online [Music] this week I chat with Avery Ching co-founder and CTO at aptus Labs we talk about his time working at Facebook which became meta and specifically his work on blockchain projects there we then talk about how this group split off to form different companies like mistin and

aptus and what Aptos has taken with them in the creation of this new organization he shares with us the state of aptus how the project differentiates itself and what it's like building in the current landscape now before we kick off I do want to direct you to the ZK jobs board there you'll find jobs from Top teams working in ZK so if you're looking for your next opportunity be sure to check it out and if your team looking to find great talent be sure to add your job there as well I've added the link in the show notes now Tanya will share a little bit about this week's sponsor foreign Oma's first fractal instance namata is launching soon namata is a proof of stake L1 for interchain acid agnostic privacy namata natively interoperates

with fast finality chains via IBC and with ethereum via a trustless two-way bridge for privacy namata deploys an upgraded version of the multi-acid shielded pool circuit otherwise known as masp which allows all assets fungible and non-fungible to share a common shielded set this removes the size limits of the anonymity set and provides the best privacy guarantees possible for every user in the multi-chain the masp circuit's latest update enables shielded set rewards directly in the shielded set a novel feature that funds privacy as a public good follow namata on Twitter at namata to learn more and join their community on Discord discord.gg forward slash nomada so thanks again anoma and now here's our episode

[Music] so today I'm here with Avery Ching co-founder and CTO at Aptos Labs welcome to the show Avery hi Anna it's a pleasure to be here so in today's episode we're going to be exploring Aptos which is a project that I don't know very much about I have interviewed folks from the mistin team and I know that both the mistin and Aptos team came out of meta and had originally been on sort of the Libra project so I'm excited to explore that before we do it though Avery let's hear a little bit about your background what kind of got you started and on the path towards aptus yeah I'd love to talk about my background I was born and raised in Honolulu Hawaii I live there for the better part of my

life and I went off to college at Northwestern and studied computer science intellectual engineering uh during that time I also did a PhD under Professor chattery hello in high performance Computing so I spent a lot of time in different National Laboratories such as Los Alamos Sandia and Argonne doing things around super Computing and parallel file systems specifically and there's something called MPI or message passing interface which is a really interesting way that and super flexible way that people can program supercomputer software very flexibly across different architectures different kinds of network interconnects to support the larger scientific applications in the world such as protein folding World simulation Matrix factorization all kinds of cool stuff

after my PhD I went to work at Yahoo for four years in the area of data infrastructure I was working on what was called the web map at that time it was a after the crawling phase of going through the world's internet sites there's an analytics phase where we do analysis data derivation around domains and insights and worked on something called Apache giraffe which is a large-scale graph processing infrastructure an open source project that allowed us to do things like page rank Matrix factorization and triangle Counting in 2011 I made my way over to Facebook to work on data infrastructure that was the team that was kind of just kicking off things around Hadoop at that time it was very exciting space that no

one had kind of scaled Hadoop to the size of petabytes next to bytes and not just to do but of course any kind of general purpose Computing such as Hive which is kind of SQL language put on top of Hadoop I worked out I got a good time to work on spark and did a batch scheduling and pipeline management and derivation as well as taking Apache draft and turning it into the full-time product that powered many different graph applications within Facebook a social media company what is Hadoop I actually don't know what that is at all ah no worries so Hadoop is a map reproduce uh processing infrastructure if you think about um my background again with problem Computing we have MPI which is a very low level customized way you can do message passing between different processes and even things like RDMA

remote direct memory access to support again getting the best performance out of these machines I could do simulation and and run hundreds of thousands or millions of cores for weeks or months at a time before they kind of generate an output but that's complicated and in fact it takes programmers a long time to write these codes they're super hard to maintain there's a very small set of developers in the world that can write those type of applications and maintain them Hadoop is an idea where you take this thing called bsp which is both synchronous parallel processing uh and apply it in a in a stricter sense where you can do things the map operation you can take any kind of input data and transform it and reduce which takes those input things and kind of consolidates them so it supports some core Primitives of parallelism but kind

of limits you a little bit to what you can do but at the same time by that limitation it allows a broader set of programmers to be able to access that framework and write different kinds of applications one of the most key applications in that space was Hive a SQL implementation on top of mapreduced and supported according you know billions and or trillions of rows and producing you know petabytes of data at a time and then this is the kind of infrastructure that powered uh companies like meta and Google and um you know LinkedIn and others uh all their analytics pipelines in the in the future so um it's really cool to see the way that program models can actually impact the way the developers uh have a flexibility and expressiveness and ability to to write applications in a meaningful way

in time to Market that's what we kind of see happening in the blockchain space as well which I'm sure we'll get into yeah yeah so that's when you talk about like message passing in this context I've done interviews where we talked about message passing in the blockchain context is it the same thing are we dealing with sort of like a different level it is I think there's some simulators here which I find fascinating um so in the kind of something like MPI or message interface the idea is that any process can send messages to others at any given time and like as I mentioned this provides kind of any kind of parallelism you would dream possible um you just need to kind of construct what the models you're looking for one of those I mentioned was bsp which is super interesting but you could do

