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*Sponsored* Building the Global Trading Engine for RWAs
Recorded: April 23, 2025 Duration: 1:04:06Space Recording
Short Summary
Aptos is positioning itself as a revolutionary global trading engine, with strategic partnerships and innovative technology aimed at enhancing financial transactions and trading capabilities. The discussion highlights the potential for significant growth in user adoption and the emergence of new decentralized applications (dApps) within the Aptos ecosystem.
Full Transcription
Thank you. so
so I'm sorry. . Thank you. Oh I'm going to go to the next one. Wow Thank you. so
yeah i'm gm i'm gonna give a couple of minutes for some folks to trickle in Yeah, I'm GM.
I'm going to give a couple of minutes for some folks to trickle in. . Oh All right, everybody.
Thank you so very much for being with us today.
Nikhil, go ahead and take it away.
Awesome.
Jam, jam, folks.
Really glad for everyone to come over here.
So just to set the scene, nothing said here is a recommendation to buy or sell securities
or tokens.
This panel is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed on the show are solely
opinions and not financial advice.
So I'd like to just introduce myself.
My name is Nikhil.
I am a protocol strategist at BlockWorks Advisory.
For context, I worked at Avalanche for a little over two years prior, and a lot of the work
that I was doing dived very deep into BlockSTM and Aptos' approach to DSMR.
So very, very personally excited to be chatting with Avery and the rest of the Aptos team
today.
For context, we'll be chatting with Avery, who is the founder and CEO of Aptos, and with Ash, who is the
head of ecosystem at Aptos.
So Avery, Ash, any things that you'd like to share about what you do and your roles
at Aptos or your backgrounds prior before we dive into the exciting conversation today?
Maybe I'll just start.
Thanks for the introduction, Akhil.
And both Ash and myself are very excited to be here representing both labs and foundation I can give a quick background about myself um a PhD in
computer science uh studied high performance computing for a long time uh worked at YAH for
four years Facebook for 10 years uh alongside that was the uh the tech lead for Dim and Libra, if you guys remember that project back from Meta,
and then started Aptos kind of in late 2021. And then we're pretty excited, of course,
to be taking this forward in the journey of global finance and the global trading engine
and talking a lot more about that today. I'll pass it off to Ash.
Hey, Nikhil. It's nice to be here with everyone. I'm Ash. I'm the head of ecosystem here at the Aptos Foundation. What that simply means is helping support amazing founders build on the best network there is out there.
I have had around a 15-year career journey in technology.
I started or I cut my teeth helping Spotify launch in the U.S. early in 2011, which was incredible.
We had to convince a bunch of people who used to pirate music to stream and pay for streaming.
stream and pay for streaming um and it was an incredible journey i uh was at youtube for about
And it was an incredible journey.
seven and a half years where i'm where i wore a few hats uh but my primary mission there was helping
the music industry and artists see the future of the creator economy um and so we kind of took
uh that industry on another evolution from piracy to paying for streaming to actually
taking control over their business. And I left YouTube because I saw what was happening in Web3
and specifically with NFTs, that a new creator class and builder class was emerging that I don't
think traditional FANG or traditional tech companies could have ever served.
And so I said to myself, you know, I can either choose to stay here and become a dinosaur by the time I'm 35,
or I can kind of leave and go both feet in on where I think the next big factor change is coming.
And that's kind of what led me here.
Fantastic. And for context for the audience,
Ash has an excellent music taste, predictably based on his background. So, you know, really excited to get into today's conversation. The first thing that I think everyone is super excited
to talk about is this sort of global trading engine that Aptos is building upon. So Aptos
has described itself as building the go-to global trading engine.
Avery Ash, we'd love for the both of you to sort of unpack what that means from both a technical
standpoint and what are its implications on the Aptos ecosystem and why is now the right moment
for that vision to materialize? I'd love to take track of this one first. So when you think about
what blockchains are great at, right, you have this,
you have this very limited amount of space in the blockchain. You have a very small amount of time
to do a computation because you don't want to have one computation hogging up a lot of time
in a blockchain. And this is something that just makes sense for trading. Like trading is a perfect
fit for it. And there's no reason really to build a high performance blockchain engine like Aptalus using things like BlockSTM, Raptor and other techniques other than for moving
assets around at high speeds. And so I think it's something that we've always been thoughtful about
from our days back at Libra and Diem of how to build a system that support money movement for
billions across like the largest companies in the world, Facebook, Uber, Lyft, and others, Visa, MasterCard
as well. And so I think just making that vision much more clear and focusing and doubling down
on that, it just seemed like a very obvious thing for us to really to lead with in the next, you
know, three to five years, at least. I think it's very clear now that three aspects of this are
going to be critical for blockchain usage in this time frame.
The first is going to be trading infrastructure.
We can see that centralized exchanges have provided great services for many to onboard into crypto.
But there are things that decentralized systems can do just so much better.
If you can build an incredible spot in Perp Dex that can operate the speed of centralized exchanges or even faster.
They can be composable. You can have flash loans coming in to do complex borrows. You can have
road assets being traded as well at high speeds. You can bet on kind of any market you like
across the world in a permissionless way and across emerging assets in different places of
the world.
This is really exciting to us. The other area is going to be around just stablecoins and we see
now with the administration pushing forward both stablecoin bills as market structure bills,
that this is accelerating very quickly in the US and also across the world.
Many new stables are being listed. I think for even Wyoming, they have
their own stablecoin coming. I think our newest rankings show that we're at the top of the list
when it comes to the best possible platform for developing and shipping stablecoins in that space.
And we're seeing things like, you know, our chain has the top three stable assets on it,
has the top three stable assets on it, Tether, USDC, as well as USDE, and the largest move chain by
TVL. And so we're seeing a lot of traction for this space because we also have the lowest fees.
