Crypto's Ultimate End State With Avery Ching

and we see several profitable projects in Aptos, that always gets us really, really excited since they're self-sustaining. That flywheel of kind of incubation all the way to building very interesting products with product-market fit is something that we're really focused on now. And I think that's with that focus on the foundation with new people, new blood, new ideas, as well as new energy towards ecosystem development is really exciting to us.

Hey everyone, welcome back to Empire. I'm taking this one solo. No Santi today, but we are lucky enough to be joined by Avery Ching, the co-founder and CEO of Aptos Labs. Avery, I think first time on Empire, so welcome to the show, man.

Thank you very much. I'm excited to be here.

Basically, I want to have you on because you are now the CEO of Aptos Labs. I think a lot of people knew Mo, and, you know, you and Mo were co-founders of Aptos. You guys started Aptos. Obviously, the story is very well known coming out of Facebook. And I think you have been the kind of technical leader and he was more of the— I don't know the right word— like the CEO or, you know, he was the kind of more front-facing person. And you guys had a big change semi-recently, right? I think it was in December you announced that Mo stepping back, moving more into a strategic advisory role. You're moving more into the CEO role. Tell us just about this pretty big change, both for— I'm interested both from the Aptos lens and for you personally. I mean, moving into the CEO role, it's a big personal change.

So Yeah, it definitely goes without saying that Mo helped scale the company to where it is. Um, really appreciate all the work he's done. Uh, that being said, I'm very excited to step into the CEO role. I'm looking forward to making very significant changes in how we operate, especially how we build out the ecosystem. Uh, the first month has already been quite interesting. Uh, we've been restructuring how the ecosystem team works. They'll be transitioning from the Labs to the Foundation, uh, headed up by Ash, who's a veteran in the space and a kind kind of ex-Solana member who knows how to build community. We're also doubling down on how we think about community ecosystem. So much better tooling, support for ecosystem builders, white glove support, and everything else is just really to help them kind of grow and scale without TOS into the future.

Nice. Did you ever think you'd be in the role?

I don't know. I didn't, to be honest. I think if we were still at Meta, we might have launched there, we might still be there, who knows? My mission has always just been how do we bring this technology change to people around the world, uh, in a way that would improve society. And that means, you know, how do we kind of find a world where decentralized systems are the, the infrastructure for us to move assets around, to own assets, to protect our rights, uh, to protect our freedoms, and also, um, support kind of global communication on a scale that's never been done before. So, um, no matter what role I'm in, uh, that's my mission, and I'm very excited to see it happen here at Aptos.

Yeah. If you think back to the early days of Aptos, I forget when you guys launched. I think 2022, I want to say, but I might be getting that wrong. I don't know when you guys started the idea and kind of incubated obviously at Facebook and stuff like that. And so I don't know the full progression, but like, how would you— what, like, how would you think about giving yourself a rating, like a grade basically on the scorecard? And like, I guess I'm curious what you— when you laid out that initial vision, like, what did you guys— what has gone according to plan and what has been different? And what have you guys gotten right and what have you guys gotten wrong?

