Former Meta employees and key players behind the defunct stablecoin project Diem have raised $200 million to expand a new project called “Aptos”.
Aptos was co-founded by former Novi – Meta’s crypto unit – strategic partnerships lead Mo Shaikh and tech leader Avery Ching. The duo is now the CEO and CTO of the new company. Both left the company in December, before Diem was sold to Silvergate Capital in February of this year.
The team is building a decentralized Layer 1 blockchain based in part on Move, the coding language originally developed for Diem. The company is now expanding its developer ecosystem and attracting projects to the blockchain, which it says will be a low-cost, secure and scalable network.
According to a March 16 announcement, Aptos’ $200 million strategic funding round was led by equity capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), along with backing from top firms such as Three Arrows Capital, FTX Ventures, Paxos and Coinbase Ventures.
The funding will be used to hire new staff and to support “companies, brands and builders” looking to develop projects on the Aptos blockchain, with the startup teasing that several DeFi, NFT, Web3, social media and payment projects are the works.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Aptos declined to disclose a specific valuation, but suggested it is “well off in the unicorn territory” of about $1 billion.
In addition to the funding announcement, Aptos has also launched a public devnet with an open-source codebase. The team told the publication that big names such as Anchorage, Binance and Coinbase have provided guidance and contributed code to the devnet. The announcement stated:
“Later in the second quarter there will be a boosted testnet to help scale the network and stress test it as it marches to the mainnet. We are inviting validators and other infrastructure providers to join our community now in anticipation.”
Aptos expects Mainnet to launch in the third quarter later this year, giving developers about six months to build projects before the network is available to the public.
Related: Vale Diem: How Facebook’s Ambitious Stablecoin Project Came to an End
In a blog post late last month, Aptos emphasized that the focus of its blockchain is based on “absolute security, extensible scalability, and credible neutrality,” while allowing it to work on its ideas without intense oversight from regulators as in Diem’s case:
“Since the departure of Meta (formerly Facebook) we have been able to get our ideas started, eliminate red tape and build a brand new network from scratch that will bring them to fruition.”
“Aptos uses Move, the secure and reliable language originally developed for Diem. The ideas we came up with then are still relevant today and will serve as an important foundation for a secure, scalable, upgradable Web3. Our plans for decentralization and unauthorized access are progressing rapidly and will be developed publicly,” the message added.