And it just makes sense that having lowest fees, having an ability to work at kind of sub-second,
very fast latencies with 130 millisecond block times and getting faster and also supporting the scale
that's necessary for a visa a mastercard and others uh to happen on chain real time as a part
of an actual real world application are just coming together now now that aptos has kind of
built the technology and started to really uh work with the ecosystem on how to how to use
this technology in the best ways uh for money across the world. And the last thing is just about world assets.
We're seeing things like Pact,
who has issued more than a billion dollars of loans on-chain
across more than 20 million customers
for kind of smaller loans of 10 to 50K
starting to really build traction in emerging markets
where if you need a small loan to, for instance,
buy a scooter for a delivery service
or some kind of maybe just a short term loan to perhaps do a large purchase of
a car, something that's necessary for your job.
These things are going to be possible with on-chain infrastructure for private credit.
And they're already happening today.
We expect this to expand much, much more quickly.
And then so when you add all these together, trading infrastructure, stable coin movement, as well as real-world assets and real-world
on-chain yield, it just comes together in this very nice picture of what we call the global
trading engine that is going to basically power money movement for the coming decades in the space.
100%. And that sounds really, really exciting. And I wanted to also tap Ash as well, because
not only will these sort of legacy dApps that
are in the Aptos ecosystem that are innovating to sort of adopt these different upgrades
will benefit, but also there's sort of an Aptos renaissance where there's a new wave
of dApps, of Dex's, both Spot and Perp and other interesting businesses that are building
on Aptos that benefit from this as well.
So Ash, I know that Avery touched on some of these things as well,
but what are some of the ecosystem implications?
How can some of the existing dApps in the Aptos ecosystem
benefit from some of these new upgrades?
And we'll dive more into them specifically later.
And also, how do some of these new wave dApps also benefit as well?
Yeah, so I think one incredible part of this new kind of focus is it puts into perspective the outcome we want to see on Aptos, you know, near, mid and even beyond that, which is deep liquidity and economic activity of any asset, right, being traded.
any asset being traded. I think for a lot of the DeFi protocols that exist today,
what they get to do now is, number one, there's a first mover advantage. You've been here,
you've been building, you understand the technology, you understand the ecosystem.
Now you can start to inform your roadmap in a direction that in kind of a sum of its parts starts to lead to these
bigger bang outcomes. And so my goal essentially is, you know, Avery published the roadmap from
the lab's perspective, but the foundation's job now too is to take that and help our ecosystem
projects navigate around where we think could be interesting to build so that all of these things kind of ladder up into a greater outcome.
So that's going to be the great level of clarity that comes.
I would say that, you know, there's a few elements or platforms that people can build
now based on kind of the roadmap that Avery shared related to the trading engine.
There's obviously the core primitives that are going to exist or some of it in market.
And then there's also the dApps that will be built on, like the perp stacks that will come
to Aptos where another ecosystem can sprout.
And so you kind of have this opportunity where you have existing DeFi protocols who can start
to accelerate their roadmap in a direction that they know will add up. You have new primitives coming
to the space where they can actually launch new types of use cases, a lot of which fall under the
banner of trading that may not be as evident. And now you're going to have even more new products
with deep liquidity, which will have its own hooks and you'll be able to build its own ecosystem around. So I think it's just widened the field and at the same time sharpened where a few existing
protocols can take their roadmap.
Awesome.
No, that sounds really exciting.
And some of the things that were just mentioned by both you, Ash and Avery as well, is that
there seems to be these sort of like three major pushes on the Aptos side amongst the
many others that, you know, create this really positive feedback loop. You have this, you know, this,
these sort of performance upgrades that formulate this global trading engine, you know, with
Zapdos, with BlockSTM v2, tiered storage, Shardines that kind of come together to create
the substrate that's perfect for, you know for moving money quickly and moving assets quickly.
And then paired with this sort of large RWA push to issue assets on chain, which makes sense because
this makes it a very favorable place to do that. Paired with sort of the last component in this
sort of trifecta, which is a significant upgrade in user adoption, developer adoption that we'll
get into. So the first area that I really want to dive into are these sort of performance upgrades
that enable Aptos to be the sort of go-to substrate for money movement and asset movement globally.
So, you know, you have Zaptos, you have BlockSTM v2, Aptos-tiered storage and shardings.
Avery, we'd like to, you know, understand from your side, how do these different components
come together to really make Aptos the global trading engine? And then Ash, we'd like to tap on your side to sort of see like, what are the
things that are sort of emerging on top of this? Because you have great like projects like Ekaiden,
you have a lot of projects that are in stealth as well, that are taking advantage of this
infrastructure to create something that's really special. So Avery, first towards you,
what are these components that make up the trading engine that Aptos is constructing? And how does it really set Aptos apart from both centralized
counterparties, but also from these sort of decentralized competitors that are out in the
wild right now? Right. I think so. If I'm maybe a little blunt here, I mean, a lot of people are
definitely chasing similar spaces of like building open finance, but they aren't necessarily putting
in the muscle and the effort to actually build out the system that's going to support it really,
really well. And this is where we laid out in that post kind of a lot of the key efforts and very
unique differentiators that we're working on within Aptos to move this space forward. And so
diving into a couple of these, Aptos allows us to kind of take all these pipelines. So Aptos kind
of invented a novel pipeline infrastructure,
very akin to how you think about a modern day CPU,
a super scalar CPU, multiple stages,
when the stages can work in parallel, that's great.
And then supporting it in very, very high throughput
in this manner.
Zaptos takes those stages of computation
for transaction processing,
and then compresses them together to overlap
as much as possible.
What that means is that when you think about a latency for transaction,
it's usually kind of this idea of data dissemination.