Oh, that's good, a good question. So I, I think that's only proper to tell that story from 2018, which is kind of when the first kicked off in this form of, of Libra and Diem. And so going back to those days, I think we were just interested in how do you build a payments network that would support billions of people around the world 24/7, uh, across applications that not include just Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, but would support Visa, MasterCard, Uber, Lyft, and so many other companies that had joined the DM Association. And so with respect to that, like a new programming language, a new blockchain infrastructure that could scale, I feel like that was, you know, people may not know this, but that was very early days. We launched our testnet, it was all good, everything worked fine, but the technology has come a long way since. And it's not just, you know, me or a couple of people. It's really, I think there are more than 30 people that eventually ended up joining us from Meta at Aptos Labs that had worked on the project in the past, from engineers to the legal team, to other folks that just were passionate about this vision of how do you support a decentralized internet that is meant for all 5 billion internet users out there. And so from that perspective, I think we've done really well in terms of building the tech. Just to recap a little bit of some of the highlights, Aptos is the most scalable, lowest latency, and cheapest blockchain out there today. For scale, we've demonstrated more than 2 billion transactions per second on a preview net. Just to put that into context, you know, 2 billion transactions in a single day is about 25,000 transactions per second sustained. That's more than Visa, MasterCard, and every other credit card processor put together. Processes in one day. So it shows that you can demonstrate and demonstrates that you can support the payment use cases of, of today on the decentralized internet. Additionally, in 2024, I think we've seen Aptos at the, the daily mainnet transaction volume 4 times, peaking at 326 million, I think in August, which is more than 3,700 transactions per second. No slowdowns, no increased fees, no downtime. No issues with their applications. And then that again is just a very good proof point for a mainnet to show that just because you have high throughput doesn't mean you have to have an issue with your network. And so from a scalability perspective, we feel really good about this space. Like this can support major, major use cases. From a latency perspective, we've been able to improve our consensus bottlenecks to be the theoretical best possible. That's just 3 network hops. Before you get a commit. And even with the, the Morgan Zapdos framework, we can actually drop that even lower. But we, in 2024, already kind of achieved about 850, 800 milliseconds of latency from a user perspective. This is not from a blockchain perspective. And so what this means is that if you go to a website, it usually takes about 2.5 seconds to load a very good performing website. 800 milliseconds is a third of that, right? So you can actually do something in a website and have a Web3 action be a part of it and not affect the usual latency, which of course is something that's important for people as they browse the web. So very excited about the latency infrastructure as well that we built out at Aptos. The third thing is in terms of cost. Today, Aptos is, I think, the only move chain with USDC and USDT live on it. And being able to move USDT at a hundredth of a cent per transaction allows not just users to basically have almost free transactions, but the other thing is that it enables new use cases that just weren't possible before, whether streaming transactions or micropayments or different kinds of payment models that allow you to get very, very fine granularity, or even thinking about things where you want to just pay folks in very small volumes. For example, people are watching this podcast, they really like what you're saying, and they want to kind of give you a very small tip. The transaction fee is not going to be a large part of that. So seeing all that happen in, in kind of the technology space in 2024, something that I think is, is really important to, to show the industry that look, Web3 is not just a toy. It is something that can be used for mission-critical use cases. And I think that's something we established really, really well. So I give ourselves a good grade in that.

I do think tipping, tipping Empire Hosts is mission-critical. I would agree with you that people, more people should be tipping Santi and me. I agree with that. I have a bunch of questions actually Aptos and the tech side of things because you guys roll. But before we get there, um, how do you think about like what I maybe call the old Aptos of the first couple years and then maybe the new Aptos? And there's probably two lenses to that. Maybe there's the technical lens and the ecosystem lens. But before we even talk about that, like, I'm just curious, like, how are you different from Mo? Like, how, you know, like, I have a co-founder, his name is Mike, and a lot of people who listen to the show probably know him. Like, We kind of just like split the role, like, but I think if one of us was running Blockworks without the other, it'd be very different. First, if Mike stepped in and ran it without me, it'd be very different. So I'm just curious, like, how do you think about just how are you different from Mo and how will you run it differently than Mo?

Yeah, I think a lot about the tech, obviously, but also about the products built in this space and how the tech and the products come together in a way that drives interesting new usage and adoption. And so I think that's why the focus on ecosystem is so important for me. For example, going into some of the DeFi products in the space, I think we really want to understand what challenges they face, what's interesting to them, what brings them more value. And so for DeFi, a lot of it is like the tick-to-trade times. How fast do you get from information kind of discovery to being able to trade on that information? And so that's where a lot of the new improvements we're going to make going forward in the infrastructure is especially important. AptOS is basically a trading system for digital assets. And, you know, we've already got the fastest block times out there, which is important, about 200 milliseconds today. But we're going to drop that to under 100. And that's going to like double the speed of in which people get information, can act on it going forward. Another area that's very exciting is about adventure in transactions. And so for us to be able to, you know, once you see a price change, be able to act instantly on that can kind of drop the latency to nonexistent. And that's just a flavor of a couple of things that are going to be coming in the new trading infrastructure. But we're excited to see trading take on a major use case within the Aptos ecosystem because of its ability to kind of operate at speeds that are unprecedented for DEXs, for spots as well as perps. for clubs as well as AMMs, uh, and other kinds of innovative products can be built now that you have this unique infrastructure. One thing we have noticed is aggregators like Panora, uh, and Aptos have, have gotten very high traffic and very high usage because of the fact there's such low fees, right? If the fees are very low, having multiple routes in which you want to kind of, uh, move money around is, is something that, uh, is much more open because of the fact that the, the, the route, uh, um, kind of inter, interlays are not too expensive. We've also seen that having the natives on-chain as well as interesting new world assets allows for new use cases that just aren't possible in the past. So we're really excited about kind of the merging of the product and the tech. Like, what things can you do that just aren't possible anywhere else? And that's things around kind of this very, very fine-grained movement of money through aggregators. It's also through the idea that now you can have the most efficient DEXs. Spot and perps on the planet. And now that the kind of tick-to-trade times reduced significantly, we can see new kind of trading applications and new kind of alpha available for traders that aren't possible in other decentralized exchanges.

