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Core Team Members

The following represent the upper management at Aptos Labs, including their respective roles:

• Mo Shaikh - Co-Founder and CEO
• Avery Ching - Co-Founder and CTO
• Charles Adkins - Global Lead, Business Development
• Ariana Gianacopoulos - Head of Marketing
• James Hodgkins - Head of DeFi
• Max Unger - Head of Community

Outside of upper management, Aptos Labs has 134 publicly listed employees. These employees include a multitude of founding engineers, blockchain developers, Move programming experts, and marketing professionals.

Investors

As discussed throughout this report, Aptos Labs attracted significant venture capital interest when Co-Founders Shaikh and Ching broke off from Meta to develop the Aptos project. Among the earliest and largest investors are:

• Andreessen Horowitz
• Multicoin Capital
• Katie Haun
• Three Arrows Capital (3AC)
• ParaFi Capital
• IRONGREY
• Hashed
• Variant
• Tiger Global Management
• BlockTower Capital
• FTX Ventures
• Paxos
• Coinbase Ventures

This initial primary round raised an estimated $200 million. Following this round, the Series A funding round on July 25, 2022, raised an additional $150 million and included the following new investors:

• Jump Crypto
• Superskrypt
• OakHC/FT
• Griffin Gaming Partners
• Franklin Templeton Investments
• Circle Ventures
• Apollo 

Two additional undisclosed funding rounds were led in September 2022 by Binance Labs and Dragonfly Capital, respectively. In total, 22 different investment groups/VC firms made capital investments in Aptos Labs in 2022. These 22 different firms raised over $350 million for Aptos Labs, making Aptos one of the most well-funded projects in the blockchain economy. 

Core Report Roadmap

The Aptos developer testnet was launched in March 2022 and reached a peak of 18,000 full active nodes, making it the largest known Proof of Stake node community in operation. The first phase of the incentivized testnet took place from May 24th to June 9th, 2022, with only 100 validators selected from over 30,000 submissions. This first stage was a success, assisting in identifying bugs and vulnerabilities and enhancing the Aptos network.

Source: Xangle

As outlined in their roadmap, maximum engine use will be achieved once three milestones are reached. The first milestone involves separating consensus from execution. By eliminating the interdependence that comes with combining consensus and execution, higher throughput and lower latency can be achieved.

The second milestone is optimizing transaction execution times through the use of the Block-STM in-memory smart contract parallel execution engine. In general, STM models have performance limitations due to the conflict between bookkeeping and aborts. However, upon evaluation, Aptos Labs concluded that when applied to specific use cases such as DLT along with a combination of innovative techniques, they were able to achieve 100k+ TPS with 32 cores within their execution-only benchmark. Furthermore, their experimental evaluation has also shown that Block-STM outperforms sequential execution by up to 20 times on low-contention workloads and up to nine times on high-contention ones. Whether this can be actively applied to mainnet remains to be seen, as the Aptos blockchain routinely operates a TPS of under 10.

The third milestone is achieving an optimized authentication data structure. To address the scalability issues that come with writing Merkle trees to persistent storage, Aptos is developing authenticated data structures with the goal of being a scalable, database-friendly solution. This will be achieved through evaluating higher branching factors, optimizing access patterns through caching, and implementing careful versioning.