You have an ordering phase, you have consensus as well as storage,
and then kind of also some commitment phase.
We can overlap all these phases together and then provide that kind of user experience
that's going to be incredibly quick, even at massive throughput. And so that's kind of a first in the community that's ever been
seen before. And the reason why is just because we have some of the best researchers in the world
working here at Aptos Labs to build these innovations. But the other piece is because
we started off with design that was already kind of pipelined and paralyzable. And so it makes it
easy to do these kind of optimizations that just aren't possible in other networks and so by compressing this what it means from user standpoint is it's
going to be a lot faster for you it's going to support um money movement for micro payments
for streaming payments for things that just aren't even possible in today's world forget
other blockchains and that's that's something that we're very very excited about it uh the idea
behind chardines is going to be really about how do you scale beyond just a single machine.
Now, many people try to do this through what we call the easier technique.
You can see with Ethereum, with L2s, kind of growing out more networks, more shards and using bridging as a way to kind of grow the overall EVM scalability.
But this brings into account a lot of issues as well because of the user experience of having to kind of move assets from chain to chain, the bridging risks.
And so what we've done is said, look, we want to take the harder challenge.
How do we take the shared space everyone is kind of playing in and then just scale that out?
And so rather than having kind of a bunch of countries connected together with different roads, we're just taking that country and making it incredibly large.
a bunch of countries connected together with different roads.
We're just taking that country and making it incredibly large.
And so by doing that, we can actually support composability of applications
and being able to kind of do all kinds of fancy things.
Really the promise of what decentralized infrastructure allows you to do as a developer
is use someone else's application without permission,
using someone else's assets, having them available to you when permissible.
And so allowing this to happen in a way that scales out to not just one very large use case, assets, having them available to you when permissible.
And so allowing this to happen in a way that scales out to not just one very large use case, but all the large use cases of the world.
And what we've seen with Chardines is that we can get over a million transactions per second in a single shared state.
The result that's never been done before, not even close.
I think the last result that was even in that space was at best one one hundredth of what we could do.
So the technical innovations we're building are all really towards this world of a shared platform for money movement, for trading, for road asset yield combined together in one place.
And then we're thinking about trading specific optimizations.
How do you support something like what we call schedule transactions or a way to, you know, Bitcoin price hits 100K.
How do we take the next action immediately on behalf of a user on an intent to say,
rebalance a portfolio or, you know, buy a different asset?
That can happen even faster than a centralized exchange can do today. And so these kind of technologies we're building are really for novel next generation products,
as well as improving the existing products in the space.
And then, you know, doing things that really aren't next generation products, as well as improving the existing products in the space.
And then, you know, doing things that really aren't, you know,
crypto today is just a very kind of poor, inefficient marketplace, but it's something that is also very open and permissionless.
We want to kind of do the best of both worlds.
Keep that permissionless, keep the openness of the platform,
but build something even better than the existing products across the world.
Awesome. No, that sounds really exciting.
There's a lot I want to unpack there. But before getting into that, Ash, there are a few things
that were sort of touched upon that this sort of global trading engine could unlock. And more
specifically, things like BlockSTM v2, ZapToss, even things like tiered storage that could enable, you know, sort of better state access for data rich sort of services like order books. So, you know, what kind of dApps are you
seeing in the wild that are emerging that are really taking advantage of this? You know, I know
a lot of things, there's a lot of focus on the trading side, of course, with like Purpose and
Spot. But it sounds like, like what Avery had mentioned, there's also quite a bit of interest
and appetite on the payment side. So curious on, you know, what do you think this sort of shifts the ecosystem towards?
And how does it also position Aptos in relation to maybe other competitors?
Because you have people like Hyperliquid that are building things on the perp side.
But it sounds like with this new trading engine, a lot more of the features that may have been off-chain
can be moved on-chain while retaining a lot of that performance?
can be moved on-chain while retaining a lot of that performance.
Yeah, what I would say firstly is
I think we need to go stimulate exploration and development
on these new primitives, right?
That only Aptos now has enabled to see what can be built, number one.
So that is going to be exciting in terms of how we divert kind of our grants, our accelerator tracks, where we show up, who we help get funding to start building in these areas, my head on how lucky we are that we get to differentiate is I feel like, you know, and I might be getting a little too kind of head in the cloud.
So bring me back down to Eric Nikhil, whatever you want.
For the majority of, let's say, Web3 or crypto or Lifetime, it's been more philosophy than technology.
It's been much more about how we as a society believe in self-sovereignty, ownership, right?
Not being bound by governments.
And when I think about where Aptos is, obviously from its origins, but also where we are today,
we can maintain that philosophy, but be pure play technology that can now start to power
very serious apps and use cases and markets.
And that's what's really exciting from a branding perspective in the sense that
when you think about everything Avery talked about, you can start to now bring on assets
with deep liquidity and volume that may exist off-chain, right? On-chain, number one. And that
dwarfs any on-chain asset, right? Like by orders of magnitude.
So that's number one.
You can actually start to bring on assets that just have insane liquidity.
And now you bring it on-chain
and you open up a bunch of different use cases
and things like that.
Number two, on the payment side,
we can start to,
because we are now the most efficient dollar
on the internet,
you can actually start to power real world use cases for people who want to build HR payment software, right, for distributed employees, right?
You can start to think about the things like extending credit networks to emerging markets. You can start to think about
micropayments, right? For subscription services. You can actually just start to like, basically
be like, wow, like we're going to bring on billion user use cases now. Like we're there,
we're there. And so that's what I think for me is going to be our most differentiating feature is just our pure focus around trading, but trading in the sense of we want to bring assets that have volume, have deep liquidity and bring them on chain.
And then we want protocols to start to build around those things to create differentiated use cases and arbitrage scenarios that make those assets more interesting in Web3 versus not in Web3.