Why are you— what is the thing that lets you guys be able to have— what did you say, 25,000, I think you said, transactions per second? And Visa is like 1,700, and I don't know the other chain. It's a large number for anyone who doesn't know. It's a very large number. Why are you guys able to do this and other people can't accomplish this?

Uh, it's not that I don't think anyone else can't do it. It's just that, you know, we have, um, you know, we started off with a very good design, uh, for when it comes to Aptos. One of the key things I think we recognized early in the space is that there's a lot of innovation and, uh, research to do in the future. And so locking yourself into a design in which you can't upgrade things and can't modify things. Um, doesn't make sense. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so, uh, upgradability is something that's built into the Aptos stack from day one. We have on-chain governance to support upgrades very quickly. The stack itself is extremely modular. Um, modularity means very different things today in today's world, but, um, the modular design for us means that you can kind of modify parts of the system without having to affect the system as a whole. And this allows us to move very quickly in the space. The other thing that's important is that we started off what we believe is the right design philosophy. Around a pipeline infrastructure. People today talk about asynchronous execution in some of the networks like Solana or Monet out there. That's just one phase of a pipeline. But in Aptos, we decided to kind of intentionally create a, a long pipeline that would allow us to kind of operate each of these phases of pipeline in parallel, as well as allow these phases to kind of use our machine resources extremely effectively, whether it's one machine or multiple. And this is some, some very key design concept that has helped us to innovate faster than anybody else out there.

Is this the dynamic parallelism?

Dynamic parallelism is part of it, but the 5 kind of stages we have today are data dissemination. That's how transactions get into the system. And we have a very exciting protocol called QuorumStore that allows you to do this extremely efficiently and in parallel. We also have kind of our ordering phase, which is also known as consensus, in which we have the directly most optimal consensus protocol on the planet there. With 3 network hops to get agreement. Then we have the parallel execution phase. That's a dynamic parallelism phase that we can— we'd love to talk about in this, in this podcast. Then there is the kind of commit phase in which you agree on the state and finally kind of the writing to storage phase, which we do in parallel to reduce IOPS. And each of these phases have also subphases alongside them. But the important thing here is that they all operate in parallel. They're all running at the same time, and they allow you to leverage all the machine resources at once, which allows for a very efficient computation. Uh, that allows us to get very high throughput as well as extremely low latency in the system. Hmm.

Uh, this might be a really dumb question, so you can just tell me if it's not even the right question to be asking here, but what, what happens when one of those stages fails?

Right. So if one of the stages fails, let's say, um, which one would be the most likely? I'd suppose maybe, um, actually they're all pretty unlikely, but if consensus gets blocked, somehow there's a network partition, right? And the nodes can't get to agreement. There's something called back pressure in the system, which kind of slows things down. So if you think about like an assembly pipeline, you know, people are building cars, for example, and somebody is kind of assembling the wheels in one phase and putting the body together in another. What happens is we allow certain parts to keep going. So for instance, in data dissemination, keep submitting transactions to the system, but, and they keep getting kind of recorded on the blockchain, not on the blockchain, but on the nodes. But consensus is kind of backed up. Uh, that will happen for a period of time. Once consensus actually gets to agreement again, it will then agree on all the blocks that have been kind of backed up for some period of time. Mm-hmm. And so the system kind of then proceeds, uh, uh, forward without actually missing a beat because all those blocks that were kind of pre-stored are still gonna be committed very quickly in the consensus phase. It's sort of decoupled. Uh, so it's a very efficient, it's like, it's like a production line, but a production line where the production pieces don't directly depend on each other. You can kind of assemble multiple cars at once. and you can assemble lots and lots of cars at the same time, even if one phase is kind of backed up, if that makes sense.

Yeah, it does. Okay. The thing that I think most people maybe who aren't as technical might know Aptos for is Move, right? And maybe you could walk us through— and honestly, I need to refresh myself— like just how you think of Aptos versus the other Move chains, probably Sui is the main one. And then also, you know, there's— I was with the Initia folks the other day. We know, you know, Rushi was on here the other day, and my understanding is that a lot of them have built on Aptos' Move, which I'm not even fully sure what that even means at this point, just because I think a lot of these things are getting kind of intertwined. But just curious to hear, like, how you would lay out that architecture.