extinguished type messaging passaging there's something in API called Collective operations where processes will collectively get together decide what to write and then share that information in a way that optimizes for the writing patterns such as bash writing chunks of data to storage which is much more efficient than running little pieces of the other storage and so this is something we see kind of on the blockchain space as well where you know the API is available to you uh could be very different some of them are very simple and straightforward uh like move I would argue which allows you to constrains a program which not have to make so many mistakes thinking about the way the coin operates versus an integer representing a coin as an example is a constraint on a programmer but it makes them you know it makes it much more

accessible and much more less likely you're going to have errors in your contract when you write those when it comes to message passing specifically though there are ideas around what we call asynchronous move which we're super excited about the idea that move itself can pass messages between different actors in the system and that can be an interesting way to think about parallelism in the in the blockchain context kind of similar to the way I think about it in the high performance Computing context [Music] how long were you at Facebook meta I was there for over a decade from 2011 to about 2021 yeah oh my God like the time frame for that at that company must have been very special like 2011 Facebook was the Pinnacle and like I think everyone

wanted to work there so you were working like this highly competitive like very I bet like just amazing people that said like the reputation in our space is definitely different did you like by the time you left did you feel like this was not I mean I'm sure it was a very different company but tell me a little bit about that change when I joined in 2011 you're right it was a very small startup and a super exciting place where everybody had some very unique talents about them I was sitting next to someone who was like very influential in C plus uh and someone who was like a semi-professional Chess Championship yeah it was very interesting to see the kind of interesting talent that came together at that time to work at meta Facebook it's hard for me to go back and forth

I call it Facebook for the first nine years of my career there and then last year so it's still a challenge for me to get over that airfare uh but over time you definitely saw like one thing Facebook did really well was to kind of keep the small team culture going so teams are still pretty tiny like four or five people now there are grouped of come together as larger teams but the bottoms of culture and the way that roadmaps came together and people planned I think was mostly maintained uh during my time there definitely the the Dale part of it it was it was it was very large I've grown many many times in multiples over that but overall I had a great time there and I really enjoyed the colleagues that I met over the over those years did you like so I've had on the show uh

bobbin Costas and Sam all who were at meta mostly in the cryptography like Libra project you were also working there so I kind of want to understand I mean like a bunch of those two of those folks went on to to do mistin with I know a lot of the folks from that that crew so tell me a little bit about like what was that original group like and how did it split off yeah um so Facebook was was a really four thing coming at the time they invested a a ton in terms of bringing together Talent across so many different domains um cryptography languages distributed computing consensus um a lot of talent and the way that was kind of assembled was into different

organizations it was the engineering organization that focused on how do we build um the blockchain how do we scale things how do we deploy this infrastructure and then there was also other folks that worked on languages and research and so I think you know they were just there were no the organization was pretty large I think it was more than 100 people uh working on also data wallet infrastructure team as well so my focus was I started from the team worked on consensus protocols did a bunch of research in the space to understand what what direction we want to move in we ultimately ended up picking up hot stuff as the first kind of consensus program we would work on yeah yeah and over time I became the leader of the blockchain space um kind of helping us on how we integrate move with with DM how do we

work on the custody side of solutions with respect to what our wallet infrastructure was doing and the ecosystem projects around it and we had a great team of 30 plus people that was that was working that space a lot of those folks uh we're fortunate to have come with us uh work with us at Aptos labs yeah wait it isn't it Thai an author there yes Italia room is also cool if they're on the paper okay we work closely with malfun Thai and Dalia on the pacemaker improvements for liveness um but but you know hofstuff was this interesting theoretical paper uh it did not have the Practical applications uh into how you would make it work in the system we took the kind of Core Genesis of the three-phase protocol the separation of safety and liveness and then evolved it

into something that we think was was pretty meaningful to support two steps instead of three steps with respect to consensus making it much more faster and also the idea of an active leader as opposed to a passive pacemaker so in in-house the original paper was designed to wait for timeouts uh long exponentially increasing timeouts which would which would take a very long time before you kind of get back to a system that works and we you know of course it's not going to work well in Practical context we took the the potion to make it more an active pacemaker were node synchronized and because it's synchronization they can actually recover much faster from failure they can make much more progress with respect to liveness uh and and support a more practical running system and what we saw

actually which was which is cool is that others have adopted some of this work so uh flow blockchain for instance has adopted both both of these uh both these Primitives I don't think they have the leader reputation that we have yet leader petition is a really cool primitive where as you progress in your your usage of the blockchain the validators that that run the software are going to be on reporting their reputations on chain with respect to the votes the fact that they were able to successfully commit blocks as leaders and we use this information to then bias towards those nodes that have done well and support that as well with rewards with respect to our previous stake Network that's what you're doing today that's what we're doing today with like Aptos okay okay on the consensus front yeah we've also taken that a step

further so we've you know I I don't know if it's a good time to dive into it now but we've we've been also worked on the next next phase of our consensus protocol so the way we think about it is very much an iterative process we started off with the kind of basic hot stuff we iterated to our first um deployment that improves blindness areas quite a bit with respect to responsiveness and then we had our leader reputation on top of that and more recently we've done something called Quorum star which is the first production grade implementation of the narwaltusk papers and so there's a there's a lot of research that which is this Tusk narwhal and Tusk so there's a there's a yeah there's a research paper that broughty Sasha from appsauce Labs have been working on collaboration with others uh which talks about the idea

