8 Key Innovations 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 driving the development of the Aptos network.

1. Move Language Optimization Application Development

Aptos integrates the Move language, providing developers with better development conditions. Move is an expressive and easy-to-use programming language designed for secure asset management. Aptos and Move share many core design principles, making Aptos an efficient and enjoyable Move development environment.

Aptos has greatly improved the Move ecosystem by adding multiple features at the language and framework levels, including a comprehensive security architecture, detailed configurable fuel metering, and code upgradeability. Move validators provide additional guarantees for smart contract invariants and are actively expanded in Aptos.

Many early researchers and developers of the Move language continue to build within the Aptos ecosystem, continuously enhancing the Move language and community. After four years of testing and validation, Move has become a mature development language ready for production.

2. Block-STM provides more programming freedom

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

Unlike other parallel execution engines that require reading and writing data to break transaction atomicity, Block-STM allows developers to code without restrictions and achieve higher throughput and lower latency for real-world use cases. Developers can easily build highly parallelized applications with Block-STM, supporting richer atomicity, thereby enhancing user experience by reducing latency and improving cost efficiency.

3. On-chain governance promotes decentralization

Aptos has a built-in on-chain governance mechanism that enables seamless network and virtual machine configuration changes, supporting a truly decentralized and permissionless Layer 1. The Aptos incentivized testnet and mainnet have proven this.

Since its inception, the Aptos community has been able to create and vote on proposals that affect blockchain behavior. These proposals include: modifying the epoch duration, requirements for validator stake, software upgrades to the core blockchain code, and upgrades to the Aptos framework modules, among others.

4. AptosBFTv4 Efficient Consensus

AptosBFTv4 is the first production-grade blockchain BFT protocol with strict correctness proofs. This protocol is optimistically responsive, providing low latency and high throughput, fully utilizing the underlying network. Compared to Hotstuff, AptosBFTv4 reduces the submission delay from 3 steps to 2, cutting the delay by 33% without sacrificing communication compensation.

AptosBFTv4 takes into account security rigor and upgradability during implementation, clearly separating invariants for isolation and effective auditing. The same software stack has undergone 4 upgrades and has been tested on the live network, demonstrating the thoroughness and robustness of its development process.

Aptos also ensures the overall network uptime through an on-chain reputation system, even when individual nodes go offline. This system considers past availability and performance as indicators for the future, automatically minimizing the negative impact of underperforming validators.

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. The hybrid custody model supports advanced recovery solutions and account management, helping to bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3.

Wallets can use transaction pre-execution to explain the transaction results before the user signs, reducing security risks such as phishing. Aptos also restricts the validity of each transaction through a triple protection mechanism involving serial numbers, expiration times, and chain IDs to prevent errors or attacks.

The Aptos consensus protocol and verified storage provide seamless support for lightweight client protocols, offering a more secure and reliable user experience. The network welcomes anyone to connect to full nodes for direct access to validated data, emphasizing the Web3 principle of "trustless, verify."

6. Future-oriented Modular Architecture

Aptos was designed from the beginning 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 creates client flexibility and is optimized for frequent upgrades with zero downtime. Aptos includes an embedded on-chain change management protocol that enables rapid deployment of new technological innovations and supports new Web3 use cases.

7. Proposal-Based Reward System

Aptos has implemented a proposal performance-based reward system as a staking reward system to promote greater decentralization. This system has a higher timeout than voting-based reward models and is less sensitive to cross-region latency.

The proposal-based system has increased the reward rate for nodes in remote areas and mitigated the impact of geographical distribution. The reward model still takes voting behavior into account, as good voting performance will affect the probability of electing proposers. This approach helps achieve a more balanced distribution of nodes.

8. High-Performance Sparse Merkle Tree

Aptos uses the Jellyfish Merkle Tree ( JMT ) design, leveraging a monotonically increasing version-based key pattern to optimize the write operations of the underlying storage engine. JMT achieves a practical balance between CPU, I/O, and storage usage, ensuring good performance while controlling the size of state data on disk.

Apart from JMT, Aptos also has an in-memory, lock-free sparse Merkle tree implementation designed for caching and parallelization. This works in conjunction with Block-STM to facilitate high-performance global state updates.

These innovations have collectively driven the development of the Aptos network, making it an efficient, secure, and easy-to-develop blockchain platform.