And then start to actually let the founders, whether they come from Web2, they quit their
job and they say, I want to build the next payments in for software fully on chain, or
they come completely from an emerging market and they have a very strong thesis because
it vexed their immediate society and community around them to start building. I like to think of it as the real
world app moment. And I hope that's kind of where our branding resides. Amazing. And I want to get
more into also some of those assets that are going to be onboarded and some of those use cases that
are being onboarded on TapToss and how they take advantage of this better substrate. But real quick, I want to kind of, you know, go a little bit deeper into Aptos' position
in the overall market from an infrastructure standpoint and what it unlocks for use cases.
So like for Raptor, for instance, it's one of the few sort of deterministic consensus mechanisms
that have, you know, fairly low finality and has the ability to still be leaderless.
Typically, when you think of leaderless, you might think of folks like Avalanche Consensus
or Snowman Consensus, but obviously that's more probabilistic. When you think of deterministic,
you might think of Narwhal and Tusk, but Raptor has far higher throughput while still retaining
that leaderless aspect of it.
And so I wanted to kind of get into how do you guys sort of feel like when developers and investors even are deciding where to allocate their capital in terms of on-chain finance,
where they're determining where to build, why Aptos? There are many reasons that can be,
you know, sort of gone into. For instance, the fact that, you know, you can build a
permissionless, you know, club or leverage the existing club
for perps on Aptos while having permissionless market making
and atomic transactions while having it all on chain.
Usually you have to take some sort of trade-off between that.
But Avery, from a technical standpoint,
what do you feel you would like to tell developers
and investors are the key differentiators,
especially in light of this new roadmap.
And from your side, Ash, what do you feel like current developers
that are in the Aptos ecosystem right now,
what are they raving about that they feel like,
hey, this is something new, this is something different,
and this is why everybody should build an Aptos?
The thing that I think usually brings the developers to Aptos,
the ones that we see
are those that are really trying to do something differentiated in the market.
And so, I mean, there's been a lot of like kind of basic apps built in places like Ethereum
or like, you know, L2s out there, you know, maybe a simple spot, you know, a simple Dex
or kind of a simple liquid staking protocol.
Those can be built in all chains, right?
And I think the thing that's interesting is what can you build that you can't build
elsewhere?
And so what we've seen from other kind of developers is kind of a confluence of things,
but I'll give you some examples that would be helpful.
So if you're looking for a massive scale, if you're a large company that has, you know,
a hundred million customer base or 50 million customer base,
and you want to have massive scale of accounts of storage, the account fees will start to add up for
you over time because of the, and the transaction fees will add up because it just, you know, like
the law of large numbers, you know, doing a million transactions a day, you know, at a cent,
you know, it gets pretty pricey, right? For example, those kind of use cases are just very obvious for Aptos. Like Aptos is really the only network out there that can
support that at scale, that can operate with low latency at a high transaction volume that supports
the costs that start to get much more competitive to cloud costs than versus like, you know,
what's available in the rest of the market. So those ones just naturally come to us because there's just really no other choice.
The other areas, though, are still like going to be these very hungry young founders who
are interested in doing something very different in the space with technology that, you know,
that's just basically limitless.
So if they want to build, for example, a new social product, the next generation Facebook,
but you want to support the idea that maybe likes are going to be small payments to a creator.
And those are both going to be civil resistant as well as other things.
It may not be, even if it's small numbers of users, you may have a lot of traffic happening on chain.
chain. And so, you know, those costs add up. These things are not possible that are networks.
And so those costs add up.
These things are not possible that are networks.
Can you put this kind of on-chain activity in the mission critical path of a small customer base
is only really possible on AppTus as well. And so those things I think are very, very good there.
And we see a lot of developers trying to build the next generation of consumer apps on AppTus
as well. But now I think, you know, with this focus on really global trading engine, there's
even new primitives that make much more sense for if you're doing stablecoin work, if
you're doing RWAs, and if you're doing trading, right, that allow builders to do things that just
really, again, are not possible. There's no way to build a high performance DEX that's going to
rival something that's on Aptos anywhere else in the world. There's no way to kind of build out
the cheapest stablecoin movement elsewhere as well that
kind of has the infrastructure to a massive DeFi ecosystem.
And there's no easy way to kind of bring these on-chain assets with a security of move anywhere
in the world.
So these are the reasons why we usually see builders coming to Aptos and always the reasons
that kind of we helped to emphasize here.
We're not trying to build Copcat apps.
We're trying to build the basic things,
the building blocks and built on other networks.
We're trying to see developers help them build
really the next generation of Web3 apps
that are gonna rival the Web2 apps that came into space,
the Netflix's, Meta's, the Amazon's, the Apple's,
all that great stuff that for the last 20 years
has captured the mind share of everyone,
and also not just the mind share, but the product space of the internet we've got to see that next
generation of things being built for web3 that can actually use web3 in it right we have no real
mass adoption web3 apps today uh and they're nothing that sits in the mission critical path
that's the goal that app does just trying to change and that's the thing that we built for
um having that experience working at large tech companies and supporting billions of customers around the world.
Awesome.
That sounds fantastic.
And I think a key thing, and I wanted to orient this towards you, Ash, is that L1 and L2 teams
like to sort of thread that fine needle between mass adoption, because we can all agree that
for the most part, the users in the space so far are just folks that know, folks that are kind of going back and forth between a couple of chains
and onboarding real users, which sounds like is what Aptos is positioning itself towards.
