Aptos' Avery Ching: Building Bridges to TradFi

You could say Aptos, co-founded by Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, was on the move in 2024.

The layer-1 blockchain, a descendant of Facebook's discontinued Libra (later Diem) project, landed integrations with such TradFi players as Stripe, Franklin Templeton and BlackRock. Aptos also released a new version of its smart contract programming language, Move, which is finding usage outside the project's own ecosystem: the language was used to create Movement, a layer-2 network running on top of Ethereum.

Heading into 2025, the market's appetite for faster-executing blockchains, evidenced by enthusiasm for Solana over Ethereum, may augur well for Aptos, a VC-funded project built with scalability in mind.

CoinDesk recently caught up with Ching, Aptos' CTO and one of the Most Influential figures of 2024, to talk about mainstream financial adoption of DeFi, his expectations for the year ahead, and more.

When you look back at 2024, what were your main personal highlights while working on Aptos?

At the very top of my list was Aptos’ first developer conference, Aptos Experience, in Seoul. Meeting and building alongside hundreds of innovative developers across the top projects in the ecosystem was as energizing as it was validating. I'm already looking forward to the next one.

We’re always working to improve the developer experience and innovating on the user experience and system scalability. We shipped our first release of Move 2, drove the consensus protocol to the theoretical optimal latency, and scaled the network. Aptos set the daily transaction record at 326 million in a single day and holds the top four daily records. We launched Aptos Build, a comprehensive suite of developer tools to build on Aptos. Finally, we made huge inroads in improving the user experience with AptosConnect and Aptos Keyless.Aptos has been moving the needle on industry-wide benchmarks, making huge progress towards ushering in the next iteration of finance, including achieving sub-second latency — near-instant transactions on Aptos.

What were your biggest challenges in building Aptos this year?

Time!! Building takes time and relies on tech and infra. We've been focused on building, integrating, upgrading, and bridging to make Aptos the home for high-performance DeFi and boosting interoperability with EVM ecosystems — all powered by Move on Aptos.

Aptos has made a string of high-profile TradFi partnerships this year. On a scale of 1-10, what stage are we at in terms of mainstream financial adoption of DeFi?

I like to say that blockchain is where the internet was in the late-1990s: we’re still so early. I know we say that a lot in this industry, but within the context of mainstream financial adoption, it's especially true.

We've made tremendous progress on this front in 2024, both on the tech front with products like Aptos Ascend, our digital asset management platform for financial institutions, and with new integrations from Stripe, Circle and Tether. Franklin Templeton, Blackrock, Libre, and others deployed tokenized assets on Aptos.

How might the new US administration and changes at institutions like the SEC impact institutional adoption of DeFi in 2025?

It was encouraging to see Congress working in a significantly bipartisan way to advance the regulatory framework in the US this past year. Groups like the Blockchain Association (which we joined last year) will also be important venues for sharing perspectives, real world context, and connecting government and industry leaders.Moving toward a regulatory framework that enables Web3 innovation generated from the US would be a great signal for our industry.

What other big trends do you foresee for 2025?

As more energy and excitement surrounds crypto heading into next year, we’re seeing many more developers gaining interest in web3. At Aptos Labs, we’ve been building for the future scale of the 5 billion people who use the Internet. We are particularly excited about the flywheel of finance, loyalty, commerce, and ad tech and are working closely with partners like K-gen and STAN on innovation in this space.

A prime example is our recent partnership with NBCUniversal. Earlier in 2024, we announced a multi-year collaboration to reimagine fan engagement through on-chain experiences. This isn't just a token partnership — it's a strategic effort to create deeper, more meaningful connections between entertainment brands and their audiences. By integrating customer loyalty programs and interactive gaming experiences on the Aptos network, we're demonstrating how blockchain can transform traditional engagement models into something better for the producers of content, and those who enjoy it.

This profile is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year's nominees, click here.