Exploring the 8 Major Innovative Driving Forces of the Aptos Network

Aptos, as one of the blockchains with the lowest latency and highest throughput in the cryptocurrency market, has brought significant changes for developers building web3 applications. This article will introduce 8 core innovations that drive the development of the Aptos network.

1. Move Language: A Programming Language More Suitable for Building Applications

Move is an expressive and easy-to-use programming language designed specifically for secure asset management. Aptos shares many core design principles with Move, making it an efficient and enjoyable Move development platform. Aptos has significantly enhanced the Move ecosystem by adding multiple features, including a robust security architecture, detailed configurable gas metering, and code upgradeability. Move validators provide additional guarantees for contract invariants and are actively scaled in Aptos.

2. Block-STM: Bringing More Programming Freedom

Block-STM is a new type of smart contract parallel execution engine that accelerates transaction processing speed without compromising the development experience. It enables developers to code without restrictions, achieving higher throughput and lower latency for real-world use cases. Block-STM supports a richer atomicity than other parallel execution environments, eliminating the need to split operations into multiple transactions.

3. On-chain Governance and Decentralization

Aptos features built-in on-chain governance that allows for seamless network and virtual machine configuration changes. The community can create and vote on proposals that affect blockchain behavior, including modifying epoch duration, validator stakes, core code upgrades, and more. This ensures true decentralization and a permissionless layer 1 network.

4. AptosBFTv4: Efficient Consensus Mechanism

AptosBFTv4 is the first production blockchain BFT protocol with a strict correctness proof. It improves upon Hotstuff by reducing the commit latency from 3 steps to 2 steps, achieving a 33% reduction in latency without sacrificing communication compensation. The protocol considers security rigor and upgradability, making it the fastest production-ready Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus protocol.

5. Security Mechanisms to Enhance User Confidence

Aptos accounts support flexible key management, including key rotation, encryption agility, and hybrid custody models. Wallets can use transaction pre-execution to interpret transaction results before the user signs, mitigating security risks such as phishing. Aptos also restricts the feasibility of each transaction, protecting signers through serial numbers, expiration times, and chain IDs.

6. Future-oriented Modular Architecture

Aptos has high upgradability, with various areas of the system designed with modularity and flexibility in mind. This allows the blockchain to quickly adopt the latest technological advancements and support emerging use cases. Aptos includes an embedded on-chain change management protocol that enables rapid deployment of innovations and supports new Web3 application scenarios.

7. Proposal-Based Rewards System

Aptos has implemented a staking reward system based on proposal performance to promote greater decentralization. Compared to voting-based systems, this approach is less sensitive to cross-region latency, increases the reward rate for nodes in remote areas, and mitigates the impact of geographical location on rewards.

8. High-Performance Sparse Merkle Tree

Aptos uses the Jellyfish Merkle Tree (JMT) design to achieve a balance between CPU, I/O, and storage usage. In addition to JMT, there is also an in-memory lock-free sparse Merkle tree implementation specifically designed for caching and parallelization, which works in conjunction with Block-STM to promote high-performance global state updates.

These innovations make Aptos a high-performance, secure, and flexible blockchain platform, providing an excellent experience for developers and users. As technology continues to evolve, Aptos is expected to play an increasingly important role in the Web3 ecosystem.