Layer by Layer: Aptos Ecosystem Sees Influx of Users but Limited Growth in DeFi Activity

It has been an eventful year for the crypto industry thus far, characterized by a continually escalating tug-of-war between financial regulators, law enforcement agencies, lawmakers, and both traditional financial and crypto institutions, as each entity has sought to shape the future of a space still grappling with a series of institutional collapses spanning the past ~15 months. Uncertainty has grown for many of the largest Layer 1 (L1) blockchains in production today, which must now contend with regulatory pressure, waning user growth, and competition from emerging rollup solutions that have started to gain wider adoption. 

Even as rollups have begun to claim market share from L1s with the promise of scaling base layers - primarily Ethereum - some L1s, such as Aptos, are continuing to pursue the thesis that scalability can be achieved effectively with a single chain via high-throughput transactions and low fees. Today, we take a look at Aptos, a Move-based network focused on scaling through parallel transaction execution, and the state of its decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.