that separating the data dissemination phase from consensus is is very important for scalability and so it's great to have a research paper there's a cool prototype implementation out about it but we want to take that prototype again and turn into something that was much more practical and applicable to real life systems and so our first implementation of that called the Quorum store actually has been tested uh right now with our node operators in what we call the preview Nets and and achieving a pretty pretty fantastic results with that and so our goal is really how do we keep marching this technology forward we know that Technologies continue to evolve over time the goal of Aptos is when we think about this space it's so young it's so early uh it's not in a phase where things are so matured where

products are very similar in spirit like you think about postgres or MySQL they are different products and they have some differentiators but and by and large you know they a lot of the features are pretty much interchangeable between those things same thing with Cloud you can think about AWS and Google and Azure is being you know they have differentiating Services they offer and the support is different but by and large they offer large Fleet of machines they offer some serverless infrastructure that's applicable for building on top of and you know blockchain is not anywhere near that maturity phase right now we're at the early early phases where technology is being experimented with play with and so for us upgradability is super important how do we think about a technology stack that can keep moving forward over time until we get to that

maturity point until users can kind of see less differentiating between the products because they're all pretty high performance and support great user experiences uh I want to go back a little bit to the sort of the meta crew so what we've shared a little bit about like the consensus side of things so that's like running with hot stuff and adding these new ideas into it but yeah I want to also talk about move because you've mentioned move a few times and I had Sam on the show from mistin who talked about move like move was developed in order to be kind of the script or the like the language for some new blockchain it's kind of to replace solidity right originally I think I don't have a design Service Place yeah I

don't think we're trying to replace anything at the time I think we were trying to think about you know when we think back the history in 2018 it was more about meta has billions of people that come to it every day and thinking towards that scale compared to what industry is and was at the 2018 where you have maybe a couple hundred or at that time probably tens of thousands of users that are excited about blockchain how do we take that and you know add orders magnitude people to it and that's not just developers but those are users and what would need to be done to be that experience particularly safe and also bring timed from from development to production down uh to make the industry move quickly and I think we was the answer to that

our answer to it which was a new primary language which would make it harder for people to make mistakes that would support things like formal verification they'll be designed from the ground up to to be um resilient to denial service tax all those things came together in the name of language and maybe most important of all those factors a language in which we could iterate our move on very quickly solidity you know is a great Community around it and that's a both an advantage and a disadvantage um it has as you know lots of great developers but at the same time the language can't evolve quickly and with move it's something that we felt was designed also to to be upgradable uh also to add some new features and we've added quite a few even the recent you know months and and of course years uh

with respect to it and we continue to expect to do so in the future the thing is if Sam's at mistin then he I mean I know that he's still quite active on it like is it the two teams are contributing towards the same language or are there others as well they're actually been more this is something that's a little surprising maybe to folks but there's been more than 300 unique contributors to move over the years okay okay and you know while they're definitely you know some large contributors in in Aptos and it missed in and others like zero L of star coin um you know we do see community support for this project both and also in Academia I think I can even also regards as a very interesting place to play with it yeah and and we expect that to change over time we've also heard expressions

of of interest from Solana from near and from other blockchains that are thinking about movies a different Gateway into their blockchain and that's that's also something that excites us a lot have you ever looked around at other I mean obviously you're familiar with solidity and stuff but like would there ever be I guess it would just be compilers but like would you or with the move Community also want to interact or connect to any of the other languages out there like I'm thinking stuff like I mean especially right now we're dealing with like the ZK DSL land explosion maybe maybe that's too far off but like yeah I mean you have ink over at polka dot you have solidity which is really well understood I don't know what's the Solana's using rust I guess

that's right so like yeah can you compile from rust to move I I think there's been a lot of efforts to try to make compatibility support from moving to and from uh I know our team uh Wolfgang and run 10 and others have worked a lot on that space and how do you think about compiling or transpiling from solidity to to move or you know just kind of support even the evm by codes in in a move compatible way and vice versa as well um although I think right now you know all a lot of our resources are tied up in just you know supporting move in a really good way for Aptos um it's something that we do think about and our our team is excited to support in the future and also helping willing to help support others who are made willing to make that

happen cool okay so so far we've covered consensus and some of the unique points you're using the language move but move is the language that you would write programs for Aptos in right that's correct you're not using move to build the blockchain uh are you actually uh I actually I think you could you could argue that's the case for us oh really I think that's a big part of our great upgradable story so definitely have a lot of our validator code is written in Rush that's for sure okay but one thing that makes us upgradable is the fact that we use move modules to determine the state of the blockchain as well so we have launching governance where people can vote for different proposals and a proposal might be for instance upgrade our consensus protocol from kind of

current hot stuff to Hot Stuff Plus our Quorum store and it's something that we actually have done in the past and and when that vote happens there's a trigger on chain on chain configuration that flips and now all the values that sync up to the current state of the blockchain are understanding that now this use cornstar technology plus op stuff going forward and this is a way that allows us to do upgradability in a very seamless fashion without any disruption to their users yeah that's interesting so it is kind of on both both ends it's like one would use it to write on top if you ever built anything on top and also you're using it somewhere under the hood that's right I mean even our staking contracts are written using move there we try our best to use move because that way it allows

