Three years after its launch on the mainnet, Aptos remains in a distinctive spot within the blockchain space. Emerging from Meta’s abandoned Libra initiative and supported by prominent venture capitalists, it burst onto the scene with significant expectations and lofty valuations.
Aptos is characterized as a high-throughput, relatively cost-effective blockchain, developed using the Move programming language to enhance security. While its technical prowess is clear, the journey toward widespread adoption is still uncertain in an industry where the divide between technical excellence and actual application can be significant.
Ash Pampati will speak at Consensus 2025, held in Toronto from May 14-16.
I had a conversation with Ash Pampati, who leads the ecosystem at Aptos, to explore how the project is addressing its challenges, what differentiates it from its rivals, and to examine whether its institutional heritage serves as an asset or a liability in the current market.
Prior to his role at Aptos, Ash Pampati was the Business Lead at Metaplex Studios on the Solana blockchain and spent seven years at YouTube managing partnerships within the music industry. His transition from YouTube to blockchain informs his perspective on Aptos’s adoption efforts.
“Our core belief is that all global assets will eventually be digitized on-chain,” he stated.
This discussion has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Interviewer: I’ve observed that Aptos is moving towards a more grassroots builder community. What has sparked this transition?
Pampati: In Web3, aside from time, the most scarce resource is skilled developers. All ecosystems are in competition for innovative developers who are eager to bring their ideas to life despite challenges.
This community-building initiative starts with a critical question: How do we persuade a developer to choose Aptos over other blockchains, and Web3 over Web2?
Your developer engagement efforts in Southeast Asia have been impressive. Is this a deliberate strategy because these markets are more receptive, or is it due to established developers being tied to other platforms?
We have cultivated strong grassroots relationships with talented students globally—ranging from California to the U.K., Singapore, India, and Hong Kong. We’re demonstrating the advantages of Web3 and how Aptos, with its consumer-friendly, high-performance capabilities, can empower them to launch decentralized applications within a week if they already have the ideas and necessary infrastructure.
When you execute this well, readiness to invest in motivated and skilled individuals becomes crucial. We maintain a focused yet efficient grants program, assisting people via accelerators, providing direct funding from our foundation, or linking them with investors who share similar ambitions.
Solana had similar technical promises but ended up with an ecosystem filled with meme coins and gimmicky projects. With your institutional model, does Aptos risk the opposite challenge—having impressive technology but lacking speculation?
Aptos benefits from not having the clutter of meme coin culture impacting our identity, positively or negatively. We believe that tokens and tokenized assets enable the creation of businesses that might not have been viable in any other market, while also granting users access to businesses they otherwise couldn’t reach.
While I don’t think we should see 60,000 tokens created daily on Aptos, I do want to encourage a steady influx of high-quality projects that leverage tokens for community alignment and product development. Those are the kinds of builders we aim to attract.
What key areas is Aptos currently concentrating on?
We focus on three main areas to navigate adoption hurdles. Firstly, asset tokenization. Our central thesis posits that all the world’s assets will transition on-chain. We are currently witnessing a convergence of real-world assets and institutional interest with native decentralized finance, tokenized cryptocurrencies, and stablecoins. Our goal is to facilitate a network that supports the global trading mechanisms of these assets.
Secondly, payments play a significant role, leveraging Aptos’s technological advantages. In just three months, we’ve onboarded the top three stablecoins on Aptos, achieving a collective market cap approaching a billion dollars. Aptos is vastly more economical in terms of transaction costs—by a factor of one thousand compared to the next leading high-throughput blockchain. We also offer rapid finality with sub-second speeds.
Our third area of focus is decentralized infrastructure that supports emerging technologies. Through minor improvements, we can unlock capabilities related to storage and computation not previously seen in other blockchains. This paves the way for AI and machine learning infrastructure to operate on fully decentralized networks, facilitates data discoverability for banks, and transforms content delivery systems.
Your examples often emphasize institutional applications. Is there a disconnect between Aptos’ vision and the current state of the market?
Our PACT protocol embodies our vision for the next five years. It utilizes on-chain frameworks on a high-throughput blockchain with stablecoin integration to extend credit networks to individuals in traditionally underserved markets.
For instance, a rickshaw driver in India looking for a loan to repair their vehicle can now access one. The democratization of financial market access gives me chills, and I wish to accelerate this progress.
Within DeFi, which has demonstrated product-market fit over several cycles and has been driven primarily by the Ethereum and EVM layer 2 ecosystems, we’re investigating what a flourishing DeFi environment looks like on high-throughput blockchains that mitigate much of Web3’s friction.
Can my father, a doctor in Kentucky who saves all his passwords on notepads, effortlessly earn yield by parking stablecoins in a dependable space and engage in the on-chain economy with minimal hurdles? Streamlining the onboarding process for people to earn in the on-chain economy is truly thrilling for us.
In a climate where numerous crypto projects have fallen short of their commitments, what gives you confidence that Aptos will thrive where others have encountered difficulties?
Looking at the broader landscape of project founders: the macroeconomic atmosphere is unpredictable, and volatility will remain a feature of this market. However, foundations like ours are determined to stay on course and are prepared to invest in the right people to keep driving our mission forward. My greatest concern is seeing talented individuals leave Web3 for more stable paths. Any effort we can make to retain skilled individuals committed to the vision of decentralized networks, self-custody, and provenance is essential—for us and for any foundation or ecosystem.
We must ensure that innovation continues; otherwise, we will miss the opportunity to realize the transformation we envision within a timely framework. Progress should never be taken for granted. Sustained efforts are required to keep individuals inspired to build for the future.