The 8 Major Driving Forces of the Aptos Network

Aptos, as a blockchain network with extremely low latency and high throughput, has brought revolutionary changes to developers building Web3 applications. This article will introduce the 8 major innovative driving forces that are rapidly advancing the Aptos network.

1. Move Language Optimization Application Development

The Move language provides developers on Aptos with a better development environment, enhancing development efficiency. This expressive and easy-to-use programming language is designed for secure asset management. Aptos shares many core design principles with Move, making it an efficient and enjoyable Move development platform.

Aptos has improved the Move ecosystem through various features, including a comprehensive security architecture, detailed configurable gas metering, and code upgradeability. Move validators provide additional security guarantees for smart contracts. Many early researchers and developers of the Move language remain active in the Aptos ecosystem, continuously enhancing the Move language and community.

2. Block-STM provides more programming freedom

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

Block-STM enables developers to code freely, achieving higher throughput and lower latency for practical applications. It supports a richer atomicity than other parallel execution environments without the need to split operations into multiple transactions, thereby enhancing the user experience.

3. On-chain Governance and Decentralization

Aptos has a built-in on-chain governance mechanism that enables seamless changes to network and virtual machine configurations, supporting a truly decentralized and permissionless Layer 1 network. Since its launch, the Aptos community has been able to create and vote on proposals that affect blockchain behavior, including epoch duration, validator stake thresholds, core code upgrades, and more.

4. AptosBFTv4 Efficient Consensus

AptosBFTv4 is the first production-grade blockchain BFT protocol with a strict correctness proof. It is optimistically responsive, providing low latency and high throughput. Compared to Hotstuff, AptosBFTv4 reduces the commit latency from 3 steps to 2 steps, decreasing latency by 33% without sacrificing communication complexity.

The protocol was designed with security and upgradability in mind, clearly separating invariants for easier auditing. Even if individual nodes go offline, Aptos can ensure the normal operation of the entire network, thanks to the maintenance of the on-chain reputation system.

5. Security Measures to Enhance User Confidence

Aptos accounts support flexible key management, including features such as key rotation, encryption agility, and hybrid custody models. The decoupling of accounts and 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 signs, reducing security risks such as phishing. Aptos also restricts the validity of transactions through triple protection with serial number, expiration time, and chain ID.

Aptos's consensus protocol and authenticated storage seamlessly support lightweight clients, providing a more secure and reliable user experience. The network welcomes anyone to connect to full nodes for direct access to verified data.

6. Future-oriented Modular Architecture

Every system component of Aptos is designed with modularity and flexibility in mind. This architecture supports frequent upgrades, allowing the blockchain to quickly adopt the latest technological advancements and support emerging use cases.

Modular design brings flexibility to the client and is optimized for zero-downtime upgrades. Aptos also includes an embedded on-chain change management protocol that allows for the rapid deployment of new technological innovations.

7. Proposal-Based Reward Mechanism

Aptos has implemented a proposal performance-based staking reward system to promote a greater degree of decentralization. This system has a higher timeout duration than the voting-based reward mechanism and is less sensitive to cross-regional latency.

This increases the reward rate for nodes in remote areas and mitigates the impact of geographical location. The 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 uses the Jellyfish Merkle Tree (JMT) design, utilizing a monotonically increasing version-based key pattern to optimize the underlying storage engine. JMT achieves a practical balance between CPU, I/O, and storage space.

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