Yeah. So what people aren't kind of aware of too much is that while Move was invented at Facebook back in 2018, it was very primitive. It was kind of designed to support those basic use cases of money movement for the Libra network. And since then, we've taken Move and really improved it a lot. And there's a great team here led by Wolfgang who's been building out Move to support developer infrastructure and also support the Aptos blockchain very diligently and also with extremely great results. So what we found is that Move has been evolving into a place where it is usable by many different networks. And so you can see Move being adopted by Initia and Movement, both of these the Aptos version, as well as others like Rouge and Pontem. And I think there's other— I think you will see more of those in the future, which is great. I think it's really a testament to the fact that people can see the developer community loves building in Move. And we hear all the time from our developers that once you start building in Move, it's very, very hard to kind of go back to any other kind of interface into Web3. Compared to SuiMove, which is a different variant, SuiMove is kind of tailored towards, I think, the Sui infrastructure and ecosystem. And there are some things that have been removed, like no global storage, and there's things that need to be done to support kind of their their infrastructure design decisions around different, different paths of execution. For us, we— our job with Mu has been to provide the simplest developer experience out there. And so it supports MoveObjects, it supports the MoveProver. I think it's the— it's definitely the only variant that supports the MoveProver today in Aptos. The MoveProver, for those of you who don't know, is a very interesting formal verification system for certain types of specifications you might make into your coding language. And so, for those of you who code, there's always a way to write unit tests, regression tests, for how you think about your logic behaving correctly. But formal specifications and formal verification allow you to kind of test all the possible inputs and outputs into your code and verify that these variants are being upheld. And that's a really unique way of kind of ensuring the safety of your code that really isn't possible anywhere except for the kind of MoveOn AppTest framework. So, you know, for us, we've seen this evolution from early Facebook days to kind of us building Move. And now we actually have Move2, which is a new iteration on top of that with new programming language features, a lot of simplification around syntax, new enum types, closures, many, many cool things that people kind of have seen from other programming languages that have been successful. And then that adoption into their networks as you kind of See the developer excitement and interest in how you build and get from ideation to production quickly and safely as possible.

Avery, you're clearly a very intelligent and very amazing engineer. How do you think about building all of this stuff in an industry where narratives matter so much? I imagine it could be very frustrating sometimes being thrown in your position and a very good engineer and you're like, you know, 25, TPS, 1,000 TPS. And yeah, I, I won't even try to keep up with you on a lot of these engineering conversations, but how do you think about doing all of that? But then, you know, the, the— maybe the price of Aptos is not doing as well as the price of other things, or the adoption is not doing as well as other people, and you're like, guys, look at, look at how much good technology we've built. And like, yeah, just curious to hear how you think about that.

Yeah, I think it's, um, it is definitely— I think you're right that crypto is a very narrative-driven space. I think we'd all agree about that. You know, we love to be very data-driven, I think for us. And so whether it's the performance of our system or the fact that, you know, there, the metrics are out there that show, hey, Aptos is the second fastest growing ecosystem according to Luxor Capital. That's great for us to see. It kind of is a, is a good feather in our cap when we think about the impact that Move has had in the industry in particular. Or we look at the daily active addresses on Optimist or the monthly active addresses on Optimist and we see, look, this traction is real. We see it not just across one app, but there's like 5, 6 apps that are driving significant adoption in Web3, even for those that don't really understand they're even using Web3. So that's exciting because when we see people being able to leverage the Web3 infrastructure we've built, but not having to see like the pain points that we've seen on other networks, whether it's gonna be downtime, slowness, really bad user experience, they're using Web3, they don't know about it. So if you're using Facebook and you don't realize that using a MySQL DB backend, That's a win, I think, for our industry in general. And, you know, narratives matter with respect to kind of how the market thinks about it. But for us, we're really focused on getting that adoption. And I think the thing that's going to help us a lot in the narrative space is going to be showing like the ecosystem growth that we have really, really started to focus on going forward. And to your point earlier, what's the big differences? You know, early on we focused a lot on enterprises. I think that That was our huge path to adoption. I think we've had a lot of good wins in that space. I think 2025 is going to be us much more doubling down on the builders in this area, on the kind of the Web3 native companies that are starting up and spinning up that really want to take advantage and do novel things here and say like, well, you have this on-chain randomness, what can I do with that? Plus sub-second finality, plus kind of even private transactions, plus, you know, exciting trading infrastructure. Those are the folks we want to, we want to see coming to the ecosystem, building out extremely interesting novel products that are much more Web3 native going forward.

Do you think the early successes with the institutional and enterprise crowd actually hurt your ability to win favor with the crypto natives?