How do you see in terms of ecosystem construction for like sort of threading that fine line of
balancing between the current crypto users that are here today and the current activity
and also, you know, more future related ones? Because for example, a lot of the trading engine upgrades sound really favorable for market makers, for instance, as we know, unlike chains
like Arbitrum or even base, a lot of the activity that occurs there might just be arbitrage activity
between ETH USD pairs on DEXs and ETH USD pairs on centralized exchanges. But it sounds like with
the trading engine, Aptos might be the go-to venue or the most preferred venue for market makers that want the tightest spreads, want to be able to submit cancel orders whenever
they want. And so how do you sort of thread that fine line between future growth, but also
capturing the current crypto mindsharing users? It's a good question. I mean, with trading in
any market, there's several stakeholders, right? That interface.
And so I think for us building the tools and the permissionless network to enable anyone to co-form or any kind of like a group of stakeholders, co-form and create a market is,
is essential, right? So if it's a a market maker if it's trade or whatever it is
is essential what what i would really love to see is as we start to because there's a few tranches
of this roadmap that's releasing so we just announced some of the uh primitives that are
available today like x accounts which basically doesn't matter what wallet you use you can
transact on an aptos tap which is incredible um which I think is the first step to onboarding
to allow anyone to trade on Aptos.
Who cares what wallet you have?
And so there'll be a tranche of things that we roll out that we want people to kind of
build on top of and explore.
But what I would say in terms of your question on, you know, how do we think about growth
in terms of existing users and getting
kind of new users? I really value a Web3 user, full stop. Like, I think it is true today,
and it will be true tomorrow, that a Web3 user by psychology is $1,000, $10,000, $100,000, 10,000, 100,000 more valuable than a Web 2 user by psychology.
They could be the same person, right? But they're in different contexts.
And so what I really want is to see the growth of the Web 3 user psychology in the sense that
there are more of them, but they maintain this principle of, um, I'm very engaged.
I believe in self-custody, right? I want to be peer to peer because it's easier for me.
Right. And, and I think that's kind of what I want to see and what I believe will happen
because of networks and the builders and the partners that are building on top of Aptos of,
um, abstracting some of the unnecessary complexity or friction that are building on top of Aptos of abstracting some
of the unnecessary complexity or friction that may exist, right? That's kind of what I really
want to see. In terms of capturing mindshare, you know, it's a tricky situation. I think with
any emergent technology, there are real world catalysts that spur it, that pull it forward, right? And then there's winners or losers
within that pull forward. And so the question is, what is that next catalyst that'll actually pull
a lot of the technology and the winners and losers and the adoption forward? The answer is,
I don't know, but you know what? We should prepare for it to happen because that is inevitable.
And so I think trading is an obvious bet
no matter where in the market cycle we are.
We obviously see through our partner like Blockworks
and the amazing events and outreach
and storytelling that you guys do,
that institutions are here,
they're not going anywhere.
They're stuck in.
And so now it's about, okay, they're here.
How does the long tail or let's say the web three native builder or founder start to
participate in that, right? You've been building a money market for years, right? Like now you have
institutional interest. What are you going to do now? What can you open up now? And so I think
that's going to be key. And then payments, right? Like it's essentially,
it's essentially like constantly building the technology to make sure that it's frictionless
and there's not a lot of infrastructural barriers that stops anyone who wants to
build the crazy next breakout dap. But then it's going and cultivating those founders
who have a very
specific vision and giving them a bunch of shots on goal to try to find PMF. Because one day,
there will be a catalyst that pulls the whole thing forward. And the person that is the last,
the people that are the last few standing who've gotten those shots on goals and have learned the
most and have figured out kind of like the most precise way to solve this problem they're the ones who are going to win and so that's kind of uh
that's kind of what i would say is is is those two areas we're not going to take our foot off the gas
but we want to give great founders with kind of a strong vision and great uh um companies with a
strong vision multiple shots on goal um to try things. So that's kind of, yeah.
Awesome. And it sounds like there's quite a bit of shots on goal that are starting to
come to fruition on Aptos, especially in relation to RWA's. And so I wanted to touch on this further
because there's been a strong push on the RWA side, which sounds very complimentary to this
sort of global trading engine, because, you know, no offense to the crypto space, the global trading engine can't just be ETH USD
arbitrage forever.
I mean, that's fun and all, but, you know, I'm sure that people want to, you know, potentially
have 24-7 arbitrage for other assets as well, be it Forex, be it commodities, etc.
And so I wanted to ask both you, Avery, and Ash as well, what are some of the things that
you're seeing in terms of RWA developments on Aptos so far, both that are live today and that are coming down the pike? And how do you foresee them taking advantage of this global trading engine? Because we see in a lot of ecosystems, a lot of idle RWAs. They're just kind of sitting there and doing nothing. But it sounds like Aptos is prioritizing not only these assets to be parked on Aptos, but also to be utilized, which I think is something that's exciting, new and different.
Yeah, this is a great question. And I just want to, Nikhil, just throw in a little bit earlier,
I think you asked a great question as well. I do want to hit this one. Will certain players be
favored from the global trading perspective side when it comes to market makers or others that are trading on the platform?
And the answer for me is going to be no, because what we're doing is building primitives.
We're building the ability for any kind of application to be constructed.
So if there's a way for maybe Cancelers to be prioritized across others, it's specific to an application and not necessarily specific to the blockchain. And I think that's a very important differentiation because it allows different kinds of apps to be
having different priorities, different kinds of experimentation without having to be like a one
size fits all for everybody. And that's, I think, where that kind of customization within what Move
can do is really important. And also what we're doing with Move to kind of take advantage of having our own programming
language to play with and to allow different kinds
of composability.
So if someone wants to make a DEX that supports
cancel orders as a priority, great.
If they want to support fees as a priority, great.
Over a fixed period of time, like one or two blocks.
If someone wants to build a combination of those two, that's also perfectly fine.
We're not going to take a position on that.
What we're going to do is allow developers and application builders with expertise in the space to construct the absolute insane kind of exchange primitives that are going
to make sense for money movement, for asset movement.
