The 8 Innovative Drivers of the Aptos Network

Aptos, as a low-latency and high-throughput blockchain network, has brought significant changes to developers building Web3 applications. This article will introduce the 8 major innovative forces driving the flourishing development of the Aptos network.

1. Move Language: More Suitable for Building Applications

Aptos uses the Move programming language, providing developers with a better development environment and improving development efficiency. Move is an expressive and easy-to-use language designed for secure asset management.

Aptos shares many core design concepts with Move, making it an efficient and enjoyable platform for Move development. Move was originally designed for Aptos's predecessor, and this lineage ensures that existing Move developers can seamlessly transition to Aptos, while newcomers can also benefit from previous documentation and examples.

Aptos has added multiple features at the language and framework level, greatly improving the Move ecosystem, including a comprehensive security architecture, configurable gas metering, code upgradeability, and more. Move validators provide additional security guarantees for smart contracts and are actively expanded in Aptos.

Many early researchers and developers of the Move language are still active in the Aptos ecosystem, continuously enhancing the Move language and community. After four years of testing and practice, Move has proven to be a mature language suitable for production environments.

2. Block-STM: Bringing More Programming Freedom

Block-STM is a new type of smart contract parallel execution engine built on the principles of transaction memory and optimistic concurrency control of Aptos. This innovative method of transaction parallelization can speed up transaction processing without affecting the development experience.

Unlike parallel execution engines that require read and write data to break transaction atomicity, Block-STM allows developers to code without restrictions, achieving higher throughput and lower latency for real-world applications. Developers can easily build highly parallelized applications that support richer atomicity than other parallel environments that require operation splitting, thereby enhancing user experience.

3. On-chain Governance and Decentralization

To support truly decentralized and permissionless Layer 1, Aptos has built-in on-chain governance mechanisms that enable seamless network and virtual machine configuration updates. This has been proven on Aptos's testnet and mainnet.

On the mainnet, the network reliability has been enhanced by reducing the "voting power increase limit". Over 52% of token holders voted in favor of this proposal to help protect the network.

Since its inception, the Aptos community has been able to create and vote on proposals that influence blockchain behavior. Governance proposals include: modifying epoch duration, adjusting validator stake requirements, software upgrades, and improving Aptos framework modules, among others.

4. AptosBFTv4: Efficient Consensus

AptosBFTv4 is the first production-level blockchain BFT protocol with a strict correctness proof. This protocol employs an optimistic response strategy to achieve low latency and high throughput, making full use of the underlying network. Building upon Hotstuff, AptosBFTv4 reduces the commit latency from 3 steps to 2 steps, decreasing latency by 33% without sacrificing communication complexity.

The implementation considers security rigor and upgradability, clearly separating invariants for isolation and auditing, and enforcing the no-fork principle. The same software stack has undergone 4 upgrades and has been tested on a live network, proving the thoroughness and robustness of its development process.

Even if individual nodes go down, Aptos can ensure the normal operation of the entire network. This is thanks to the on-chain reputation system, which uses past availability and performance as indicators for the future, automatically minimizing the negative impact of poorly performing validators.

5. Security Mechanisms to Enhance User Confidence

Aptos accounts support flexible key management, including key rotation, encryption agility, and a hybrid custody model. Key rotation is crucial for preventing remote attacks. The decoupling of accounts and keys allows Aptos to seamlessly add new digital signature algorithms. The hybrid custody model supports advanced recovery schemes and account management, helping to bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3.

Wallets can use transaction pre-execution to explain transaction results before the user signs, reducing security risks such as phishing. Aptos restricts the feasibility of transactions through a triple protection mechanism of serial number, expiration time, and chain ID, preventing the risks associated with unlimited validity.

Aptos' consensus protocol and certified storage implement seamless support for light clients, providing a more secure and trustworthy user experience. The network welcomes anyone to connect to full nodes for direct access to certified data. Aptos is built on an efficient multicast tree structure, offering participants high throughput and low latency. Participants can process the entire transaction history or only synchronize the latest state. Light clients can synchronize partial states, enabling verified state reads.

6. Future-oriented Modular Architecture

Aptos has a history of being upgradeable, designed with modularity and flexibility in mind from the very beginning. This allows the Aptos architecture to support frequent upgrades, quickly adopt the latest technological advancements, and accommodate emerging use cases.

Modular design creates client flexibility and optimizes frequent upgrades with zero downtime. These features have been validated in previous mainnet iterations, testnets, and internal stress tests. Aptos has a built-in on-chain change management protocol that enables rapid deployment of innovations and supports new Web3 application scenarios.

7. Proposal-Based Reward System

Aptos has implemented a proposal performance-based staking reward system to promote greater decentralization. This system has a higher timeout than the voting-based reward model and is less sensitive to inter-region delays.

This increases the reward rate for nodes in remote areas and mitigates the impact of geographical distribution. The reward model still takes voting behavior into account, as good voting performance affects the election probability of proposers. This design helps achieve a more balanced network distribution.

8. High-Performance Sparse Merkle Tree

Aptos uses the Jellyfish Merkle Tree (JMT) design, optimizing the underlying storage engine with a monotonically increasing version-based key pattern. JMT achieves a practical balance between CPU, I/O, and storage usage, ensuring satisfactory performance.

Apart from JMT, Aptos also has an in-memory, lock-free sparse Merkle tree implementation, designed specifically for caching and parallelization, working in conjunction with Block-STM to achieve high-performance global state updates.

These innovations provide a strong technical foundation for Aptos, making it an ideal platform for building the next generation of Web3 applications.