Expanding the Aptos Community

Welcoming Strategic Investors and Opening Up Devnet to Companies, Projects and Builders Everywhere

By: Mo Shaikh

Building a network is a heavy lift, but we’re not alone.

Over the past few months we have assembled an outstanding team, each with their own strengths and expertise, to help us aggressively grow the network and bring it to billions of people around the world this year.

As part of that, today, we’re excited to announce that Aptos has raised $200 million in a strategic round led by a16z crypto with participation from Multicoin Capital, Katie Haun, 3 Arrows Capital, ParaFi Capital, IRONGREY, Hashed, Variant, Tiger Global, BlockTower, FTX Ventures, Paxos and Coinbase Ventures, as well as a great supporting cast of other phenomenal firms, executives and angels across the Web2 and Web3 ecosystems. We will need these partners and this capital to continue growing our team (already 25+ people!) and to support the companies, brands and builders who are eager to build on Aptos.

In addition to the funding, we’re also taking a major step forward today with the launch of Aptos’ public Devnet! The codebase is now open source. The network is up. Docs are live. My co-founder, Avery, also published a great post today outlining the key features of the network, including Move, the Aptos programming language, and how to leverage both of them to build safe and reliable, world-class applications.

Aptos is for people who want to build software that touches billions of other people. Over the past months we’ve talked with hundreds of developers, brands, and companies about their projects; there’s a lot to be excited about. They’re building next-gen social media platforms, rich NFT experiences, Web3 games, creator-first media and entertainment businesses, cheap and secure payments, DeFi-integrated fintech products, and so much more. There are great companies like Anchorage, Binance, Blockorus, Coinbase, Livepeer, Moonclave, Paxos, Paymagic, Rarible and Streaming Fast in our community already giving feedback, and contributing code on Devnet. In addition to building out important tooling and strengthening the network, we plan to use our funding to support these groups as they journey through Web3 and help bring safer, fairer technology to the people they serve.

You don’t need to be a big brand or company to build on Aptos: it’s open infrastructure for the world. As I wrote in my first post, Aptos will only succeed if it is collectively used, owned and maintained by everyone. To that end, I invite you to join us in building.

So what’s next?

Aptos Devnet is live today. Jump in, contribute, provide feedback, help us make it better.

Later in Q2, there will be an incentivized testnet to help scale the network and stress test it as it marches toward mainnet. We invite validators and other infrastructure providers to join our community now in anticipation of that.

We expect Mainnet to occur in Q3 2022. That means if you plan to build a production-grade application on Aptos, you have roughly six months to build prior to revealing your creations to the world.

Last but not least, we’d like to give a huge shoutout to our team, community members and partners who have been spending the past few months (and years!) making Aptos a reality. We look forward to what’s ahead and welcome anyone who wants to be a part of building Aptos to join here.