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Chorus One announces staking support for APTOS Network

Chorus One
Chorus One
April 21, 2023
5 min read
April 21, 2023
5 min read

We’re excited to announce that Chorus One is now live on the APTOS Network, after successful participation in the Aptos Previewnet Program - a quarterly program that Aptos intends to run to both evaluate performance of existing and aspiring node operators who wish to operate nodes on Mainnet, and test out new features.

The Aptos ecosystem is bustling with activity as developers work on a range of innovative projects such as NFTs, DeFi applications, DEXs, wallets, and bridges. You can head to this repo for notable examples of these projects, showcasing the diverse and dynamic nature of the Aptos community's development efforts.

What is Aptos?

Aptos is a high-performance layer 1 proof-of-stake protocol that aims to be one of the safest and most scalable protocols, with a core focus on user experience. It was initiated by Aptos Labs, a venture founded by former engineers and scientists from Diem (formerly Facebook), with a vision to build their own, permissionless blockchain. Aptos is built using the Move programming language along with the Move Virtual Machine for dApp development. The team behind Aptos was actively involved in the development of Move, with a focus on flexibility, customizable transaction logic, and provability to enhance the safety of writing smart contracts.

Cutting Edge Solutions

Aptos is designed to prioritize scalability, safety, reliability, and upgradability, addressing common problems faced by existing protocols such as outages, high costs, slow transaction processing speed, and security concerns. It achieves this through innovative techniques like flexible private key management and hybrid custody services to enhance user safety.

Additionally, it utilizes a unique design that enables quick and efficient transaction processing through a parallelized and modular pipeline approach, resulting in high transaction throughput and minimal delays. More on this next.

Aptos Technical Caveats and USPs

  1. Upgradability

Aptos is designed with a strong focus on upgradability and evolution over time. It achieves this through various approaches, such as storing configuration information on the blockchain and customizable state synchronization protocols. This allows node operators to choose synchronization strategies that align with their requirements, making it user-friendly for both users and developers. The flexible upgradeability framework of Aptos ensures smooth adaptation to changing requirements in the future.

  1. Security

Aptos prioritizes security and performance to enhance user experience (UX). It addresses key management challenges through flexible private key management and hybrid custody services, catering to both new and experienced users. This allows users to create multiple accounts that are not linked to each other but can be managed using a single wallet. It also enables trusted custodians to rotate private keys in case of certain circumstances, implemented on-chain at the base layer to prevent damages caused by key mismanagement.

In addition, Aptos enhances security by providing transaction transparency before signing, helping users detect malicious transactions and automatically reject them, thus improving end-user security and UX.

For developers, Aptos streamlines smart contract development through Move, which introduces a new type of digital object that can be passed as arguments and returned by functions, making smart contract interactions more efficient and preventing issues like dangling references and memory leaks. The Move Prover, a formal verifier, also allows developers to verify their code before deployment, ensuring it behaves as intended in a live environment.

  1. High Performance and Scalability

Blockchain transactions can be processed sequentially or in parallel (simultaneously) Aptos uses 'parallel execution' - a concept inspired by Solana's sealevel runtime - to improve performance.

It achieves parallel processing through its Block-STM execution engine, which allows transactions to be processed in parallel as long as there are no conflicts in data or accounts. Transactions are processed in batches, and invalid batches are re-executed after validation. This allows developers to build products that process multiple transactions at once, enabling scalability on a single chain.

Aptos has achieved over 170,000 transactions per second (TPS) in experiments, which is much faster than Ethereum's 30 TPS and Solana’s 10,000 TPS.

Aptos also has a modular transaction lifecycle, where broadcasting, block metadata ordering, and batching storage occur separately and concurrently, leveraging available computing resources for parallel execution. Additionally, the consensus phase is separate from transaction dissemination and execution, reducing bandwidth requirements and improving scalability.

Governance

Unlike most other PoS networks,  there is a maximum stake limit in Aptos to prevent centralization of voting power. Staking in Aptos involves three personas: owner, operator, and voter. The owner owns the funds, the operator performs validation, and the voter participates in governance. Validators take turns proposing new blocks and earn rewards based on their reputation. Epochs, which are time intervals on Aptos, dictate events like reward payment and lock-up periods. Parameters like stake limits and epochs are subject to on-chain governance by the Aptos community.

How Proposals are made and resolved:

  1. The Aptos community suggests an Aptos Improvement Proposal (AIP) on GitHub in the Aptos Foundation AIP repository.
  2. If the proposal is deemed appropriate, an on-chain proposal is created for the AIP using the aptos_governance module.
  3. Voters then cast their votes on-chain using the aptos_governance module.
  4. If the proposal receives sufficient support, it can be resolved.
  5. Governance requires a minimum number of votes to be cast by an expiration threshold. However, if more than 50% of the total supply votes in favor of the proposal before the expiration threshold, the proposal can be executed without waiting for the full voting period.
Source: https://aptos.dev/concepts/governance/

Staking $APT with Chorus One

APT can be delegated to Chorus One delegation pool

Current Inflation Rate: 8%

Current Staking APR: 6.65%

For any other questions, reach out to staking@chorus.one.

Useful links, tools, and resources

Website: https://aptoslabs.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/aptoslabs

GitHub: https://github.com/aptos-labs/aptos-core/

Docs: https://aptos.dev/

Forum: https://forum.aptoslabs.com/

Whitepaper: https://github.com/aptos-labs/aptos-core/blob/main/developer-docs-site/static/papers/whitepaper.pdf

Explorer: https://explorer.aptoslabs.com/

About Chorus One

Chorus One is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 40+ Proof-of-Stake networks including Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche, and Near amongst others. Since 2018, we have been at the forefront of the PoS industry and now offer easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invest in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures. We are a team of over 50 passionate individuals spread throughout the globe who believe in the transformative power of blockchain technology.

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