The New Aptos Tech Stack: Innovation-Forward, Ecosystem-First

The Aptos ecosystem started the year with a renewed mission and purpose: evolve the network from a high-performance L1 to production-grade infrastructure powering real value, assets, and applications at Internet scale. The next wave of protocol innovations will compound this progress and establish Aptos as the Global Trading Engine.

Delivering on that vision means advancing the stack along several different verticals:

• Latencies that power CEX-level experiences in a fully decentralized network.

• Reasonable financial confidentiality for both scale and adoption. 

• Specialized throughput for novel financial primitives that exist completely onchain.

• First-class, native automation that enables applications to subscribe to events and trigger logic instantly.  

It also requires a deliberate way to share this progress with the ecosystem and the broader industry, so that the impact extends beyond Aptos. 

Archon: Near-instant confirmations

A primary-proxy leader architecture, where a small, co-located validator cluster behaves as a single BFT stable leader. Archon is Aptos’ next step toward CEX-level responsiveness, enabling traders, payment flows, and RWA platforms to get deterministic confirmation at the speed modern markets expect: 30 ms inclusion confirmations and ~10 ms block times, while preserving BFT security.

Block-STM v2: Performance under pressure

Aptos’ signature execution engine that safely runs many transactions at once. Block-STM v2 scales way beyond 32 cores to dramatically improve hardware efficiency, enabling a single node to process massive transaction volumes—up to 8X current capacity. This matters for stablecoin rails, perps funding, oracle updates, and coupon runs that all fire together.

Encrypted Mempool: Privacy by default

A natively encrypted mempool keeps transaction payloads hidden from submission to inclusion. No frontrunning. No orderflow leakage. No new trust assumptions. The result is institutional confidentiality with public, auditable settlement the moment execution completes.

Event-Driven Transactions: Native automation layer

Onchain infrastructure must respond at the speed of markets. With event-driven transactions, applications can subscribe to onchain events; when they are triggered, logic is executed automatically.

Namespaces: Many lanes, one Internet superhighway

Namespaces feel like distinct networks, but they all share a single consensus and security model—no external bridge, no extra trust assumptions. Everything routes through the Aptos Internet superhighway, with cross-namespace transactions achieving <50 ms block times and sub-second latency. Transactions within a single namespace can reach near-instant <10 ms block times. With Namespaces, entities can run customized Aptos environments while still remaining part of, and continuing to expand, the overall Aptos Internet.

Licensing the Next Era of Aptos Tech

Aptos-pioneered advancements like Archon, Encrypted Mempool, Block-STM v2, Event-Driven Transactions and Namespaces aren’t just features for a single chain. They’re primitives that other builders, researchers, and networks will want to study, test, and eventually adopt.

As Aptos pushes toward internet-scale, finance-ready infrastructure, a question naturally follows: how should this technology be shared with the world?

That’s why, alongside these upgrades, the Aptos Foundation is introducing a new license for the protocol and its technologies. The goal is to keep the code transparent and research-friendly from day one, while giving the Aptos ecosystem a defined window to benefit first from the innovations pioneered on Aptos before they become fully permissive and broadly commercializable.

How the Innovation-Enabling Source Code License Works

Under this license the source code is available immediately and fully permissive over time:

• The full source code is publicly available immediately, so anyone can read, audit, and experiment.

• For the first four years from the date code is published, it is licensed for non-commercial, non-production use only (research, education, internal proofs-of-concept).

• After four years, it automatically converts to Apache 2.0, allowing unrestricted commercial and production use in accordance with the terms of the Apache 2.0 license.

The new license takes inspiration from the Business Source License (BSL) models used by Aave, Uniswap, and EigenLayer. This gives the broader community early access to Aptos innovations, while giving the Aptos ecosystem a clear head start to deploy, harden, and benefit from the technology it helped bring to life.

The Aptos Foundation remains committed to collaboration across the industry. For entities that wish to use licensed components in production or commercial settings during the restricted period, the Foundation will evaluate on a case-by-case basis. Examples may include:

• Licensing fees directed into a protocol fund that would be used for APT token buybacks or other ecosystem sustainability initiatives

• Partnership agreements tied to building applications or infrastructure on Aptos

• Collaborative arrangements that further research, security, or long-term protocol health

Advancing Aptos, Empowering the Ecosystem

Since the earliest days, Aptos researchers and collaborators have pushed the boundaries of blockchain performance, security, and usability. Today, as a result of those innovations, Aptos has become one of the highest-performing networks: 400 ms finality, ~65ms block times, >20K max mainnet TPS, >1M max tested TPS, and transaction costs averaging $.0005.

By pairing this next wave of infrastructure with an innovation-enabling license, Aptos is setting a clear path for how that technology is shared, adopted, and extended by the broader ecosystem, in a way that sustains both the Aptos network and the builders who rely on it.

Legal Disclosure: Please note that the above is intended only as a summary of the license and is subject in all respects to the full text and terms of the license available here.