MC Interview | On Aptos, 7 out of top 10 applications are from Indian founders: CTO Avery Ching

Avery Ching, Co-founder and CTO, Aptos

Avery Ching, co-founder and chief technology officer of Aptos, was back in India last week, his second trip in less than six months, when Moneycontrol caught up with him to trace the road ahead for the startup.

The L1 blockchain company entered the region only last year as one of its test markets. And, India quickly grew to become one of its biggest markets by the size of active monthly users on the blockchain.

Aptos was co-founded in 2022 by Ching and Mo Shaikh, both former Meta employees. Ching led Meta’s crypto platform team, focusing on all aspects of L1 blockchain infrastructure development and most notably, the Diem (formerly named Libra) blockchain. Ching and Shaikh are among the the most prominent names in the global blockchain landscape.

The startup has raised over $350 million so far from marquee investors like Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from Tiger Global, Katie Haun, Multicoin Capital, 3 Arrows Capital, FTX Ventures and Coinbase Ventures.

During the interaction with Moneycontrol at the India Blockchain Week in Bengaluru, Ching shared his plans for India expansion, funding into Indian Web3 startups, finding talent, Aptos’ business strategies and more.

Excerpts from the interaction:

How do you see the India opportunity for Aptos? What’s your game plan for this region?

India is an area we're going to invest heavily. I was here twice this year, and some of our colleagues are stationed here permanently. We're hoping to build an office over time and step up our efforts here as we see the adoption happening from college developers all the way to the larger enterprises.

There are government opportunities as well. The Indian government is very progressive when it comes to blockchain adoption and something that we are keen to help with.

India is going to be one of those places in the world we will double down on.

Today, seven of our top 10 applications are from Indian founders. Around 6.5 million out of our 8.5 million monthly active addresses are from people in India… Being on the ground has confirmed the excitement here. It's a place that we feel also fits the ethos of what Aptos is trying to do. We want massive scale of the internet to be decentralised. And India's got that population.

India's cost conscious. That's exactly what fits off this blockchain. Aptos is the most scalable, cheapest blockchain in the world to use. It can support all the use cases that anyone from a small developer to the largest conglomerates in India can go on with high assurability.

Do you see enough mature use cases coming out of India in the Web3 space?

Absolutely. Aptos is working with companies like KGeN (Kratos Gamer Network), Stan who are extremely mature. These are well-tenured founders who have done other businesses before. Manish Agarwal, founder of KGeN, was the CEO of Nazara.

We've seen them stand out as well. They have very good connections in the space. And overall, there's a maturity there that comes with tenure, and also building a sustainable business in Web3 that a lot of people don't think about.

I think seeing KGeN be profitable and revenue generating is really incredible, and probably less than 1 percent of all Web3 companies have turned profitable.

You have some interesting bets in India such as KGeN, which is doing really well, and Chingari that has been struggling to find its ground. Will you invest more in Indian startups?

I think it's a no-brainer for us… It may be a long flight, but when you get on the ground, you see the amazing builders that are coming here that are just looking to develop innovative things, and it's super inspiring for me, personally.

Do you see enough developed talent in India, or skilled talent for Web3 and blockchain?

I would say some of the best talent in the world is here for developing Web3.

I've been to quite a few hackathons, and the Unfold 2024 hackathon (by CoinDCX) had some of the more innovative apps than I've seen in this space. I was very impressed.

Coming to Aptos, how is the L1 blockchain that started in 2022 differentiating when there are existing players like Avalanche, Bitcoin, Solana and Ethereum blockchains?

We have our own new programming language Move, which is intended to help developers get from the idea to production as fast and as quickly and safely as possible. When you think about developing on Solidity or other languages, we've seen so many bugs and hacks where we've just lost hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars in sum.

Alongside Move, I'd say there're three things that blockchain can do for you. They scale, they have a latency aspect, they have also a cost aspect. And this is an area where Aptos really sets the bar in all these three. This allows us to reach large global populations, and not just in the kind of the proof of concepts of Web3 typically is.

