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Team Bringing Diem Blockchain to Life Confirms $200M Raise, Says Coinbase and More Are Building on Devnet

Aptos announced the funding round Tuesday and said major crypto brands were already contributing code.

Updated May 11, 2023, 5:58 p.m. Published Mar 15, 2022, 2:59 p.m.

Aptos, a team helmed by former Facebook coders, announced a $200 million funding round Tuesday, confirming an earlier CoinDesk scoop.

The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with Multicoin Capital, 3 Arrows Capital, Tiger Global, FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and more also signing checks.

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Aptos is among a handful of teams looking to bring the Diem (formerly Libra) blockchain to life outside of the watchful eye of Meta (formerly Facebook). 0L is another project similarly looking to revive Diem, in part through its Carpe app.

In a second Aptos blog post on Tuesday, the team sketched out some of its blockchain’s tech specs.

Notably, Aptos said its devnet, meant for coders to contribute open-source code, is now live – with developers at big-name crypto firms offering their time.

“There are great companies like Anchorage, Binance, Blockorus, Coinbase [COIN], Livepeer, Moonclave, Paxos, Paymagic, Rarible and Streaming Fast in our community already giving feedback, and contributing code on Devnet,” Aptos wrote.

“We have worked with the Aptos founders over the last few years to bring to life the decentralized vision we both share,” Joe Lallouz, head of product at Coinbase Cloud told CoinDesk in an email. “We are incredibly excited to support them and their team with solutions and infrastructure to bring more participants and builders to the ecosystem.” (Coinbase was a member of the Diem Association from its launch in mid-2019.)

In its blog post, Aptos ID’d “next-gen social media platforms, rich [non-fungible token] experiences, Web 3 games, creator-first media and entertainment businesses, cheap and secure payments, [decentralized finance]-integrated fintech products, and so much more,” as potential applications to live on Aptos.

UPDATE (March 15, 16:00 UTC): Adds Coinbase comment.

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Zack Seward

Zack Seward is CoinDesk’s contributing editor-at-large. Up until July 2022, he served as CoinDesk’s deputy editor-in-chief. Prior to joining CoinDesk in November 2018, he was the editor-in-chief of Technical.ly, a news site focused on local tech communities on the U.S. East Coast. Before that, Seward worked as a reporter covering business and technology for a pair of NPR member stations, WHYY in Philadelphia and WXXI in Rochester, New York. Seward originally hails from San Francisco and went to college at the University of Chicago. He worked at the PBS NewsHour in Washington, D.C., before attending Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.