Former Meta employees and the key players behind the firm's defunct stablecoin project, Diem, have raised $200 million to expand a new project dubbed "Aptos."
Aptos was co-founded by former Novi, Meta's crypto unit, strategic partnerships lead Mo Shaikh, and tech leader Avery Ching. The duo now serve as CEO and CTO of the new company. Both left the company in December, before Diem was sold to Silvergate Capital in February of this year.
The team is building a decentralized layer 1 blockchain that is based in part on Move, the coding language initially developed for Diem. The company is now in the process of growing its developer ecosystem and attracting projects to the blockchain, which it touts will be a cheap, secure and scalable network.
According to a March 16 announcement, Aptos' $200 million strategic funding round was led by venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), along with backing from leading firms like Three Arrows Capital, FTX Ventures, Paxos, and Coinbase Ventures.
The funds will be used to hire new staff and to support โcompanies, brands, and buildersโ looking to develop projects on the Aptos blockchain, with the startup suggesting that several DeFi, NFT, Web3, social media, and payment projects already they are running. the jobs.
Speaking with TechCrunch, Aptos declined to reveal a specific valuation but suggested it's "in unicorn territory" at around $1 billion.
Along with the funding announcement, Aptos also launched a public development network with an open source code base. The team told the publication that big names like Anchorage, Binance, and Coinbase have been providing guidance and contributing code to the development network. The ad said:
โLater in Q2, there will be an incentivized testnet to help scale the network and perform stress tests as it moves towards the mainnet. We invite validators and other infrastructure providers to join our community now in anticipation of that."
Aptos expects the Mainnet to launch in the third quarter of this year, giving developers about six months to build projects before the network is available to the public.
Related: Vale Diem: How Facebook's ambitious stablecoin project came to an end
In a blog post late last month, Aptos emphasized that its blockchain approach is based on "absolute security, extensible scalability, and credible neutrality," while being able to work on your ideas without intense scrutiny from regulators as in the case of Diem:
โSince leaving Meta (formerly Facebook) we have been able to get our ideas off the ground, cut through the bureaucracy and build an entirely new network from scratch that brings them to fruition.โ
โAptos is using Move, the secure and reliable language originally developed for Diem. The ideas we conceived then are still relevant and will serve as an important foundation for a secure, scalable and updatable Web3. Our plans for decentralization and permissionless access are progressing rapidly and will be developed openly," the post added.
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