Aptos is not a typical crypto startup. It was built by former Meta engineers who spent three years working on the Diem blockchain (formerly Libra) before spinning out as an independent network. Co-founders Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching took the Move programming language, the parallel execution engine, and the research investment that Meta poured into its failed crypto project and used it to build a general-purpose Layer 1.
Now Aptos is narrowing its focus. After experimenting across web3 gaming, culture, and other trends, the network is zeroing in on two areas where it sees the clearest opportunity: trading and AI infrastructure.
Ash Pampati, SVP and Head of Ecosystem at the Aptos Foundation, sat down with TheStreet Roundtable to explain the pivot and why it matters for the future of the network.
Trading is where the product-market fit is
Pampati says that after riding every trend the crypto industry has produced over the past few years, one conclusion became unavoidable: blockchains are best at markets.
“Blockchains are really good for determining truth. Crypto is really good for markets, both traditional and unique, finding users. We see that’s where product market fit is happening now, specifically within the trading space, whether it’s sending a stable coin from point A to B or actually doing high leverage trading on commodities 24/7.
Aptos has been building toward this for years. The network provides instant, low-cost transactions for builders and users, positioning it to capture the infrastructure layer underneath the next wave of on-chain exchanges, stablecoin payments, and 24/7 derivatives markets.
Stablecoin transaction volume hit $33 trillion in 2025, up 72% year-over-year. On-chain perpetual futures markets are growing rapidly across multiple networks. For a chain built on sub-second execution and parallel processing, the trading vertical is a natural home.
The AI agent opportunity
Beyond trading, Pampati sees AI as a longer-horizon but equally important bet.
“We’re very bullish on this concept and we think blockchains and permissionless and open networks are the only way for agents to transact in the internet economy,” he said.
The use cases include AI agents coordinating sequences of actions for humans and executing microtransaction payments autonomously with each other.
There is also a deeper infrastructure play. In Q1 2026, Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed that cloud revenue “would have been higher if we were able to meet that demand,” as compute capacity continues to fall short of enterprise need.
“What we hear in the market right now is that cloud revenue at Google is constrained by the lack of compute. All of the enterprise capex is going to expand that capacity. What we will see, which crypto always does, is the need for a global network that actually transfers that value efficiently to anyone who needs it and anyone who consumes it,” Pampati explained.
To that end, Aptos is building Shelby in partnership with Jump Crypto. Shelby is a high-performance, decentralized hot-storage network designed for continuous, high-frequency workloads. It connects a global mesh of nodes via a dedicated fiber-optic backbone, enabling AI pipelines, streaming data, and real-time applications to operate at cloud-like speeds while retaining full decentralization. Aptos serves as the native coordination layer, though Shelby is designed to be chain-agnostic, with support for Ethereum, Solana, and others.
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Aptos’ tech advantage
The reason Aptos can pursue this pivot without rebuilding from scratch comes down to its smart contract language.
“One of the unique things about Aptos’ stacked infrastructure is we came up with our own native programming smart contract language, which is called Aptos Move. That puts us at a strategic advantage to actually change the essence of the blockchain to fit use cases,” Pampati said.
Move was originally developed inside Meta for the Diem blockchain. When Aptos spun out, it took the language and evolved it into Aptos Move, adding features like higher-order functions, signed integer types, and lazy module loading through the Move 2.0 update. The next evolution, MonoMove, is a complete redesign of the Move VM targeting parallelism and single-thread performance improvements for 2026.
He explained how blockchains that rely on older smart contracting languages are limited in their capabilities, locked into design decisions that were made years ago.
“If you’re using more archaic smart contracting language, you’re actually constrained in many ways on the developer experience of what that blockchain might have been used for eight years ago,” he stated.
For AI, Aptos is building Shelby, a global data layer that connects distributed local compute capacity, functioning as a dedicated coordination network for AI infrastructure.
Aptos is not abandoning its general-purpose roots, it is focusing them. Meta’s research investment gave it an architecture that can adapt, and Aptos Move gives it the flexibility to build purpose-built infrastructure without forking the chain.
