Aptos: why the hype?

It's one of the sensations of this early 2023 on the crypto market. The Aptos project's cryptocurrency, APT, has gained 400% in one month and has just topped 2.5 billion in capitalisation.

The project isn't too well known in Europe, but in the US it's getting a lot of buzz, mainly for two reasons:

• The first is that it's backed by almost all the big investors in the sector. Andreessen Horowitz, Circle, Binance, Coinbase, PayPal, Jump Crypto, Multicoin, and even FTX - before it exploded - have invested in the project. In total, all these players have injected $350 million.
• The second is that it was created by former engineers from the Diem project, the digital currency project of Meta (ex-Facebook) abandoned in 2022.

The aim of Aptos is not to take over the Diem project completely, but to build on its legacy, and on what the developers have learned about the "Move" programming language.

"At the end of the Diem adventure, we said to ourselves that we shouldn't stop there," explains Mohammad Shaikh, co-founder of Aptos, who was visiting Paris. "A large part of the team followed us for this new project."