us to upgrade these these different contracts or use your Primitives in an in a very seamless way interesting it's much more flexible to write anything you want to do in Russ but when you can use move to do it it allows us that upgradability with respect to online governance and with respect to contract upgrades and that's really really fascinating for our developers and for our our community in general cool cool what are other kind of Dimensions that you would say like you're doing experiments or you're creating something somewhat new from what's like the audience the audience of the show we've heard in detail how like ethereum works and we've done episodes on Solana and on near and on polka dot and on Cosmos so yeah what else like when you're kind of

going to an engineering community like a Dap developer Community what are you offering them that really like changes yeah the offerings I mean obviously there's the language there's some stuff going under the hood but yeah tell us more so different language is a big component we think that they'll help you get faster time to production and that's meaningful developers obviously today there's a huge amount of challenges with respect to how do you audit the code and get it get it ready and if there's fewer things to audit if you can take the advantage of the move prover and how it supports formal verification about certain aspects and semantics of your programs that's a huge important factor we think about the user experience as well so many blockchains today don't have even simple things like key

rotation and after style supports key rotation but it supports key rotation that's controlled by smart contracts that allows you to support things like hybrid custody Solutions imagine a world where as a smart contrary platform you have a way to rotate your key but only under certain constraints only when you have not used a blockchain for a period of time like six months or a year so most of the time you have full control of your account you no one can touch it and except for with your private key but when you haven't used it for a while for instance you've lost your key another key that's held by custodian would be able to rotate it on your behalf but only only with those points improvably yeah on the blockchain at a certain time audited so we think that the user experience challenges of Key

Management are things that we can push as far down to the L1 stack and support with whatever the ability and with the transparency and with kind of help from others you could be a friend it could be a custodian of sorts that's very meaningful the other thing that's very meaningful of course is this technology stack needs to scale and when I say that every single blockchain combined in the world can support what a single MySQL server can do and what we've done at optos is think about how do we design a system that can support scaling up the resources for larger workloads the same way that cloud infrastructure does for in their applications like Netflix or or Google those those are powered by you know hundreds of thousands if not millions of

bicycle servers when you think about infrastructure like Instagram and meta and that's because it gives you an idea of how far away we are in Industry from where we need to be and where we are and so when that stock was designed it has many different phases of transaction execution it has a dissemination phase it has an ordering phase it has a pal execution phase and then what we I think we talked a little bit earlier we have the ability to batch updates which was much more efficient from a resource perspective and then finally a proof generation phase and by creating these different phases of computation that are that are logical we can not only allow each of these phases to work independently we can allow the depolarization of these phases so data

summation is something done with Quorum store where we can push data to as many values as we can in the network and get what we call the proof of availability uh from them and then those can be then ordered without having to pass that data around and support the public execution phase and then so on and so forth and so if you think about today we have a valid a single validator with CPUs and memory and ssds and network bandwidth those things will grow we'll have multiple processors we'll have multiple ssds and then over time what we'll have is validators that operate low latency clusters of machines and those will be able to scale up their resources and support you know hundreds of thousands or millions of transactions per second and growing to the needs of

what what we need uh needs to support the largest applications in the world and I think that is something that's pretty unique about the Optus infrastructure so supporting it from a programming languages perspective a user experience perspective around custody and pushing those Primitives on chain and then finally kind of supporting the fastest you know decentralized database and scalable data Essentials database in the world that's our course why is it fastest everyone can think about fastest in different ways yeah we think about in terms of finality and kind of indisputable finality not probabilistic so for that we started off with the bft-based protocol a business protocol in hot stuff and the hot stuff we took from the three round trips of network latency to two down trips

that's you know given a a data center might have about 200 milliseconds of latency from something completely across the world you can imagine that gets us to 400 to 500 milliseconds of fidelity time now with Quorum sort that increases that slightly because of the time to also get the approve availabilities on it uh but that's kind of allowed us to get you know sub second around second of latency in real life production scenarios and mainnet so if you look at the reason my sorry report on Twitter optos had had the lowest finality time for any any production Network and it's something that we you know we haven't necessarily even optimized to our fullest Jets we're excited about even driving that time further and making it making the blockchain accessible to real-time applications uh which we think would be really important for adoptions

Technology stock you sort of said though like fastest can be defined in many different ways like are there other blockchains that you think are fast in a different way I'm just trying to understand what like if finality is if if it's not the only metric what are other metrics so some people think about you know either use them as intermediate metrics like you know the first time someone throws a receipt of a message it's not guaranteed to be committed to the network but there's a good indication that it's likely going to be committed if you use kind of historical data as a measure of future performance and I think that there's other ways you can provide signals in the system for instance even the optos blockchain which

will give you similar metrics so it really depends on what we're talking about for instance as once a transaction gets submitted uh an evaluator kind of gets this proof of availability on it you have a guarantee that no one's going to forget this transaction and people will keep submitting it until it either gets rejected or it eventually gets committed and so there are different kind of metrics in the system you can expose to this pipeline infrastructure which is really neat such as when things have been proven to be available on top of any of the validators there's another proof which you can provide in which the ordering phase happens now you're guaranteed which it's going to be looked at not necessarily executed in this fashion and then you also have a phase at the very end which says it's been executed and here's the execution result

