Crypto Startup by Former Meta Employees Secures $200 Million Fund

Based on the report by Aptos Labs, the strategic investment into the blockchain project will help Aptos accelerate the development of their mainnet, which is planned to be released by the end of 2022.

The $200M funding round was led by a crypto-focused venture capital firm a16z and supported by several other known investors in the blockchain industry including Three Arrows Capital, ParaFi Capital, Multicoin Capital, Tiger Global, FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Katie Haun, Irongrey, Variant, BlockTower, Hashed, and Paxos.

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The two co-founders of Aptos Mo Shaikh and Avery ching, who both worked at Meta, will be at the helm of the project, which is expected to be an independent blockchain network like, for instance, Ethereum. Aptos will be looking to give users a scalable blockchain network with lesser gas fees and increased transaction speed.

Aptos has already launched its devnet where developers are able to register on the platform and access onboarding material that includes relevant documents, and information on the core development tools of the project.

When speaking with TechCrunch, the co-founder of Aptos Mo Shaikh spoke on the departure from Meta, and the future of Aptos, stating:

"We’re certainly excited about a shared vision for the web3 world. A good thing about us being external is that we can focus on everyone now, we don’t have to just focus on Meta. Our goal is to work with some of the world’s largest brands and tech companies to really build a web3 ecosystem for the masses."

Other than that, according to Shaikh, the Aptos development team is working closely with their counterparts from Ethereum and Solidity in order to create a separate Layer 1 network where they could "build on top of natively", and attract developers who would work on Meta’s own programming language Move.

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