Exclusive Interview with Aptos Founding Engineer Sherry: The Technical Journey of Meta Blockchain "OG" in Building a "Global Trading Engine"

Interview: Tong, PANews

Editor: Yuliya, PANews

In the context of increasingly fierce competition in public chains, Aptos is steadily moving towards its strategic positioning as a “global trading engine” through technological innovation and ecological expansion. Since its total locked value (TVL) first broke 1 billion USD last November, Aptos reached 1.03 billion USD by the end of March. In addition, the market value of stablecoins also first surpassed 1 billion USD on March 24, a year-on-year increase of more than ten times, demonstrating strong ecological attractiveness and funding capacity.

In this context, Aptos has not only achieved continuous iteration on the technical level but has also made multiple breakthroughs in ecological construction: Aave has completed its first non-EVM environment testnet deployment, and DeFi activity has significantly increased. To meet the rapidly growing transaction demand, the Aptos team continues to promote technical solutions such as Zaptos and Shardines, accelerating the construction of an underlying architecture that supports millions of TPS, strengthening its core advantages in performance, stability, and user experience.

In this trend, PANews had an in-depth conversation with Sherry Xiao, an early founding engineer of Aptos, discussing key topics such as the technical architecture of global trading engines, ecological expansion strategies, and developer support, to gain insights into how Aptos stands out in the new round of public chain competition with a technology-driven approach and an ecosystem as its wings.

Meta “OG” built a high-performance Blockchain.

PANews: Please introduce your background and your role at Aptos.

Sherry: I am Sherry Xiao, one of the early founding engineers of Aptos. Before joining Aptos, I worked as an engineer at Instagram, mainly focusing on scalability architecture. Later, I joined the Libra/Diem team at Meta (formerly Facebook), where I was responsible for validator nodes and infrastructure construction, helping organizations like Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and eBay deploy validator nodes.

When the Libra project faced policy obstacles, our entire team followed the leadership to start a business in 2022 and established Aptos. In fact, many talents have emerged from Facebook’s Blockchain team; some joined Sui, some joined a16z’s crypto team, and others created other startups, such as Lightspark founded by David Marcus. It can be said that Facebook has provided a large number of talents for the Web3 industry.

PANews: As an engineer, how do you evaluate the advantages of the Move language compared to other smart contract languages?

Sherry: For people with an engineering background, switching languages is a common occurrence. The Move language is developed based on Rust, and its biggest advantage is that it was designed from the ground up as a language for smart contracts, providing many assurances in asset management and security, along with formal verification tools.

Compared to Solidity and EVM, Move can effectively avoid many common security vulnerabilities and reduce the risk of financial loss. Among them, the Move prover tool also enables developers to verify the correctness of smart contracts written in the Move programming language. In addition, Move offers innovative features such as dynamic dispatch, account abstraction, and permissioned signatures, allowing developers to build more advanced products.

For developers who understand programming languages and data structures, learning Move is not as difficult as it seems, because the basic principles of programming are interconnected.

PANews: What are the bottlenecks that still need to be iterated upon in the current technological infrastructure?

Sherry: Overall, I believe there is still significant room for improvement in the developer experience and user experience of Web3. Taking Aptos as an example, the infrastructure is already quite mature, with its throughput, speed, and Gas fees having been reduced to a very low level, but how to provide unique features on-chain that allow developers to create standout products remains a major challenge.

We are deeply exploring ZK-based login solutions and innovations in privacy protection. This is important because user privacy is a significant consideration for achieving large-scale payments. Recently, we launched a project in the open-source code repository that can hide transaction details, allowing users to know that a transaction occurred between Alice and Bob, but not see the specific amount and balance. This technology combines privacy protection with the decentralized characteristics of Blockchain, enabling the creation of interesting products.

PANews: Aptos focuses on high-performance Blockchain. What unique advantages does it have in terms of scalability compared to other public chains?

Sherry: Scalability is our core advantage. As a team of engineers from Facebook, we have extensive experience in building highly scalable systems and have been responsible for large-scale infrastructures like Instagram and Facebook.

The design of Aptos is very modular, with each module having its own expansion space:

• At the consensus level, our latest release Raptr is the industry’s most advanced consensus algorithm implementation, pushing parallelization to the extreme;
• At the execution level, our Block-STM technology is also industry-leading, with many newly released public chains and L2 adopting this technology, such as Movement, Monad, Polygon, etc.;
• In terms of storage, we have implemented sharding technology and will continue to research sharding technology and related caching layers in the future to further enhance system performance.

These technologies are open source, and the community is welcome to use Aptos’s technology. However, even if other chains copy our technology, there will be delays. For example, while they are still using Block-STM V1, we are already working on V2; by the time they catch up, we have already released performance optimizations for Move 2.0. Therefore, developing directly on Aptos is a wiser choice.

Ecological Layout: Stablecoins, Trading and DeFi

PANews: The performance of data on the Aptos Blockchain is impressive, with the number of accounts surpassing 47 million and weekly transaction volume exceeding 39 million. What are the aspects contributing to this progress?

Sherry: Our ecological layout mainly focuses on several aspects:

First is infrastructure construction, we have natively supported the three major stablecoins USDT, USDC, and USDE. Users generally feedback that transferring on Aptos is very smooth, and on-chain peer-to-peer payments have become one of our major advantages.

