Aptos Is Betting Big on Transparency After Crypto’s Black Friday, Says CEO - Ep. 927
🎯 Summary
Podcast Summary: Aptos Betting Big on Transparency After Crypto’s Black Friday (Ep. 927)
This episode features an in-depth conversation with Avery Cheng, CEO of Aptos, focusing on the blockchain’s strategic pivot toward building transparent, high-performance financial infrastructure, particularly in response to recent market opacity events. The discussion covers Aptos’s origins, its core technological differentiators (Move language), and its ambitious product roadmap targeting global trading and decentralized cloud computing.
1. Focus Area
The discussion centers on Web3 infrastructure, specifically Layer 1 (L1) blockchain development, decentralized finance (DeFi) trading mechanisms, the necessity of transparency following centralized exchange failures, and the emerging intersection of blockchain technology with AI/Cloud Computing.
2. Key Technical Insights
- Move Language Advantage: Aptos leverages the Move language, which was specifically designed for secure asset management, positioning it as superior to the EVM for specialized, high-performance trading applications.
- Namespaces and Performance: Aptos is architecting its infrastructure using “namespaces” connected by high-speed fiber, aiming for 10ms latency within namespaces and 50ms across them, enabling centralized exchange-level performance for on-chain operations.
- Fully On-Chain Matching: The flagship trading product, Decibel, is designed for fully on-chain order submission, matching, and settlement, contrasting sharply with current “decentralized” exchanges that rely on opaque, off-chain order matching systems.
3. Market/Investment Angle
- Trading as the Core Value Add: Aptos has strategically focused its mission on building the “global trading engine,” recognizing that asset trading generates massive revenue ($50B annually) that is currently captured almost entirely by centralized entities.
- Decentralized Cloud Opportunity: The second major bet is on decentralized cloud computing and AI infrastructure, viewing this $300B industry as the next major wave for decentralization usage, exemplified by the launch of Shelby.
- Transparency Premium: The recent crypto market instability highlighted the market’s demand for verifiable systems. Aptos aims to capture market share by offering unmatched transparency in trading, which centralized and semi-decentralized competitors cannot match.
4. Notable Companies/People
- Avery Cheng (CEO, Aptos): Former crypto lead for the Libra/Diem project at Meta (Facebook), bringing deep experience in building global-scale payments infrastructure.
- Decibel: Aptos’s fully decentralized, full-stack spot and perpetuals exchange designed to match CEX performance with blockchain fairness.
- Shelby: Aptos’s first product in the decentralized cloud space, offering real-time storage optimized for deep learning and AI workloads, aiming to reduce egress fees.
- Wachie (with NBCUniversal): A decentralized operating system for media built on Aptos/Shelby, focusing on unifying identity, payments, and loyalty across large media properties.
5. Regulatory/Policy Discussion
The discussion implicitly addresses regulatory concerns by emphasizing transparency as a solution to opacity. Cheng noted that if recent market events (referencing the “Black Friday” collapse of a major entity) had occurred on a fully transparent, on-chain system like Decibel, the chain of events, market manipulation, and profit distribution would be entirely visible and auditable, contrasting with the current “black box” nature of centralized finance.
6. Future Implications
The long-term vision is an “on-chain economy” where daily life—getting paid, earning yield, having AI agents automatically manage investments (rebalancing portfolios every minute)—occurs seamlessly on decentralized infrastructure. This future relies on Aptos achieving CEX-level performance to support high-frequency, low-cost transactions for billions of users globally.
7. Target Audience
This episode is highly valuable for Web3 infrastructure developers, blockchain investors, DeFi strategists, and technology executives interested in the next generation of L1 scaling solutions and the convergence of blockchain with AI/Cloud services.
🏢 Companies Mentioned
💬 Key Insights
"I think that people should know not just within that product, but across the industry. And so, as a whole, we have to see a lot of this volume transact on-chain as opposed to off-chain so that we can have those metrics."
"I think they saw this energy between what Aptos is trying to build, like very much enterprise-grade secure software. They have a lot about security. We've seen that. We've done so many security reviews with them, auditing the code over and over again, and then deploying very slowly and then kind of ramping up."
"And they actually tried some other chains, didn't work out so well. And then they came to Aptos because they knew they only wanted to support 500 million users across the world, transacting at tremendous amounts of volume. And India is a place where the fees really matter because of the scale that they bring to the table."
"I think the easiest sell for Aptos is just that whatever stablecoin comes to Aptos, we immediately become the fastest, most performant, and cheapest version of stablecoin across the world."
"So for example, USDT is used very heavily outside the US, USDC, thinking of almost as a regulated US-based currency. And then PYUSD, having access to PayPal's customers, USD1 being the administration-backed currency. So they all have their niche."
"But for Decibel, we're taking, I think, the really, really hard approach of saying when you submit an order, that order is going to be shown on-chain, that order is going to be matched on-chain with the matching algorithm that everyone can look at and take a ticket, and also the results of that will be published on-chain."