of it verified by the validators so there's many different kinds of metrics around finality okay which are interesting to provide to the users and to the developers and they can be used for different types of use cases going forward um you would sort of mentioned the key rotation I just wondered if that was is that all like a smart contracts or is the like account is basically the question like is it a form of like account abstraction as we've understood it in the ethereum context so a contraction is something that we we definitely also support in Aptos uh it's a it's a little bit longer discussion but definitely around Keys you know there's a kind of a way to secure an account through a key and any transaction that modified this account has to basically be signed by that key we also support a very flexible things

here such as multi-sig keys for accounts we support contracts that kind of control the way the keys are managed okay okay there's a lot of flexibility here I think that flexibility is is intended so that the user experience can be customized toward particular use cases whether it's Enterprise grade infrastructure such as something that M safe or momentum safe is doing one of the other projects built on top of apptos or it's going to be more user-facing projects that large-scale custodians would build that would support kind of more generic key rotation purposes when you mentioned sorry you mentioned like provers obviously like coming from the ZK land I always think you're talking about a ZK proof proverb but I'm guessing you're not what kind of provers are they yeah so thinking about the move prover is a

little bit different the idea behind it was again how do you get that time to market for a developer as fast as possible and that has to do with good quality testing and so being able to prove certain properties of your contract in all possible kind of permutations iterations formally is something that gives a lot of confidence in the in the and when they write their contracts and so knowing that for instance a balance is conserved or that certain even ratios between different types of tokens might be concerned or things that the approver can do from you know Project deployments without the need of an auditor to kind of look at the code and make sure things are working correctly and the more we can do to enhance that framework just reduces the need for as much auditing as

you know there's always many auditing in the move any any smart contract space but the more we can do kind of reduce that need and also reduce the amount of work that happens as a part of that process allows people to move their products to Market more quickly so is the prover then like a verification thing yeah yeah it's it's definitely a something that's kind of formally verifies certain properties of your contract okay and so it's not it's not a proof in the sense like you know indicate proofs you know you're kind of verifying yeah you're then there's approver you're proving that the calculation was done yeah that was done correctly and all those fun things uh it's it's more about proving the certain certain semantics about your program okay you should really think of it as a testing tool is it like the rust

is it called prover and wrath too like that I know in Rust that like forces you to check stuff Ross has this amazing you know compile time checks which also prevents you from as many mistakes as possible of course you can't solve the bugs in your code uh and it is targeted towards specifically things that are you know around memory management uh which are very important the proof is a little bit different inside of move it's really about application Level semantics and not so much about the core system semantics which is what the rust compiler does on your behalf I see okay got it but it is sort of it it is like it's a checker it's checking to make sure the thing will work the way you want it to exactly okay and but just happening more at the application Level as opposed to

the kind of core languages and system level I do want to ask you like do you have any ckps in your system are you looking into adding them yeah I mean I think we definitely have you're on the Zero knowledge podcast I have to ask this question absolutely absolutely we have quite a bit of uh interesting cryptography in in the Autos platform uh for sure um a couple things that are interesting is that we have something called build tokens they're kind of based on zero knowledge range proofs uh specifically based on bulletproofs users can Veil their balances and keep that hidden from folks uh they but but recipients and centers are well known this is kind of

providing an interesting middle ground between full privacy of zero knowledge and also full transparency of a public blockchain but also intermediaries in terms of the cost as you know generating ZK proofs are very expensive uh the verification very fast and there's different kinds of trade-offs between the different techniques available but we like the idea also this veiled transaction is a way to find a middle ground and a hybrid between the solutions is another alternative for us so this it fails it it hides the amount is that correct that's correct but not the recipients but then like is the Wallet balance visible the world bounces are visible to the users so then you'd see the change anyway the recipient and the sender

would know of the changes but no one else okay but like a block Explorer would not see the the value of the account that's right a block Explorer would not see it oh in general are the amounts in a wallet always or like the amounts and accounts failed like by default uh so we I don't think we've actually integrate into our wallet yet so we were still working on that technology piece but we kind of put the corporators out there so people can build this infrastructure and it's just one of the things that we're doing we also support a variety of different signature schemes within the as mood Primitives within Aptos things like of course edu25519 signatures ecdsa signatures we support different kinds of cryptography

functions we're also supporting different types of other Decay proof verification such as growth 16 zero knowledge proofs that will be kind of shorts and fastest to verify and so this kind of builds the core set of Primitives that are necessary for interesting ZK applications on top of Aptos whether it's going to be L2 chains or it's going to be just applications or even verification of these proofs coming from Bridges from other networks which would be interesting as well I want to ask you a question about the validator sets and also the governance like are the validators voting or are the users voting when it comes to governance like is this sort of a you know validators and their delegates

carry a certain weight how are you making that distinction ballot is always implicitly vote by running the software stack okay so I just want to make sure that's very clear right no no matter what like it's true for all networks it's not just true for Aptos if the value decides to do something you know they can kind of do it without permission from anyone and so that's there's nothing different here from that perspective but when it comes to the on-chain voting process that's where it's token holders that are vote and token holders could be validators could be users with token balances could be you know other parties anyone that has a token is allowed to vote and the voting has certain constraints in which it can happen fast or it can happen kind

