The 8 Major Innovative Forces of the Aptos Network

Aptos, as a low-latency and high-throughput blockchain network, has brought revolutionary changes to developers building Web3 applications. This article will delve into the eight innovative factors driving the development of the Aptos network.

1. Move Language Optimization Application Development

The Move language adopted by Aptos provides developers with a better development environment and significantly improves development efficiency. Move is an expressive and easy-to-use programming language designed for secure asset management.

The Aptos blockchain is deeply integrated with the Move language, sharing multiple core design concepts, making Aptos an efficient and enjoyable development platform for Move. Move was originally designed for Aptos's predecessor, and this connection ensures that existing Move developers can seamlessly migrate to develop on Aptos, while newcomers can also benefit from the existing documentation and examples.

Aptos has greatly improved the Move ecosystem by adding multiple features at the language and framework levels. These features include a comprehensive security architecture, fine-grained configurable gas metering, code upgradeability, large-scale tables, resource accounts, and more. Additionally, Move validators serve as formal verification tools for Move smart contracts, providing extra assurance for contract invariants, and have been 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 practical testing, the Move language has proven to be a mature and reliable production-level development language.

2. Block-STM Brings Programming Freedom

Block-STM is an innovative engine for parallel execution of smart contracts, built on the principles of transaction memory and optimistic concurrency control of Aptos. This novel approach to transaction parallelization can significantly accelerate transaction processing speed without compromising the development experience.

Unlike the parallel execution engine that requires reading and writing data to break transaction atomicity, Block-STM allows developers to code freely, achieving higher throughput and lower latency for real-world application scenarios. Developers can easily build highly parallelized applications using Block-STM. Block-STM supports stronger atomicity than other parallel execution environments that require splitting operations into multiple transactions, enhancing user experience by reducing latency and improving cost efficiency.

3. On-chain Governance and Decentralization

To support a truly decentralized and permissionless Layer 1 network, Aptos has integrated an on-chain governance mechanism that enables seamless updates to the network and virtual machine configurations. This has been fully validated in the Aptos Incentivized Testnet 3 and the mainnet.

On the mainnet, the reliability of the network has been improved by lowering the "voting power increase limit." This proposal set a more aggressive threshold to accelerate the network launch, gaining support from over 52% of token holders, effectively protecting network security.

Since its inception, the Aptos community has been able to create and vote on proposals that affect the behavior of the Aptos blockchain. These governance proposals include: adjusting the epoch duration, modifying the minimum and maximum staking requirements for validators, changing system parameters, upgrading the core blockchain code, and updating the Aptos framework modules ( and a set of core Move development libraries ) to fix bugs or enhance functionality.

4. AptosBFTv4 Efficient Consensus

AptosBFTv4 is the first production-grade blockchain BFT protocol with strict correctness proofs. This protocol employs an optimistic response mechanism that provides low latency and high throughput, fully utilizing the underlying network performance. Improved based on Hotstuff, AptosBFTv4 reduces the commit latency from 3 steps to 2 steps, decreasing latency by 33% without sacrificing communication efficiency.

The implementation of AptosBFTv4 fully considers security rigor and upgradability. This implementation clearly separates invariants for isolation and effective auditing, enforcing the no-fork principle. The same software stack has undergone four upgrades and has been tested in a real network, demonstrating the thoroughness and robustness of its development process. In the fourth iteration, AptosBFTv4 became the fastest production-ready Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus protocol.

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

5. Security mechanisms to enhance user confidence

Aptos accounts support flexible key management, including features such as key rotation, encryption agility, and hybrid custody models. Key rotation is a good security practice and is crucial for preventing potential remote attacks that could jeopardize multiple accounts. On other blockchains, rotation can only be achieved by migrating all assets to a new account. Aptos adopts a decoupled approach between accounts and keys, allowing for the seamless addition of new digital signature algorithms to support different types of public and private keys. The hybrid custody model supports advanced recovery solutions and account management, helping to bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3.

Wallets can use the transaction pre-execution feature to explain the transaction results to users before they sign. This method of assessing transactions before signing can mitigate security risks such as phishing, which are increasingly common in the Web3 space. To further optimize the user experience, the Aptos blockchain limits the validity of each transaction and prevents signers from being affected by indefinitely valid transactions through a triple protection mechanism of serial number, expiration time, and chain ID.

Aptos's consensus protocol and authenticated storage provide seamless and practical support for light client protocols, thereby offering a more secure and reliable user experience. The Aptos network welcomes anyone to connect to full nodes to directly access authenticated data, reflecting the Web3 principle of "trustless, verify." To this end, Aptos has established an efficient multicast tree structure that provides participants with high throughput and low latency networks to propagate blockchain states. Participants can process all transactions since the genesis or can completely skip blockchain history and only synchronize the latest state. Light clients can synchronize partial blockchain states, such as specific accounts or data values, and enable verified state reads, such as obtaining verified account balances using BFT timestamps.

6. Future-oriented Modular Architecture

Aptos has the gene of upgradeability, designed from the beginning with modularity and flexibility in mind. This allows the Aptos architecture to support frequent upgrades, meaning the blockchain can quickly adopt the latest technological advancements and provide technological support for emerging use cases.

Aptos's modular architecture design brings client flexibility and is optimized for zero downtime frequent upgrades. These features have been fully demonstrated in previous mainnet iterations, testnets, and numerous internal stress tests. The Aptos blockchain includes an embedded on-chain change management protocol that allows for the rapid deployment of new technological innovations and supports new Web3 application scenarios.

7. Proposal-Based Reward Mechanism

In the Aptos Incentive Testnet 3, a voting-based reward system has been introduced. In this model, once two-thirds of the votes reach the proposer node, BFT consensus is achieved. This means that one-third of the later votes are not counted, and the relevant validators do not receive rewards.

This may lead to delayed competition, as validators close to the main node cluster often receive more rewards. In this case, node operators tend to migrate their nodes closer to the main cluster to improve latency and increase staking rewards, but this undermines decentralization and geographic distribution, as it encourages node centralization. To promote a greater degree of decentralization, Aptos has now implemented a proposal performance-based reward system as a staking reward system.

The proposal-based system has a higher timeout than voting and is less sensitive to cross-regional delays. This increases the reward rate for nodes in remote areas and mitigates the impact of geographical distribution. For example, even if validators are not physically located in the largest node cluster, they will not receive significantly less rewards as a result. This reward model still takes voting behavior into account, as good voting performance affects the election probability of proposers.

8. High-Performance Sparse Merkle Tree

Aptos adopts the Jellyfish Merkle Tree design, JMT, utilizing a monotonically increasing version-based key pattern to optimize the write performance of underlying storage engines based on LSM trees, such as RocksDB. JMT achieves a practical optimal balance between CPU utilization, I/O efficiency, and storage footprint, ensuring satisfactory performance while controlling the bloat of state data on disk.

In addition to JMT as the persistent format for Aptos state, there is another in-memory, lock-free sparse Merkle tree implementation. This implementation is designed specifically for caching and parallelization, used in conjunction with Block-STM to facilitate high-performance global state updates.