Former Meta staff and primary figures that worked on its defunc stablecoin initiative Diem have reportedly managed to reel in $200 million of capital injection, to expand a new project called “Aptos”. 

Specifically, Aptos was co-founded by former Novi – Meta’s crypto unit – strategic partnerships lead Mo Shaikh and tech lead Avery Ching. The pair are now taking up the Head roles – CEO and CTO respectively – for the new company. 

The duo departed from their firm in December last year, before Diem was up for purchase by Silvergate Capital in February 2021. 

The team is reportedly developing a decentralized Layer 1 blockchain that is partially based on Move – the coding language previously built by Diem. The firm is currently in the middle of building its developer ecosystem and reeling in additional initiatives to the blockchain, which is promoted as a cheap, secure, and scalable network.

As revealed via a March 16 announcement, Aptos’ $200 million strategic funding round was reportedly led by capital venture heavyweight Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with major names in the fields like Three Arrows Capital, FTX Ventures, Paxos and Coinbase Ventures throwing their weights behind. 

The acquired capital injection will reportedly be channeled towards onboarding additional talents to provide assistance to “companies, brands, and builders”, who are seeking to build projects on the Aptos blockchain, with the startup teasing that several DeFi, NFT, Web3, social media and payments projects are already in the works.

In its note to TechCrunch, Aptos reportedly revealed that it is “well off into the unicorn territory” of around $1 billion.

Apart from the news of the capital injection, Aptos additionally introduced a public devnet with an open-source codebase. The team shared that major players like Anchorage, Binance, and Coinbase have been providing guidance and contributing code for the devnet.

“Later in Q2, there will be an incentivized testnet to help scale the network and stress test it as it marches toward mainnet. We invite validators and other infrastructure providers to join our community now in anticipation of that.”