of more slowly over time say the the tokens are delegated to a validator would that then contribute to the is it sort of like the cosmos version where it's like the percentage of stake equals the percentage of vote today token holders vote in the network there are new student contracts coming out that support delegation from the community and these contracts will hopefully over time support a variety of different ways for token holders to continue to vote even in delegated operation and they can also choose to delegate those votes to other parties including validators I think that is actually how a lot of the cosmos chains do still work like anyone can over like you basically delegate your tokens but then you can always override the vote of your validator if you want to like if

you decide to vote it overrides what they're voting for but if you don't vote as a token holder who's delegated whatever the validator votes for and I mean like the the actual vote this is like the upgrades and the that kind of stuff anyway yeah sounds sort of similar then it's also making me realize kind of what state the network is at so you're like there will be delegation but not yet so yeah where are you guys at so it's a great question we launched our Network in October of last year and it's been a little more than five months five and a half months or so since Network's been live we're super excited to see the amazing Community come behind it I think on launch day more than 30 projects launched alongside us and that was super exciting to see today more than 100

projects are live in network and hundreds more building but when you say launch do you mean test net launch or do you mean launch launch oh no I mean main net launch yeah there are lots of projects yeah there are lots of projects in testnet today that continue to stress our test net interesting and challenging ways but yeah more than 100 today are live in midnet and you're live on mainnet but you don't have delegation yet so that's going to be like an upgrade at some point that's an upgrade coming soon and so one thing that we've tried to start very early in the process is the notion of Community Driven input we have an AIP process which really closely mirrors the EIP process where different members of the community can propose upgrades and opportunities for improvement on the network I think

we're already on probably AIP 17 or 18 since we started and many of these proposals are coming from various factions of the community that we don't know well and we love that we love to see I think the delegation proposal actually came from one of the validator operators for the optos blockchain and it's really exciting to see them taking an interest and driving this project forward in a way that you know many of us at the labs haven't thought of yet so we're super excited about the community efforts and development in this space I'm kind of curious like who the community is mostly because like right now there's I mean if you just look at a timeline if anything I think we've seen a lot of ecosystems sort of shrinking more than growing and you have a little bit of a land grab happening

where like different like things like the new l2s or like everyone's sort of trying to to get a chunk of an existing pie um are you competing with ethereum in a way like you're you're a new L1 or Solana or whatever like how are you getting these developers basically to build on Aptos I don't think of it as competition I I think the pie is really small right now I think okay probably tens of thousands of Developers for all of web3 and there are millions of programmers in the world Our Hope and our our thought is that as we start to build out the core technology stack that provides a very scalable experience a user friendly experience

and one that can support the largest internet applications in the world those developers will naturally start to move over and and start to get excited about web3 and Aptos in general do you feel though like because I'm thinking you're based in a valley uh because of some of the teams and people you mentioned and stuff but like are you recruiting web 2 Engineers a lot into a new ecosystem like into a whole new kind of industry or would you say you are kind of like meeting a lot of the engineers from other blockchain projects coming over we've seen a combination of both we definitely have saw a lot of projects from other blockchains that are really excited about developing with move they've had experiences with other

languages and they're just looking for more and they're like wow this is a really cool new way of thinking about data models and programmability and auditing and we had a hackathon early on in the project in May where we were trying to understand like what's the developer experience around move how ready is it for prime time and could people be productive in it and developers came from different web 2 companies from other blockchains and and I think more than 50 people showed up at our office which which made it for a very interesting situation I think we were meant to have like just 10 or 20 people okay and then coded for 36 hours and after that they've built some of the most amazing technology with respect to wallets and games and nft marketplaces

and many of these projects actually can continue to build with us and in an accelerator program or you know that spans you know more than eight months now that that kind of showed us that move was a thing and it was something that people could get excited about uh and and so we've seen and in that space even there we saw both web 2 and what kind of web through communities coming together with respect to move and Aptos and I think today we see that same excitement we see definitely a lot of interesting projects from other blockchains which as you mentioned may not be doing so well or looking for something new uh come over to Aptos and get excited about technology stack the team and the way that we're advancing things very very quickly uh in a short period of time and we also see that a lot of these

large internet companies which have stayed out of the space mainly due to technology not being ready or not you know sure about some of the teams there and the organizations uh getting excited about Aptos and kind of what we bring and knowing that our history around with respect to kind of building production grade software Enterprise great software at the largest in companies in the world is something that they can trust going forward so we do see interest from both those communities and we're really excited to to support all their applications I feel like there's a focus in like is there a particular type of I don't know if you'd call IT industry segment because I don't know if these things are big enough yet but like are you focused on nfts are you focused on games are you focused on all I've heard

from thinkers that there might be a specialization in some of the other L ones or in some of the l2s so I'm curious like yeah if you sort of have a focus for the part of the market you want to tackle we're excited about technology and being kind of this great layer to build on top of again if you have amazing user experiences if you have great finality times if you have super really strong scalability in a great programming environment I think you can support all use cases extremely well that being said we do focus on certain use cases that we think are most likely to get adoption quicker kind of moving from broader internet based applications to supporting web through utility and those kind of four areas are going to be