I think it, I don't think it hurt us. In fact, I, what we always hear from people in our space is that it excites them when they see like, oh wow, you know, BlackRock issuing a fund in Aptos. Frankenthaler is issuing a fund in Aptos. NBCUniversal is building on Aptos. Those things get the ecosystem really excited because they think, wow, liquidity is coming, users are coming, big industry that can also have distribution will be coming. It kind of enhances them and their ability to kind of build and gets them excited about the space. I think the thing that we need to double down on is really how do we support builders much more effectively? Because a lot of our energy has gone towards enterprises in the past. Now we need to spend a lot more energy towards the builders, make sure they got the white glove treatment all the way from how do we source teams, how do we start to make sure that we have a good alignment with them in terms of, you know, like, these are products that we both are excited about in the space. How do we support them from an engineering perspective, develop those resources to say like, hey, you want to build something really cool in the DeFi space and you really want us to have something like Aptos Intents out there. That can support turning the blockchain into a giant DEX, essentially, we can help you with that. That's something we can put on our side. You can definitely contribute towards, or you can build and we can support you. Those things, I think, are important. And then from it comes to how we think about grants at the foundation, being able to support them extremely quickly, fast turnarounds, and then even other support around introductions for VCs to get funding, as well as kind of use cases towards profitability over time. And we see several profitable projects in Aptos that always gets us really, really excited since they're self-sustaining. That flywheel of kind of incubation all the way to building very interesting products with product-market fit is something that we're really focused on now. And I think that's with that focus on the foundation with new people, new blood, new ideas, as well as new energy towards towards ecosystem development is really exciting to us.

Do you think any of these big enterprises— because it's easy to say, you know, I remember like Reddit moved on to, I think it was Polygon, and it was, you know, I don't know how many users, right? Reddit has hundreds of millions of users, right? Or however many they have. And then like, are all those people really opening a wallet? And like, are they, you know, so how do you think about the enterprise side of things?

I think that's where it's really important to dig into the product. And so to your question earlier, one of the biggest difference for me is I take a very strong interest in exactly the product integrations that we're going to have. You know, how do we make sure these integrations are not just superficial? They are either a mission-critical function or they're moving towards a mission-critical function. I want to be in that direct pathway of like, if you're, I don't know, if you're reading a newspaper, for example, or a newspaper article and you have to pay for that article upfront, before you can read it and the transaction has to be done on the blockchain. I want our blockchain to be there and I want it to be in the critical path so that, you know, if this doesn't work well, it actually is a really bad user experience. And so that I think is like something that I think is really important to work on with each of the partners and understand like what is your intentions here? Is this something that's more of a toy or is this something that's, you know, critical part of your product success? And I hope it's, you know, for the most part it's the latter or it's a path to the latter. That gets me really excited.

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Okay.

All right. Going back to maybe what are we calling it, Aptos 2.0 or The new, the new vision, I think it is. Or you can—

yeah, Aptos 2.0 is not a bad one. Yeah.

Um, what is tactically— let's say you've been like, I don't know, in and around the ecosystem for a little while and you've been following for Aptos for a while. What is tactically going to happen in the next 90 days that will be different than what, you know, maybe Aptos 1.0 looked like?

Yeah, I think we've already started executing that, so I can kind of tell you. Yeah. Um, so I think that one of the first pieces was really combining forces of all the ecosystem team at the foundation. That's happening right now with new leadership in place with Ash and team coming together. We have a lot of new hires happening at the Optimus Foundation right now as well. The other thing is a focus on regional growth and regional growth has done really well in places like India. So we've got a small team in India, I think with 2 people in the foundation who are, who have just been crushing it, uh, there are more than 40 developer teams in the region, more than 500, uh, developers in India. And I think about 7 of our top applications by daily active addresses are out of India as well. That's with just 2 people that were able to do that. And I think a lot of their success was predicated on just being strong understanding of the culture, uh, strong knowledge of, of, uh, of the space as well as the people in that area. And kind of being able to bring people across the country together in a way that was very collaborative, where these teams help each other, they're supportive, they're even having a place for developers to meet and kind of even form teams. That's been extremely successful. And so this regional focus is now being expanded to other places worldwide. Recently we announced Movemaker, which is a, a group of, I think, you know, 4 to 6 people who have experience in VC, who have built teams in the past, who can kind of support those teams in their entire lifecycle from kind of getting to a mini launch to VC funding and beyond, operating independently in most part. And this kind of regional focus happening in both India Chinese-speaking regions of the world, uh, to, to Korea and Japan, as well as, um, places like Vietnam and those, and the US. Now that the administration is very supportive, um, having that regional focus is something that I think is going to really change the way we think about ecosystem development going forward.

