Aptos Foundation and Layer Zero Proposal

Background The Aptos Foundation is proposing a strategic initiative aimed at enhancing user engagement between Stargate’s Aptos Bridge and the Aptos blockchain. Aptos, known for its fast speed, high throughput, and pioneering of the Move language, seeks to further expand its partnership with LayerZero through increased transactional limits, marketing initiatives, and educational resources to expand reach and utility. This proposal aligns with the Aptos Foundation's mission to support the growth of the Aptos ecosystem by leveraging LayerZero's technology for bridging and interoperability solutions across blockchains.

Differentiating Features of the Aptos Network Aptos is the blockchain network with everything you need to build your big idea.

Type Safety: Move, the programming language for Aptos smart contracts, is highly type-safe/strongly typed, reducing errors and enhancing security for developers.

Resource Management: Aptos introduces a unique approach where resources are created, passed around, and managed with customizable capabilities (creation, storage, deletion, copying) rather than merely modifying a database.

Transaction Speed: Aptos achieves sub-second finality, significantly reducing wait times for transaction completion.

Aptos Execution Engine: A multi-threaded, in-memory parallel execution engine capable of processing over 160,000 nontrivial Move transactions per second, showcasing exceptional throughput.

Scalability: Aptos supports parallel execution, allowing developers to maximize speedup without the need for declaring dependencies upfront, overcoming the scalability limits of sequential execution.

Innovations: -MOVE: A programming language designed for Web3, focusing on scarcity and access control. It ensures asset scarcity by default and supports representing any asset as a resource. -Block-STM: A parallel execution engine for smart contracts based on Software Transactional Memory, ensuring deterministic outcomes for transactions grouped in blocks.

Quorum Store: Separates data dissemination from metadata ordering, allowing for asynchronous, parallel data dissemination among validators.

Narwhal / Tusk: -Narwhal: A DAG-based mempool designed for efficient transaction storage and dissemination, maintaining high performance even in asynchronous networks. -Tusk: A zero-message asynchronous consensus protocol addressing latency and lost liveness issues, capable of achieving 160,000 transactions per second with less than 1 seconds of latency.

Proposal This proposal includes the initial phase beginning in February 2024, offering one or more grants of APT tokens to StargateDAO for encouraging increased usage of the Aptos Bridge. The proposal also commits to increasing transactional limits for both inbound and outbound transfers on the Aptos Bridge, providing marketing support and educational resources to promote the Aptos Bridge and Aptos ecosystem, and collaborating with the Aptos network and ecosystem partners.

Execution -Initial Setup and Launch: The kickoff grant and incentive structure will be provisioned to start on or around February 19th, 2024.

-Removing transaction limits: For both inbound and outbound transfers on the Aptos Bridge. --With the introduction of Pre-Crime to the Aptos Bridge, there is no need for any transfer limits to protect against malicious activity, as this is now done on a per-transaction basis. Pre-Crime is a novel mechanism built into LayerZero messaging that enables applications to intercept malicious transactions before they are delivered to the destination chain. Pre-Crime simulates incoming transactions against an application-defined rule set — or invariants — in the application’s Pre-Crime contract and evaluates the global application state across all the chains. If any rules within the set fail, then the transaction will be blocked at the source. This means the DAO can feel confident in lifting limits entirely, enabling a better user experience and facilitation of greater volume.

Marketing and Education: Jointly develop and launch a go-to-market campaign focusing on educating users about LayerZero, the Aptos Bridge, and the Aptos blockchain.

Evaluation and Potential Expansion: Jointly review the initiative's success beginning in March 2024 and regularly thereafter as needed for Aptos Foundation to decide on whether to continue providing APT grants, any potential adjustments to grant amounts, or the need for further support.

Summary This proposal to the StargateDAO represents a comprehensive strategy to both bolster the Aptos ecosystem and expand the reach and depth of LayerZero assets. By introducing APT provisioning, as well as the lifting of transfer limits, providing marketing support and education resources, and committing to ecosystem support, this proposal aims to drive significant growth in the usage of LayerZero via the Aptos Bridge and in the Aptos ecosystem.