Binance Labs, the venture capital arm of Binance- the largest crypto exchange in the world, has sealed a partnership agreement with Aptos Labs, a startup layer-1 blockchain.
This was announced via a blog post and a tweet on their official page. This comes after an earlier investment dedicated to Aptos’s commitment to infrastructure building.
The layer-1 blockchain was founded by a team of developers, strategists, creators, researchers, and more- all former employees of Meta (formerly Facebook). The startup, led by founder Mo Shaikh, concluded a strategic funding round in July this year, raising $150M.
Aptos Labs protocol is based on the open source provisions of Diem blockchain, a project that gave users high expectations but was canceled due to opposition from regulators.
Under this new project, the Aptos team aims to create a reliable and scalable chain that can change the industry. Utilizing innovations spanning three years of planning, upgrades, and improvements along with 350 developers, it will be the home for future-proof applications at scale.
Sharing the vision, Binance Labs made investments in Aptos Lab earlier this year, geared towards industry adoption acceleration. Jeffery Ma, the Investment Director at Binance Labs, stated at that time that Binance Labs sought in its future, said at that time that Binance Labs sought in its future portfolio companies qualities that would “change the industry” and the “number of people who would use the product after launch.”
In that light, “Aptos would contribute to bringing 100 million users to the crypto space, with the mission to create universal and fair access to decentralized assets for billions of people.”
And less than five months later, the accelerator of Binance announced its partnership agreement with Aptos Labs, indicating a long-term future between the two proponents of blockchain technology.
Founder of Binance and Head of Binance Labs, Yi He had this to say;
“We are excited to be working closely with the Aptos team. At Binance, we have always believed in the power of blockchain technology to benefit the masses, just like the Internet. We believe that the technological competitiveness of the Aptos team could bring increasing scalability to the blockchain infrastructure while also supporting novel use cases for Web3,” he added.
The funds from Binance Labs will be put into building a secure blockchain, expanding the team, and supporting the development of the layer-1 infrastructure. The team will introduce ecosystem initiatives and tools to further the community’s growth.
Speaking on the partnership, Mo Shaikh, CEO of Aptos, commented,
“Aptos is inherently designed to address today’s key challenges around mainstream Web3 adoption. We aim to deliver the most performant, production-ready blockchain through a flexible, modular architecture designed for people-first usability and engineered to upgrade and evolve.”
Another reason for Binance’s investment is the Aptos network’s use of Move, a programming language for running smart contracts.
It also achieves an impressive 130 TPS thanks to its parallel execution engine, high throughput, and low transaction costs. Several plans are in the works- including an upgraded similar execution engine and experimentation on performance optimization.
“The continued strategic support of the Binance Labs team helps us further empower our ecosystem to create next-generational applications that solve existing consumer challenges and the ones to come,” Mo Shaikh added.
After several successful funding rounds, an estimate of Aptos’s value put it in billions. Although, the amount Binance Labs invested in the blockchain remains undisclosed.