And something that's very transparent, compared to centralized exchanges today where things happen
behind the scenes, decentralized exchanges allow for that fully transparent thing to be in plain
view for everybody. If you want to know why you were liquidated, you can go ahead and on-chain
look at the code and there's no room to really argue with why the liquidation happened. It was
something that was specified in code and with the move decompiler every piece of code that's shipped can be turned back into some kind of source that's
understandable and kind of do their own retrospective on that. Back to the question of
RDBAs though, the biggest RDBAs of course today are going to be stablecoins and that's where
we're seeing a lot of pickup across these products.
So I know the PAC teams are working very closely with USDT on different ways of leveraging their distribution and their market for penetrating not just the current market they have with 20 million customers, but expanding this in more regions and more corridors.
but expanding this in more regions and more corridors.
We're seeing specific corridors picking up
where emerging markets like East African countries
and things like that are starting from partnerships
with Aptos to start to have money movement happening
on a much, much larger scale.
And a lot of the exchanges are starting to work with us
on how to prioritize seeing USDT and USDC move on Aptos
because of its low fees
and because of its incredibly fast finale times.
These are some of the examples.
We also have some larger partnerships in the works,
but those aren't quite ready to announce yet.
But we're thinking about the scale of tens of millions of people
transacting on-chain with stables primarily as a big driver going forward.
So hopefully that gives you a good flavor of some of the things we're thinking about.
But there's a lot of exciting efforts,
I think, going to come this year
and the following years after that.
Awesome.
That makes good sense.
And, you know, both you, back to you, Avery,
and also to Ash as well,
you know, taking advantage of this sort of trading engine
on the RWA side,
what would you like to see folks,
you know, how would you like to see folks
use this infrastructure
for both like stablecoin issuance, for payments, how would you like to see folks use this infrastructure for both
like stablecoin issuance, for payments, for RWAs as well?
For instance, you know, do you want to see a club that's focused on Forex?
Do you want to see a club that's focused on, you know, like commodities, for instance?
How would you like to see folks take advantage of the infrastructure to build sort of new
primitives for RWAs that only Aptos could offer compared to some of these centralized counterparties? Yeah, I mean, I will
jump in. You know, I'm not an analyst. I'm not going to be too opinionated on, hey, we want to
see this specifically built for this market. But I think what we want to do is bring on those people who have very opinionated
points of view to build on Aptos, right? And so I think for us, the way I look at it is, you know,
even just on the club, right, that people can build on that will be releasing soon.
You know, you could build in an options order book protocol. You can start to think about a prediction market order book platform. You could think about tokenized equities order books. You could think deep, deep opinions on how to bring in the most liquidity to enable.
And that's kind of what I would say from an ecosystem and foundation perspective, how we approach things.
We're not groups of analysts who are very specific and say, hey, you should just build this thing because we've done all of this homework on it.
It's mostly around we've built all this.
Here's a bunch of things that we think could be incredible.
And by the way, we're going to support you if you actually have a strong thesis around this thing
and motivation to get it done.
Amazing. No, definitely love that.
And I think that we've seen a lot of ecosystems that get really opinionated from the top down,
and that has potentially narrowed the scope of, you know, what they can kind of offer there,
which makes complete sense there. And I know that, Avery, you touched on this,
and Ashley touched on this as well, which was sort of like X accounts and other ways that Aptos
is looking to expand its user base to get people to take advantage of these different, you know,
payments platforms, these different protocols, these different offerings that are happening in the Aptos ecosystem.
So I was kind of curious, what are some of these sort of interesting user and developer upgrades a couple of other things like Aptos Build that make it that much easier for a new developer to come to the Aptos ecosystem, take advantage of this infrastructure, take advantage of also all these different RWAs that are already there to create products.
And so how are you looking at the overall strategy from attracting all these different users and developers from other ecosystems to make Aptos that main trading hub?
Great question. I think it comes from a combination of things. It comes from the ecosystem efforts that Ash and the team are putting together to attract developers,
getting mindshare, meet them, and explain how they can build very unique things on top of Aptos that can be built elsewhere.
But it's also about having that tooling, as you mentioned, to be able to construct things
very efficiently within a smart contract space. And so when we think about Move, again, Move's
core thesis is really the traditional ways of doing programming are just very different
in a smart contracts world compared to a general programming environment. In a general programming
environment, you know, you write some code, there's obviously some bugs in it, you fix the bugs, you roll it out, you find more bugs, you roll it out again, you fix them,
so on and so forth. And that's kind of a very normal practice. My decade at Facebook was
definitely spent doing a lot of that. But in a smart contract space, we don't have the latitude
to make mistakes and roll them forward, right? And then fix them and roll them forward and do
this over and over again, because those mistakes might cost billions of dollars and it might cost the trust of any network out there and so the
idea behind move was how do we kind of construct a new language that makes it much much harder for
a programmer to make those kind of mistakes to to have a new mindset when they think about coding
this is a this construct you know needs to be something that is formally verifiable, is something that just doesn't have the ability to like make those mistakes so easily and allow great test frameworks, tooling to kind of deploy this code in different environments, DevNet, TestNet, and MainNet, and then understand how these interact in a real environment.
and then kind of support the developer all the way to beyond just the coding deployment stage,
but to the things that happen off-chain.
Because people think sometimes like once I'm done with my smart contracts coding, I'm complete.
No, the issue is not you need to interact with the blockchain.
It's like working with the database.
You need to have kind of your ability to interface with that, read the data,
submit a new transaction, interoperate with it.
And so that tooling is extremely important
because a blockchain has data organized in a certain way.
But if you're building an NFT website
and you wanna, for instance, do a query,
like how many NFTs has user traded in the last 30 days?
