While Meta’s Diem project has been abandoned, the founding team intends to bring its research to fruition. Independently of the web giant, it has developed a brand new layer 1 blockchain called Aptos and has successfully raised $200 million in funding.
Diem’s founding team launches its blockchain independently
First there was Libra, Meta’s (Facebook’s at the time) stablecoin project, which catalyzed the wrath of regulators more than two years ago. So much so that this hypothetical stablecoin was later renamed Diem, only to have to be indexed to the dollar, which was not originally planned. In the end, everything was abandoned by Meta earlier this year and the company sold the project assets to Silvergate Capital.
We thought we were done, but now we hear that former Diem team members are back at it again and this time it’s not about stablecoin, but a layer 1 blockchain.
This new ecosystem is called Aptos, and its ambition, like many layer 1s before it, is to make blockchain technologies accessible and usable by as many people as possible. Mo Shaikh, the CEO and co-founder of the project, says: “
” We’re not going to be the only ones to use blockchain.
We are not starting from scratch. We are the original creators, researchers, designers and builders of Diem, the blockchain that was originally designed to serve this purpose. Although the world has never seen what we have built, our work is far from over. “
A promising start
This new project could have gone unnoticed, but that was without a $200 million fundraiser, just 3 months after its launch.
This financing campaign brings together big names such as Andreessen Horwitz’s a16z, Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and 3 Arrows Capital, to name but a few. If this example is not enough to convince us that this project will have to be followed closely, we can also say that less than 24 hours after its launch, the development network (Devnet) already had more than 300 validation nodes :
24 hours later, over 300 Aptos full nodes are live and running. We are blown away by the community engagement
cc @aptoslabs pic.twitter.com/GRA7WR1TCh– neil (@_neilh) March 16, 2022
The Aptos team is already composed of more than 25 people, and there are no less than 13 positions to be filled, in various fields of expertise.
The ecosystem is developed in the Move language, initially designed for Libra, now Diem. A call for developers has been launched for an incentive testnet in the second quarter of this year, and a mainnet is announced for the third quarter.
The timetable is ambitious, but the investors are there and the community is starting to build little by little. It remains to be seen whether the future of the project will be like the Diem debacle, or whether it will grow spectacularly to become a reference layer 1 blockchain.