Aptos was also able to set the daily transaction record in mainnet at 326 million transactions in a single day. That's more than 3,700 transactions per second (TPS), and Aptos actually holds the top four records of TPS speed in this space, all set in 2024.

The next best record after our top four records is around 60-70 million. So, it shows that we're way ahead in the scalability game and cost game.

Have you kept a track of the number of applications and use cases that have so far been developed on Aptos? Could you share some of the moonshot innovations that developers have come up with?

Yeah, there's quite a few. There was this really cool emoji coin app that was deployed on Aptos just about two weeks ago. The idea is that you can create communities around emojis. And then you can buy and sell and trade those emojis and use them in other parts of the ecosystem.

You can transact with them on Panora exchange. And so that's a really cool take on a Web2 concept. Like today we can react and add emojis to things, but the emojis are kind of different. These are finite emojis.

On the enterprise side, NBC Universal has a multi-year contract with Aptos to build out innovative applications around its set of properties.

They have a very unique problem where they have so many different businesses, from Rotten Tomatoes to theme parks to content creation. There's Universal Studios, all that fun stuff. How do they have a central way for these properties to be able to create a digital ID for customers, to be able to transact and take that identity from property to property, whether it's a virtual or a physical property.

So they're thinking about massive scale. They have tens of millions of customers, and how do they leverage blockchain for that. So that's definitely an area that we're really excited about.

The FTX collapse happened when Aptos was in its early days in 2022. FTX was a significant investor for you. Did that have an impact for you and your plans back then?

I think the impact of FTX hit the whole market, not just Aptos. But for us specifically, we've always been kind of building in the bear (market), to be honest.

So I think we just get used to it. And I think what's important to remember is what we're doing and why we're doing it. What we're trying to do at Aptos is to build a technology that scales to the entire internet. It's not like a one-year or two-year or three-year journey. It's going to take a decade or more to kind of get there. So, while the markets may be wild and turbulent, while there'd be so many different things happening, whether it's FTX or others, we're sort of focussing on the long-term outcomes.

Maybe, crypto is not hot right now, and that's okay. We keep building and developing our infrastructure so that when people are starting to build again in crypto, we'll be ready for their use cases and have the best infrastructure possible for them.

With AI and Gen AI maturing so fast, does it have a direct impact on blockchain and Web3 ecosystem?

It does, for sure. AI has changed all our lives in the way that we interact. A lot of us use ChatGPT or Gemini or other tools to help us, like personal assistants in some way. It's no different for blockchain.

So what we've been able to benefit from, from AI, is if people are learning a new language like Move, it's much easier to come from Solidity or from any other programming language. It lowers the barrier of adoption for people learning new languages, which is fantastic for us.

On the flip side, I think AI presents an interesting challenge around how content and data is used in these models. This is where blockchain can really help. So blockchain is a base layer for storing an immutable history, a record of, if we're having this conversation, you posted it on the internet somewhere, now we have a kind of immutable place in history through blockchain that we can receive for that.

And that then can be used as a part of a model, but maybe that attribution is given back to this particular piece of content on the blockchain, or even reward can be shared back if there are kind of revenue being generated as a part of that. We're working with companies like Overlay in this area.

From a global as well as India perspective, what's going to be the business focus area for Aptos in the next two to three years?

I would say that it's a bit of a long-term vision, but we look at building this flywheel of finance, loyalty, ad tech, and e-commerce together is one very interesting virtuous cycle.

To give an example. If you have something like KGeN building out a very good infrastructure platform for gaming, whether it's reputation scores or other things. Now issuing loyalty points to people that play games on the platform.

Those loyalty points then may be used to identify patterns of behaviour across those customers. They can be used for advertisements. It can also be used to, maybe, start to transact on payment rails to think about how to buy in-app items. Now you start to see this flywheel of payments, loyalty points, and commerce and advertising start to play together in one very nice spectrum.

Also read: Bitcoin crossing $100,000 an inflection point, crypto is here to stay, says Aptos co-founder Avery Ching