Where do you think the adoption will come from for Aptos in this year? Is it mainly US or is it mainly international?

So I think a lot of, um, it's hard to say. I think it depends a lot on the administration and how fast we can change, um, the way that people think about US citizens interacting with blockchain. Today, of course, a lot of the users are international. I think that, yeah, so we'll see kind of on how administration changes affect those, the US users. But definitely for international side, we still see Asia as a big focus of growth for us, as well as the Middle East. Middle East is definitely moving, especially in government efforts. Are moving quickly to explore significant use cases in the space. So, yeah, Asia continues to be a focus for us. We're excited to engage in the regions we haven't engaged deeply before, like China, and then double down on ecosystem building in places like Vietnam and Korea that we have not done in the past. So, I'm very, very excited to see a lot of the early cohorts of developers that are coming out. They have very innovative ideas, and I think ones that really take advantage of the strengths of Aptos, whether it's the scale, the speed, or the cost, or all three, or some unique features, whether it's randomness or the things that we provide. So I expect a massive ecosystem boom in 2025.

Have you ever thought about, if you look at the, have you ever thought about becoming more of a platform than just a chain? And the, maybe a better way to phrase that question is, if you look at a lot of the ETH L2s, whether it's, you know, Optimism or Polygon with the AggLayer, Optimism with the Superchain, ZK Sync, you know, a lot of them have basically turned into platforms to go build your own chain. How do you, what do you think about that strategy? And have you ever thought about, have you ever thought about that as it's clear more and more people want to use the Aptos tech to go build their own chains?

It is something that we have thought about in the past. I mean, just for context, We're really proud that we built great tech and we're really proud that when people started to use it. So I think Blockcast TM is used by at least 5 or 6 other chains, including StarkNet, Polygon, Flow. We've seen that the, yeah, MoveOn Aptos that we mentioned before used by 4 or 5 other chains as well. We've seen our consensus protocol, variants of it being used by other networks. And that all just makes us happy because in general, we want to see the industry adopt better technology. To your point though, like in terms of Aptos being more of like this platform for others to launch their own networks, it's something we've considered, but I think the thing that always kind of gives us pause is, well, why would you need to do that? Like Aptos is extremely scalable. There's no need for other, like in many of these cases, the reason why you have L2s is because ETH can't scale to certain use cases. And so having L2 for use case makes some sense. But every time you do that, you break composability and that sucks, right? So from user perspective, if I'm operating L2 and now I've got assets on another L2, I've gotta bridge these assets, I've got to, you know, deal with other logins. It's just, it's not really like a pleasant experience for, for any of us, right?

Yeah.

And so that, that's something that isn't good. And then when you think about composability, The, one of the biggest advantages of what Web3 can do is having applications work alongside each other in a way where they don't even need to ask for permission, right? So if you have, you know, an asset that you want to borrow against and then take those proceeds and like, you know, put them into some kind of other incentive pool, you can do that with like a single transaction in a single network on shared state. Without asking for anyone's permission. If you have to cross bridges and go to different L2s, that's just not possible. And you kind of isolate users into their own spaces and then make them pay the cost of kind of moving things around and take the risk of moving things around too, as we see all the bridges and hacks that have happened in the past. So our goal has always been to like, how do we kind of get everybody together into one shared state? Uh, where people can kind of build these unique interactions, uh, and, and compose things that just, that really take advantage of the value. Like the value of blockchain is interoperability. It is, um, the ability for us to trustlessly interact with each other and separating onto different networks breaks all that stuff.

Yeah.

So we really prefer to have everyone together in one place. Yeah.

What are your thoughts on Solana? Um, both like what they got right. In your mind and what you think they either have gotten wrong or will, it will be clear that they have gotten wrong in the future.