gaming social finance and media and entertainment more broadly so those are the ones that we have interesting Partnerships with um we'd happy to talk about those as well then the areas that we really spend a lot of our time focusing on building infrastructure for specifically are you still working with meta like when you talk about Partnerships and then you say sort of entertainment and I'm thinking like is this the VR thing so like do you have ties still to the org having worked at meta for 10 years I have lots of great relationships with many different people there we don't have any form relationship with meta at this time okay um although we continue to keep in contact with with many of our colleagues and are excited about some of the initiatives we

could work on in the future okay but that's not when you talk about sort of Partnerships you're not saying like you're going to be the nft provider for meta or something like that we can't comment on that at this time I think actually they're working with polygon aren't they Instagram um so I think actually recently they did announce um they're going to take a pause on the web 3 efforts for a bit oh yeah so that's that's something that's you know maybe not great for the industry overall but you know I think in the future we still have there's there's so many things that could happen in the future I mean I think they're also working on a new decentralized platform for Twitter uh Twitter like product as well so we'll keep an eye on the space we'll keep in contact with some of our friends there

as well this definitely brings up the question about like the state of the market like when did when did optos start you sort of mentioned 2018 but then you were still at meta or Facebook but yeah when did like the company start so 2018 is when we started building out the technology stack move was being built Dean was being built we had this great team of folks that were all working in Tandem and an interesting Association of Enterprise industry members from some of the largest companies in the world that were excited about this new technology stack in 2021 it was kind of clear that this was not going to launch within meta and in end of December 2021 is when my co-founder mosheik and I who Mo had

worked on the wallet side of uh the world and I had worked on the blockchain side and started off Aptos and many as I mentioned of the former co-workers at uh DM joined us and continue to push the theology stack forward was there any other companies that came out of that actually so there's mistin Aptos is there another one linera is another one okay also Light spark huh there are quite a few interesting same group all the same group yeah okay okay so 2021 late 2021 yeah first it was abscess was was started in December of 2021. so this is like top this is like it is exciting everyone is very excited

that continues until end of February when you know stability in in Europe as we've known it has changed and then it gets progressively worse as 2022 continues as we all know so yeah how does it like being a company that sort of emerges at this time are you feeling that like do you worry about it have you had any sort of pushback for maybe like people who were really excited before and now are nervous deadly 2022 has been an interesting year for our industry yeah yeah but at the same time I think it's re-energizes so much laptops we're we're an early startup in this space from that perspective obviously our

technology has been built for many many years and evolved over that time frame so from a technology perspective we're pretty we're not mature but we're definitely in a good space and continuing to be a place we can be very iterative and move very quickly from a company standpoint it's been very interesting to see in the short period of time you know the the movements of the industry and how that affects us but it's been really positive I think for us internally we've just been very focused heads down kind of trying to ignore much of the noise as possible and saying look some of the greatest companies were built during these These Times of hardship in the past you know in 2000 nine when the you know previous chronic crisis of 2008 when the banking crisis

has happened amazing products and amazing technology was developed and I think this is a great opportunity for us in our our time in our industry to do the same thing where people that are very serious and very focused can generate amazing technology and when you know this thing turns around at some point and people get really interested in a tech uh we'll be there to support them with um you know something that scales to their use cases and their needs you're a Silicon Valley company right well a lot yeah so a lot of us you know come from Silicon Valley are living in Silicon Valley definitely a lot of besides I mentioned came from our former project at DM yeah and so therefore there is a good mass and support of us

that are in the Bay Area but we have folks all over the world in New York and in Florida in London in Israel as well as Canada and even in Asia so we do think of ourselves as very much a global company do you feel like the crypto scene there is sort of this West Coast scene and you sort of mentioned a few teams that I would like kind of associate with it Solana is very very much from there I'm curious to see like what what is your perspective on the larger ecosystem like do you see sort of still the center of innovation as being from the valley or do you see it like moving to different parts of the world and maybe this is like harsh because you're there because you have to say

it's there no we definitely see Talent all across the world and we were excited about working with our colleagues everywhere I think for us we just have a core group of folks that came together in Silicon Valley because of our history with DM and meta and you know it's something that is very special to us as well we we think that you know being in person during the pandemic and during our launch you know we call a death march sometimes um who was super was very critical for us to uh to getting to getting to Market quickly and yeah I don't think anyone's been able to launch a blockchain you know within 10 months of starting a company and and also come live with 30

different projects at the same time so that's something that we're really proud of and I think a lot of that came from the fact that we had an amazing group of folks um you know in person and many of those folks flew in from across the world to be with us and help us get there it's one of our you know core advantages as a team it's so different because I mean a lot of teams that I know my my teams are all like remote but yeah it's it's you kind of have that because you all came from one org you have a little bit of that chance to still meet up and see each other in offices I am still wondering like going forward I mean I think from what you've said I can hear that you have a relatively like you have a pretty Rosy Outlook that

there will be like it will rise again but what must it be to be because because you're coming from like more the traditional American Tech hub and given the kind of onslaught of Regulation like yeah how are you how are you managing that how are you thinking about it something we're really excited about is when we thought about the network from from day one there was a focus on doing things in as a regulatory compliant way as possible so no token sales um as much as sensitivization as possible throughout the technology stack in the processes in which we manage the code commits and I help them to invite as many people to commit participate in

