Welcome back to Chain Reaction, a podcast diving deep into stories, backgrounds and the latest news with the biggest names in crypto.
For this week’s episode, I sat down with Mo Shaikh, co-founder and CEO of the layer-1 blockchain Aptos. Shaikh is a three-time founder with over a decade of experience in financial services as well as blockchain technology and crypto. He also worked on blockchain strategic partnerships for Novi, Meta’s wallet, and was the strategy director at ConsenSys.
“When we’re thinking about Aptos, we certainly thought that the people need a new form of sharing information digitally and being able to share that information and economic value digitally in more efficient, more fair ways,” Shaikh said during the podcast. “That’s the mission that we’re on.”
Last year was huge for Aptos — the blockchain launched publicly and raised about $400 million in funding amid a bear market, Shaikh shared. The new-ish layer-1 received backing from major investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Circle Ventures and the now-defunct FTX Ventures, to name a few.
Aptos wants to reach billions of people without disruption or downtime, while giving thousands of transactions per second and sub-second latency, Shaikh shared. “All these things put together can rival not only other previous generations of blockchains and scaling solutions that we’re seeing in the market, but they’re now starting to challenge the internet and the way economic value and information moves across the world itself.”
Looking forward to 2023, Aptos plans to make it a “year of intention,” Shaikh said. “I think it’s a year of intention for the entire industry.”
There will be a new evolution to existing web3 products that have been out in the market, while big traditional players — like its Google partnership — that were previously “sitting on the sidelines” are going to dive into the space “in a big way,” he added.
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