That's something that blockchain
can answer for you very easily.
It requires tooling around that
to do much more complex analytics.
And that's where Aptos Build comes in.
So Aptos Build is a product which allows you to do higher level analytics and analysis
and APIs on top of the Web3 data that's on the blockchain.
And the goal really here is to simplify the tooling, the development lifecycle,
and the application construction for the developer.
And if we can do that, which I think we've done a pretty good job of,
it allows developers to get from ideation to deployment extremely quickly and efficiently.
Awesome.
And, you know, I'm curious, Ash, because, you know, you've had quite a bit of experience in scaling things on the Web2 side, whether it's with YouTube or with Spotify.
And it sounds like a lot of these different sort of tools can help onboard that type of category of developer
that, you know, maybe is used to a different kind of infrastructure, different kind of service
offerings to build whatever application or service they want. And so how do you foresee in the sort
of coming months, coming quarters, that net new developers could take advantage of Aptos Workplace
Alpha or Aptos Build? What do you sort of see as the sort of the new dApps
that might take advantage of this?
And additionally, what are the sort of new unlocks
that they get from this as well?
Because, you know, it sounds like, you know,
for the most part, the smart contract ecosystem
that is here right now,
there's a variety of different services
that you have to kind of piecemeal together
to make something that's sort of decent.
But this can kind of consolidate it all into one place
to make it that much easier for a new developer to onboard new users.
Yeah, I would say principally the tooling that has been built from Aptos Labs perspective is so that obviously one Aptos move is a new language.
So there's some complexity around people navigating that.
So there's some complexity around people navigating that.
And it's number one.
But number two is we don't want people to have to spend a bunch of time connecting disparate
parties and negotiating disparate deals to like just start building.
Like, no, you know, like I think that's number one is just package infra, like use this and
you can start building your app immediately.
That I think is important
i would say uh in terms of the type of i i kind of distinguish developers uh and builders um
and i don't assign any kind of different value set to either of those things but when i think about
what the question you're asking i think about a builder who's ready to kind of bring a very ambitious idea and blockchain is like a core underpinning of it. That's who I
think we are very excited about bringing over to Aptos. And when I think about who we're competing
against, it's not other blockchains. I'm competing against the internet of things. I'm competing against
bio sciences. Like I'm competing against, you know, I'm competing against these huge,
like industries that could change society forever. Right. And so it's exciting that we get to compete
against those people. Actually, that that's, what's really exciting but but we are competing against those people and so i think specifically there is someone somewhere maybe they're a director or a vp
of like a big payments platform and they've been trying to push this idea through every year i've
been in this place before at google every year that they we should do this we should do this we
should do this one day they're gonna get fed up fed up and say, you know what? I'm going to start my own company
and we're going to be right there to de-risk them to build it on chain. And so that's kind of,
that's kind of how I think about what this next tranche of, of people that are going to get.
And I think, um, part of what we want to do in terms of boots on the ground is, one, we have an amazing collegiate relationships here in the U.S. with working with blockchain associations.
to Canada, to New York and Chicago, to start to have a great pipeline of folks who actually
may say, hey, you know what, I'm going to put off that job for a couple of years to
start a company on Aptos.
Or, hey, I met my founder in my dorm.
Aptos is here to de-risk me a little bit to start building.
That's, I think, where everything starts.
And obviously, there are some, you know, we are partners with Bridge and Shopify.
So there are some interesting places we can go and start to be a little bit more
accelerated forward in specific markets where we want to see, let's say, new fintech emerge.
And so that's kind of what's exciting about this is we get to compete for
founders who have a choice of building in a variety of different industries, let alone blockchains. And it's about really being there
at the outset of knowing that we're here and they can build with us today.
Awesome. No, love that. And, you know, you mentioned that Aptos is increasingly sort of
increasing its collegiate, you know, exposure its collegiate exposure and working very closely
with founders as early as it gets, really. And so I know that that's been touched upon. And also
Aptos has been running several growth programs as well to help new entrepreneurs. And so curious,
Ash and Avery as well, what is the kind of support that the Aptos team tends to provide
towards these sort of new entrepreneurs that are just starting to get off the ground?
Of course, there's things on the infrastructure side to help de-risk them, to help expose them to all these various different new users, these new assets.
But what other kinds of support do you see as, you know, crucial for these brand new founders?
founders? Yeah, I can jump in. So number one, I think giving or offering an environment of
Yeah, I can jump in.
experimentation is important. I think that's something that is completely key in the sense of
we should never pretend, neither them or us, that we know exactly what is going to happen in the
future. If we do, we are fools. So what we want to do is create an environment of trust where say,
you're talented, you have a strong thesis, you're willing to learn, you're willing to fail,
and we are too. I think that's number one in terms of having an environment there. Number two is helping put them in touch with the right network on Aptos, not just people at labs or the foundation, but the right network of folks that can help them understand what the Aptos ecosystem is and also who they can learn from to do better.
That's number two. Number three is we have grants. And I think the way in which
historically grants I've seen been run has been very reactive, kind of this almost inbound
database of, hey, you want a grant, like apply here and then you get a grant. What we want to
do is actually be much more hands-on and integrated in our approach because sometimes
that person doesn't need a grant immediately. What they actually need is incubation. So what
they actually need is, you know, they need to be connected with an investor to start to sharpen
their thesis a little bit, or they need to be connected with other builders or other protocols
that have built businesses to start to learn a little bit. And so we have this network of accelerators, some with partners, some that we're incubating
natively that we want to graduate each of them into that are then funded in various
ways through grants, depending on their progression through that journey.