Yeah, I think Solana was kind of the first in the high-performance blockchain space. And so of course, kudos to them for being the first there. They've done a lot of great jobs, like building out the ecosystem in particular and adopting like the, adopting and even taking lead on the trends in the Web3 space, whether it's meme coins, or NFTs or other things. And so they've done a great job with that out there. I think from a technology perspective, I think Aptos is just kind of superior to that design. We've had a lot of discussions on Twitter about it. Some of the things that are difficult, like for instance, not having a mempool and having a leader that can get DDoSed because it's holding a, you know, 4 consecutive blocks for like 1.6 seconds. is not the right design for infrastructure that needs to scale and support kind of mission-critical use cases. Um, and the, the idea of moving asynchronous execution, I think is a good one for them. Um, but it's still not kind of, uh, getting to the full-fledged, like pipeline design we talked about, like having 5+ stages, allowing those stages to work independently. Um, and I think, I think Mu is just a, a better language to program than kind of the, the variant of, of Rust they have on Solana. Just in general, this is nothing about Solana in particular, but having a programming language that's custom built for Web3, as opposed to taking an existing language and adopting it, is just going to provide a much safer experience. It's actually as familiar, like, you know, if you've programmed Rust in the past, you might be a bit more comfortable. Or if you program with Python, for example, you might be more comfortable programming Python for Web3 use cases. But it's just very hard to adapt a language that was never designed for this kind of a high assurance and safety to be in that direction, right? The idea when you write Python code or Rust code is just, you know, you write it, you have a bug, you go and fix it. That doesn't work for a smart contract that is custodying billions of dollars. There has to be a different way and a different approach in which you take towards that, different protections put in place. And programming language can't just— you can't think about programming in the same way.

In your view of the future, will all value accrue maybe accrue is the wrong word, but will all of— will we live in a multi-chain world? Is all of this going to happen on— will all the value happen on Aptos? Will we have, you know, hundreds of chains where every company, or, you know, maybe millions of chains where every company has their own chain? Will we have 3 big chains? What is your view of the future?

My view of the future— well, my preferred view of the future is that we have as few chains as possible.

So you don't like this idea of, you know, every institution's launching their own L2? Like, you don't think that makes sense?

I don't, I mean, I think again, going back to my points on composability and interoperability, like every time you add an L2, that's just, it's not great. And, you know, bridges keep getting better. That's great. But the reality is it's still user friction when it comes to how do we think about moving assets around from place A to place B. What I do think will happen over time, and this is a bit farther into the future, is that you can see a chain like Aptos, while today we're in one shared state, there may be multiple shared states, uh, within a chain like Aptos, but there will be very, very, uh, custom kind of protocols to move from state to state that'll exist within a network. That is, I think, the way that it'll, they'll get to, like, so once you kind of hit the, what's reasonable within a shared state, I don't know, maybe 10 million TPS, uh, and you want to go across that, then maybe another shared state pops up in Aptos. And now you have these shared states that can communicate very quickly within the same network because there's a bespoke network protocol that allows you to do that, as opposed to having kind of just like, you know, 100 different chains connected through bespoke bridges that all have to deal with the different nuances of these chains being extremely different. That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. There'll be much fewer with standards that are much more interoperable and Ideally, the setup is that, you know, these cross-chart or cross-state interactions are extremely fast, extremely cheap, and they can only do that because they're kind of within a single network, like an Aptos network out there.

How do we go from the world that we're in today where it feels like, you know, there's a new chain every day, we've got big announcements, you know, there's all these new chains launching like Monad and MegaETH and Barachain and Stori and Abstract, and there's I mean, the list goes on, right? There's dozens of these things it feels like coming every quarter. How do we go from this world to the world of your vision?

I think, uh, that's where it comes down to like these mission-critical applications coming on-chain. Like today, there aren't a lot of mission-critical applications on-chain. There are very few, right? Most of these are using them in the backend or using them for kind of some, some smaller things. Uh, when you see those large apps that get massive traction and massive adoption, worldwide that have mission-critical use cases. Like, you know, YouTube was built on Aptos, for example, and relied on the Aptos infrastructure as a part of its critical path. I think those are, you know, when you see those $10 billion, $50 billion businesses built there, they'll be forced to kind of stop this, uh, chain expansion.

Yeah. How do you find, uh, what, how do you, uh, how do you find it is to recruit developers and engineers? Especially from the big Web2 companies right now, in context of not only there's a bunch of other chains who want that talent, but actually there's all this, you know, AI is probably the hottest industry in the world right now. How do you think about it in that light?

I definitely think it's tough because a lot of the folks that might be in the compiler and VM space are the folks that we would love to get to work on Move, for example. I think it comes down to mission again, like, you know, what do you want to do? And I think the AI space is very interesting. For context, I used to work in that space as well to some degree. I worked on things like k-means clustering as well as clever filtering and machine learning back at Meta. So it's not like those spaces are not interesting. There's definitely a lot going on there. And especially seeing the product cycle move very quickly with ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and others is is exciting to watch and follow. That being said, you know, these industries are also becoming somewhat saturated, right? And falling to kind of, there are very few that have the resources to be successful. And the resources, I don't mean just in terms of the kind of funding, but also the data, the data piece. Data is probably the most important component when it comes to AI. And so there are a very small number of organizations that have access to that data. out there. So if you're not at those organizations, it's— or have access to that data through agreements and partnerships, it's kind of very hard to, to, to do a good job no matter how good your, your model is and how good your, your, your inference is.

