The 8 Driving Innovations of the Aptos Network

Aptos, as a blockchain platform with extremely low latency and high throughput, provides great convenience for developers to build web3 applications. This article will introduce 8 core innovations that are driving the flourishing development of the Aptos network.

1. Move Language Optimization Application Development

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

Aptos has significantly improved the Move ecosystem by adding multiple features at the language and framework levels. This includes a robust security architecture, configurable gas metering, and code upgradeability, among others. Move validators provide additional security guarantees for smart contracts and are actively being expanded on 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 validation, Move has become a mature development language suitable for production environments.

2. Block-STM provides more programming freedom

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

Unlike other parallel execution engines that require breaking 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 atomic operations, thereby enhancing the user experience.

3. On-chain governance promotes decentralization

Aptos has a built-in on-chain governance mechanism that allows for seamless changes to network and virtual machine configurations, supporting true decentralization and permissionless layer 1. The Aptos community has been able to create and vote on proposals that affect blockchain behavior, including modifying epoch duration, validator stake requirements, core code upgrades, and more.

4. AptosBFTv4 Improves Consensus Efficiency

AptosBFTv4 is the first production-level blockchain BFT protocol with a rigorous correctness proof. It is an improvement based on Hotstuff, reducing the commit delay from 3 steps to 2 steps, while lowering the delay by 33% without sacrificing communication overhead.

The implementation of AptosBFTv4 takes into account security and upgradability, clearly separating invariants for ease of isolation and auditing. The same set of software has undergone four upgrades and tested in a live network, demonstrating the thoroughness and robustness of its development process.

5. Security Measures to Enhance User Confidence

Aptos accounts support flexible key management, including key rotation, encryption agility, and hybrid custody models. Decoupling accounts from keys allows Aptos to seamlessly add new digital signature algorithms.

Wallets can use the transaction pre-execution feature to explain the transaction results before the user's signature, reducing security risks such as phishing. Aptos also prevents signatures from being infinitely valid through triple protection including serial numbers, expiration times, and chain IDs.

Aptos's consensus protocol and authenticated storage provide seamless support for light clients, delivering a more secure and trustworthy user experience. Anyone can connect to full nodes to directly access verified data.

6. Future-oriented Modular Architecture

Aptos adopts a modular and flexible design philosophy, supporting frequent upgrades and enabling rapid adoption of the latest technological advancements. Its architecture is optimized for zero-downtime frequent upgrades, which has been validated in previous mainnet iterations and testnets.

The Aptos blockchain includes an embedded on-chain change management protocol, which allows for the rapid deployment of new technological innovations and supports new Web3 application scenarios.

7. Proposal-Based Reward Mechanism

Aptos has implemented a proposal performance-based staking reward system to promote a greater degree of decentralization. Compared to voting-based systems, this mechanism is less sensitive to cross-regional delays, increases the reward rates for nodes in remote areas, and mitigates the impact of geographical distribution.

The reward model takes voting behavior into account, as good voting performance can affect the election probability of the proposer.

8. High-Performance Sparse Merkle Tree

Aptos uses Jellyfish Merkle Tree (JMT) design, leveraging a monotonically increasing version-based key schema to optimize the underlying storage engine. JMT achieves a practical balance between CPU, I/O, and storage footprint.

In addition to JMT, Aptos has also implemented a memory-efficient, lock-free sparse Merkle tree, designed specifically for caching and parallelization, and used in conjunction with Block-STM to achieve high-performance global state updates.