So I would say everything from, hey, you should be a part of this hackathon. If you win it,
you're in this accelerator. Once you're in this accelerator, now we're helping you take your
product to market. Now that your product's in market, here's how we sharpen PMF. Now that you
have PMF, here's how you take your token to market. We're kind of building an integrated system so
that people can kind of just be in and taken care of. So it's not this kind of blunt instrument that doesn't really
solve the problem based on where they're at. I like that. Days are gone where you can just,
you know, fire out blank checks, like real support looks like this. So I really like that a lot.
And I know we're at the tail end of our conversation here, and I could go for way, way longer.
And hopefully we can definitely set something else up to kind of do a follow on.
But a couple of years down the line where Aptos has achieved this goal of being the global trading engine,
we've seen the steps that you guys have laid out on this panel as to how to sort of get there.
What are the ecosystem building blocks
or the infrastructure building blocks to do that?
What do you think that the world sort of looks like
when the Aptos sort of achieves that end goal?
And what do you feel is sort of different
for users, developers, institutions
when that is achieved?
I would like to sort of use that
as potentially a closing remark
to understand how things are different and how
things are improved by that happening? This is a fun question for me. So in, let's say,
five years, if we can see even like 5% of the global remittance volume, like $190 trillion
industry moving to blockchain based infrastructure like
Aptos. That would be a huge win, I think, for just so many people around the world,
maybe in the US, not as much, right, because we have pretty good payments and trading systems
here. But I think definitely emerging markets and in countries in which the currencies are much
less stable, or some of these financial products are not available, we'll start to see those financial products be available in those markets.
So where there's private credit through things like PACT or other new and novel products
that are available worldwide, I think that would really benefit a lot of people across
the continent and across the world.
That's one thing.
I think we would also see a lot of the trading volumes, not just on what we consider kind
of Web3 centralized exchanges today, but also in traditional exchanges, moving on to technologies like Aptos. Seeing that start
to be like, instead of having these hubs of NASDAQ, London Stock Exchange, NYSE, being on a global
platform, decentralized global platform, where anyone across any country can actually start to
access these assets and trade them at very high speeds, very, very low cost.
And something that's an equal opportunity platform for everybody is going to be a pretty massive world change when it comes to the way we think about these financial markets.
And also just making that much more accessible globally.
Those are the kind of things I would love to see.
And of course, you know, stablecoin growth, real world asset yields happening so that, you know, even today's, you know,
bank accounts, right. You have checking accounts, which offer either very,
very small maybe 0.25% or maybe even negative rates of return because there
are fees on these accounts are really moving on chain, right?
So you can have a full life cycle of when you get paid,
you get paid on USDT on Aptos in a kind of a confidential way
that doesn't reveal your paycheck. You're spending your money through your credit card that does a
real-time conversion of your assets earning yield in your account to then support those payments
to anywhere in the world. That kind of transition will start to really rethink
the way our entire finance system works.
And we're building infrastructure to make this happen.
I think we're the only ones really focused on making sure
that all these core infrastructure building blocks
are ready for this kind of transition
and working actively with partners in this space.
But this kind of future, I think,
is something that we should all embrace
and look forward to with Aptos kind of leading the way. Amazing. Love that. And, you know, Ash, curious on your input from like an
ecosystem standpoint, it sounds like there's a lot of really great things for, you know, how Aptos
positioning itself as a global trading engine, what it can achieve a couple of years down the
line. But from your side, I would like to target it more on the ecosystem. What do you think the ecosystem looks like a couple of years
down the line? Obviously, we're playing a little crystal ball here. But assuming that Aptos sort
of achieves this goal, what do you think the ecosystem looks like? And what are some of the
key interesting things that you feel could be built? I think in two years, my title of head of ecosystem is well dethroned. And there's
multiple heads of ecosystem in Aptos. And that's as a result of successful businesses thriving
sustainably on the network and coordinating their own ecosystems around specific use cases that are important to
their user, their segment, whatever that might be. So I think of success looking like more diaspora
within Aptos. I would say more on a micro level. is a, he's a doctor and he lives in Kentucky where I grew up. And he's very good with finances, but you know, he's old school guy, you know, I hope two years from now, I visit him. And he, you know, he picks out his phone, he opens up an app and he and I see how he's just kind of yield farming.
opens up an app and he, and I see how he's just kind of yield farming.
Defi. That's what I, that's what I hope, right.
Instead of opening up Morgan Stanley and like all this stuff,
I hope that that's super simple and he's in there and it's,
and it's easy for him and he's making money. That's kind of what I hope.
Amazing. So like a, you know, trading engine on the background, but for the
average user in the future, a couple of years down the pike, they're just using a neobank that
Aptos powers basically to do all these really cool things in one spot. I love that. And so,
you know, really appreciate your time, Avery and Ash, ladies and gentlemen, Aptos is positioning
itself as the global trading engine. You know, any final things, Avery and Ash, that you both want to say in terms of pointing
the folks in the crowd and the folks that will be listening to this, you know, after
it's been recorded, to point them towards Aptos, be them developers, investors, or other
stakeholders.
Where do you think that they should go to learn more and to get active?
That's a great question.
You know, we try to be everywhere as much as we can.
So definitely we're at large events.
We're always here on X.
You can reach out to Ash and myself, depending on your needs.
And just, I'd say watch very closely.
There's going to be a lot of big moves by Optus this year.
Large efforts take a lot of time, but those efforts have been kicked off.
And we're going to be seeing
really you know we're going to see this future like hopefully happen really really quickly
in this space so keep keep tabs on us for sure
amazing love it well thank you so much for your time avery and ash really excited to hear about
what those things are and uh definitely will be keeping an eye so um everybody really appreciate
your time and uh check out apdos and uh if you haven't already, maybe go onto the chain. I'm definitely there. Thanks everyone. Have a good one. It's gonna take all of this pain
It's gonna take all of this pain
It's gonna take all of this pain Thank you.
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