Secondly, we have collaborated with institutions such as Franklin Templeton to launch multiple RWA projects on the blockchain.

At the beginning of this year, we announced a 2 million USD ecological fund to incentivize community building and support various DeFi protocols and projects. This has also promoted the growth of DEX trading volume and on-chain activity.

In addition, we have launched the LFM program to assist ecological projects in planning their roadmaps, conducting token generation events (TGE), connecting with exchange resources, obtaining venture capital, and providing marketing and KOL guidance. These efforts have enabled our ecosystem to achieve stable growth over the past period.

PANews: Is the news about the issuance of the Hong Kong stablecoin HKDA on Aptos true? What plans are there for compliant development in Hong Kong?

Sherry: Aptos is the only L1 Blockchain platform participating in the Hong Kong e-HKD project, and we have been actively involved in relevant discussions. We maintain close communication with banks and government departments in Hong Kong, and BCG is also our partner.

We have many innovative collaborations with Hong Kong Cyberport, and our official community organization Movemaker just held a hackathon event at Cyberport a few weeks ago, hoping to nurture local projects.

Although we do not have a large office in Hong Kong, we have established the co-creation space Aptos Space in a prime location through Movemaker, providing a place for builders to collaborate and meet, and actively holding offline events to attract Web3 talent. We place great importance on the activity of the developer ecosystem in the Asia-Pacific region, as many high-quality ecosystem projects come from Chinese-speaking areas. Our layout in the Asia-Pacific region will become increasingly in-depth, investing more resources and continuing to achieve more collaborations in this area to encourage better development teams to join our ecosystem.

PANews: In the current market environment, which sectors will Aptos focus on supporting in its ecosystem projects?

Sherry: From our recently launched global trading engine, it can be seen that the trading-related track is a direction we value highly. We focus on payment, the expansion of stablecoin application scenarios, and the DeFi track, especially on developing leading projects in the “DeFi three-piece set” (DEX, lending, liquidity staking).

We also hope to collaborate deeply with large institutions and partners with distribution channels. Aptos has a clear advantage in transfers - low latency and low cost, making it very suitable for large-scale payment operations. We are also paying attention to the integration of gaming and DeFi, as well as the application scenarios of AI agents and trading.

PANews: Aptos recently announced the creation of a global trading engine. How will this vision be realized?

Sherry: In the past few years, we have been deploying the infrastructure for a global trading engine. We believe that the infrastructure of Blockchain has been addressed quite well, and we are now focusing on innovations at the user experience level:

• For example, Keyless is a technology based on zk that allows users to log in directly using their Google, Facebook, or Apple accounts, solving the pain points of private key management and mnemonic phrase memory.
• We have implemented account abstraction(account abstraction) and permission sign(permission sign) functionalities, allowing DeFi developers to better control user authentication and entry processes;
• In Move language, we have added features such as dynamic script ( dynamic script ) and dynamic dispatch ) to help DeFi or trading applications achieve functional innovation.

These technical points come together to form our vision: to build a global trading engine and invite developers to create innovative applications using this infrastructure.

Talent Development: Developer Ecosystem Construction and University Cooperation

PANews: How does Aptos attract and retain developers in the context of AI becoming a hot direction?

Sherry: There will indeed be developers attracted by popular fields, but each application scenario has its own developer base. Even amidst the AI boom, there are still many developers interested in cryptography(, decentralization, and Blockchain, features that AI cannot fulfill.

For developers, the most important thing is to see the possibilities of the future, rather than just short-term speculation. Developers all have dreams and hope to create products that can be widely used. As long as we can show them the market prospects, demand, and opportunities, we can attract developers to continue their efforts in the Blockchain field.

PANews: What measures does Aptos take in talent cultivation in universities?

Sherry: We attach great importance to talent development in higher education. As a team with backgrounds as engineers at Facebook, we understand that universities are the largest talent pool. We have in-depth collaborations with the Blockchain Associations at Stanford University and UC Berkeley, and we also have partnership projects with SMU in Singapore and Tsinghua University in China.

We collaborate with professors to design Blockchain courses, allowing students to learn Aptos technology directly, using Aptos as the first lesson in entering Blockchain. Most of our company’s engineers hold PhDs and often give lectures at universities like MIT and UC, attracting outstanding developers to join the community.

Recently, at the hackathon held in Hong Kong, teams from the Blockchain Associations of Zhejiang University and Tsinghua University showcased outstanding projects, and we look forward to their future growth.

PANews: What are your personal expectations for the future development of Web3?

Sherry: My personal vision and that of the entire team still focuses on the trading and payment sectors. Since the Libra project, we have hoped to establish a global financial infrastructure that allows more people to enjoy the conveniences of the modern financial system.

I am particularly looking forward to seeing innovative payment projects combined with stablecoins. For example, salary streaming payments can be fully realized on Aptos—working every second, getting paid every second, which is something traditional financial institutions cannot achieve.

Migrating traditional payment software to the blockchain and combining it with privacy protection features can create exciting new scenarios. These innovative applications are the key to truly promoting the widespread adoption of Blockchain technology.

PANews: What impact will the recent changes in the senior management team have on Aptos?

Sherry: Personnel changes are quite normal for many teams. For the team, this is actually a good opportunity to re-examine past plans and make adjustments. Previously, we had been focused on our work, and such changes allow us to unite and think about the future direction of our layout.