Yeah.

So, uh, I think for us, you know, and maybe a couple years ago might have been tougher, uh, as it's starting to pick up, I think these days the playing field is leveled a little bit in terms of like, you know, the opportunities are not Maybe as great as they used to be. The other thing that people don't know about AI is that, you know, everyone kind of claims to work in AI, but very few work on the actual algorithms. Most people are going to work on the things around AI, and it looks a lot more like traditional infrastructure at that point. Like how do you run scheduling services? You have a storage service for AI, but it's just kind of a storage service. And so, you know, blockchain isn't like that, right? When you work in blockchain space, you're working on a lot of the critical things for blockchain infrastructure, whether it's going to be the APIs for blockchain, access, or it's gonna be kind of products to support blockchain or the blockchain itself, or the language piece, you're working directly on the technology that makes it possible to do all this stuff, as opposed to more generic infrastructure. And so it's actually, I think, not that bad these days because of the fact that, you know, the, the kind of fun parts of AI are getting a little bit saturated.

Yeah. What do you think is the most misunderstood thing about Aptos?

I think the thing that's probably misunderstood the most is just how much technical innovation has happened in the Aptos space. And that's unfortunately in part due to myself and to ourselves. We spend a lot of time building. We spend a lot of time building innovations and doing things that we are excited about. As I mentioned, we just published Charlene's work today. We published a Zapdos which is kind of a new way to think about taking the pipeline infrastructure and shrinking it down to the fastest possible latency I think ever experienced. But we probably don't, we aren't good at really kind of repeating the message and making sure people understand what's going on out there. The devs in our space know very well, like, wow, the things you can do at Atlas, you can't do anywhere else. A lot of the enterprise partners we both also know the same thing. But In terms of making sure the message gets out to a wider community, I think we need to do a better job of explaining like, you know, these things that are very highly technical actually have a very big impact on your experience using the blockchain. Hmm. Hmm.

Will you, do you show that by like hiring more marketers or by like slamming a one sentence message over and over again on Twitter? Or do you by just getting more builders to talk about it, like finding some, some Mertz of the end? I don't know. Like how do you do that?

I think it's all those things you mentioned. I think it's all those things. I mean, the thing that I love the most is when a product team uses that and just is like, it's working really well. Like, that's the best way, right? Like, so if you're building out a Perp DEX like Merkle Trade and you can show you've got the fastest finality times in the industry, I mean, that's always a great thing to do. Or if you're building out like a new micro streaming, micro payments product and that now you've done something that can only exist on Aptos, that's amazing. I think The work that was done to kind of get that 326 million transactions in a day was leveraging a feature of Aptos, uh, called aggregators, which allows you to do voting extremely fast. So what it's doing is it's pounding the shared state, like adding these counters together and seeing like how many votes have been in the network so far and just continually increasing this one counter, which is being contended on because everyone's touching the same counter. Um, that's not possible anywhere else in, in, in the blockchain space. And so the more we can do like show rather than tell, of course we got to tell too, is great. And to your point, all the things you mentioned are definitely helpful as well, but it's a combination of these things that we need to do much better at.

Yeah. If someone hasn't played around in Aptos, what wallet should they use? And then what are some apps that they should go play with right now?

Yeah, so I would say definitely pick up Petra. There's a mobile app, which is really nice. I would say, you know, Emoji Coin will be very fun, fun thing to play with. It's a meme coin platform that allows you to buy emojis and join different community communities. Its interface is super slick. I would encourage them to play the DeFi ecosystem, you know, whether it's borrowing protocols or play with some of the DEXs, play with Panora for swaps. There's also a really great gaming companies like KGEN and STAN that have really fun products to engage with. There's a lot to do. So once you actually get into Petro, there's a list of ecosystem kind of applications you can join. I'd say definitely go through those and have fun and explore what you can do within Aptos and just transact a bit, see for yourself the fees, the speed, If you want to build scale, you know, try to, try to do that as well. Build an app, launch on mainnet, generate tons of scale, see how it doesn't really affect other applications in the system and how you can, you can get very, very good throughput for, for any application. There's a lot to do. Yeah. Awesome.

And Avery, appreciate the time. Congrats on the new role. I think a lot of folks are rooting for you guys and rooting for you. So yeah, best of luck.

Thanks, Jenna. Appreciate you.