the community as possible is something that we really focused on and we think that that's something that you know everyone will will also adopt over time when it comes to developing layer one there are two other types of blockchain based Solutions so that's an area that we think is is something that you know is actually a competitive Advantage for us and we expect the industry to to also do in the future I think one of the arguments that we're seeing a lot of like the US companies have which is that to be compliant it's so challenging because the rules have not been declared how do you navigate that well we try to again do things that we feel are going to focus on utility of the blockchain specifically as opposed

to other aspects we you know tokens are used for ping Network fees and transaction fees they are used for staking they use for governance those are the things that are important for operation of a network the decision the network across many different countries where values are operating in 22 countries around the world over more than 18 different kind of cloud providers 73 different unique operators at launch those are the things I think that really help a network to start off and and grow as the standardization over time sort of a a way that some ecosystems have decentralized by almost like creating secondary companies to build the infrastructure or like or wind down

the original one is that sort of is that a plan or is that something that you're thinking about or do you see it more like this is a technology company that will also exist alongside this network forever the atlas Foundation was was launched as well prior to the midnight one live and is continue to grow in size and responsibility the Autos Foundation focuses on the growth and deciduation of the protocol at the slabs is a contributor to the protocol and also continues to build products over time as well so developing a wallet an indexer analytics infrastructure and overtime potentially products oh okay and do you think you could have a secondary one like do you ever imagine

like having another org I'm maybe it's too weird and strategic but maybe that's not even something that most teams were thinking about but yeah I just wondered like when you talk about decentralization like if it's yeah I wonder if you're also thinking like maybe another company completely builds it that's a good question I think we've seen from the community standpoint so many different projects building in this space and the more that build externally the outside of appsauce labs the app test Labs is an influencer and contributed to the to the overall protocol and to the growth Network and we're excited by that we're excited about taking less responsibility and we're super encouraging grateful for those that are contributing to aips those that are committing code the outside stack is actually I think

450 unique contributors and it's not just a small team of folks that work here that do it it's really people around the world who are excited about the protocol and what it can do for their particular use cases nice well every thank you so much for sharing with me this sort of story of Aptos explaining kind of some of the tech stack how the community is where you're at as a project what's next is there something that folks should look forward to upgrades lots of upgrades coming forward we deployed our 1.2 operating in February uh 1.3 is probably coming out in April or May and so our planet arcadians is really to keep deploying technology out to Market

as soon as possible things like move objects and resource groups which allow people and programmers to be able to Bunch their logical objects together in a way that's going to support high performance uh throughput is something that's exciting to us we'll continue to see gas fees coming down by the way very soon I think we've I think the 1.3 upgrade you'll start to see some of that uh I think 100x lower costs in the execution side which will be very exciting for developers and enable a whole bunch of different use cases so we keep listening to developer feedback we see changes coming forward from the community and from our team specifically and we're going to keep pushing forward in that direction uh hopefully by the end of the year you'll start to see amazing you know applications being built on top of Aptos

we have a couple that are are very exciting that I would like to highlight so one of them is chingari it's a web free social media app with 45 million monthly active users and over two million accounts they were building on other chain another chain in the past and now they've really been excited by the upset technology stack and they're switching uh and gonna bring all the users with them and we're going to work together to hopefully see all that up even by order magnitude in the future which is really exciting and so everyone's looking for that use case in web 3 where it gets people to you know get excited about utility being brought to the space and something that you would use on a daily basis or you know even a weekly basis with in hours of millions or tens of millions or

hundreds of millions and so we think shingari is definitely one of those possibilities uh another one is Grand Saga unlimited which is a game coming out of uh npixel AAA gaming studio of South Korea they're gonna be launching their game soon they did an amazing demo at GDC last week uh with the private beta and they've they've had millions of players in their in some of the previous versions of the game that they built and again being able to see what app does can do to support their needs and use cases they want to put everything on chain and do every all the gameplay and design yeah uh within a blood within the network which is really exciting and offering new experience to users and just a couple of Flagship projects that are building and we think that have tremendous potential to take advantage of our technology stack and demonstrate

what web3 can do and in terms of bring utility towards a mainstream audience how would you put an entire like if it's a real video game um because I mean I think there's already like a really good mapping on like how you could do marketplaces for like if you do marketplaces for things that kind of don't matter but add status like skins it seems to work but if you do game if you do marketplaces for like in-game items then you end up with like oligarchs just owning it it's like not fair you know so like so like how how would you put a full game on chain actually so they've been thinking Netflix have been thinking about this problem pretty deeply there's something called proof of play which you could take a look at uh

and how items can be distributed to users in a in a fair fashion and verifiable on chain um but yeah it definitely raises interesting questions around token economies uh for video gameplay which is so much more flexible than say a boring blockchain that has a utility token totally that's cool well yeah thanks again for sharing all of this with us um we'll do some I mean I'll do a little bit more research into that if you've got me thinking that I should do an episode actually on blockchain gaming uh after this but uh yeah thanks so much Avery it was my pleasure Anna all right and I want to say thank you to the podcast team Rachel Henrik and Tanya and tour listeners thanks for listening foreign

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