Zekun Li

Head of Blockchain (if you're looking for titles) / Software Engineer (if you're looking for technical discussions) @ Aptos

[Zekun Li @zekun000]

e2e p99 latency < 600ms. i didn’t believe we can make it but here we are 🔥

[avery.apt 🇺🇸 @AveryChing]

Only one team can pull this off.

One of the biggest challenges for any exchange is the tightening the latency of p99 operations. For a decentralized network this is exacerbated at least 10x. Really proud to see @Aptos leading the industry here.

[Daniel Xiang @XiangZhuolun]

Happy to share that our multi-leader censorship resistant consensus is accepted to CCS!

Our protocol has
* Optimal fault tolerance n/3, O(n^2) messages, 4 rounds (3 round optimistically) to commit (data+consensus)
* Leaderless (no single DoS-able leader!)
* f-censorship resistance. Up to f rounds can be censored, including skipped/timeout rounds!

[alin.apt @alinush]

Aptos mainnet will enable 🔒 confidential assets 💸 very soon!!

i.e., encrypted balances & transaction amounts 🔐, albeit with publicly-visible 🌍 sender & recipient addresses!

(One step at a time, folks...)

Here's how they work! 🤓👇

[Zekun Li @zekun000]

multi-leader censorship resistant prefix consensus 🔥

[Daniel Xiang @XiangZhuolun]

New consensus paper: Prefix Consensus for Censorship Resistant BFT
https://t.co/OtauZLQbAr

We propose interesting new abstraction and protocol stack:

Prefix Consensus → Strong Prefix Consensus → multi-proposer SMR with bounded censorship (4 rounds, leaderless, n^2 messages)

[avery.apt 🇺🇸 @AveryChing]

It’s been >15 years since the launch of Bitcoin, and the market is more focused than ever on real products solving real problems for real people. Real-world adoption has early signs of success and will grow exponentially in the coming years.

In the past years since Aptos mainnet launch in 2022, we’ve built best-in-class infrastructure - the most scalable, fastest, and cost-effective blockchain ever created. We created products like Aptos Keyless to enable smooth Internet adoption and Geomi to accelerate builders. We made powerful strategic partnerships with builders to drive scale and adoption.

During these same years, we also rushed and messed up the airdrop. We focused on the wrong metrics, like TVL. Alongside many incredibly valuable strategic partnerships, we also made some bad business arrangements that didn’t deliver value to the ecosystem we were expecting. We have learned much from these mistakes, made significant leadership changes and have done a lot of clean up this year. Difficult, out of the spotlight hard work, but necessary. These necessary changes laid the groundwork and strengthened our ability to execute much more in the future.

My passion has always been the mission: unlocking financial freedom and financial equality. Historically, we’ve been conditioned to think of global equality in terms of the legal system and human rights. It’s not enough. Perhaps, the 1776 Declaration of Independence says it best that we are all “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” True global equality requires inclusive access to the world’s financial systems, from capital markets and money movement to wealth-management tools and stable stores of value. More powerful financial tools for everyone.

It can be odd to think of fair and equitable global trading as a societal accomplishment, but the opportunities are not equal today. IPOs and private funding have limited access. Many other investment strategies have limited access, especially globally. A global trading engine can be built on a highly-customized and decentralized technology stack. It can be accessible to all with all the rules and operations codified. It can offer fair features not found in any centralized market today - such as protection against front-running, sandwich attacks, and hidden costs. Trading tools like delta-neutral strategies can be available for anyone to deploy and understand. No more hidden agendas and a level playing field. Ultimately, everyone having the same access to financial markets, global currencies, investment opportunities, and more is going to change this world for the better. We’ll look back at this time as the path to how we unlocked financial freedom.

Our thesis-driven bets toward our mission are as follows:
* Equitable and advanced global markets: Decibel, incubated by Aptos Labs, is the first fully decentralized exchange that will match the Binance/Coinbase speed and ease of use. At the same time, Decibel is innovating with new trading primitives, user protections, assets, and markets. With a successful Testnet underway, Decibel is accelerating toward a Q1 Mainnet and will iterate on the product quickly.
* Next-gen cloud, data & AI: Shelby is the first hot decentralized storage protocol. It solves the data lifecycle challenge (i.e., hot, warm, cold) for AI use cases, creator use cases, and enterprise cloud infrastructure. Not only cheaper due to reduced egress fees when compared to traditional cloud infra, Shelby is cloud failure resistant, programmable, yet with full creator control.
* Aptos Internet expansion with Namespaces: Namespaces offers turnkey, tailor-made blockchain infrastructure built on Aptos’ proven tech stack for any bring any enterprise or institution to bring its users into crypto and expand the Aptos ecosystem, similar to the way the Internet was built. The new Archon architecture fully enables fast and reliable connectivity for namespaces internally and across them.

While it is still early for these products and protocols, the response from investors, partners, and the community has been strong and validating. Building the product vision, not just a tech narrative, is what sets Aptos apart. Our strategy is to deliver utility that drives organic revenue in every product and sustains the mission. This is a significant change to the previous years in how we have operated and we’ve been realigning and rebuilding for nearly a year now. The Aptos Foundation is working with us on how to best allocate resources to support these changes.

The market continues to evolve rapidly and APT isn’t reflecting the fundamentals, ecosystem growth or progress in the mission. I continue to hold every token that was granted to me as a co-founder because I believe it's the right thing to do to serve this mission. Not many founders can say that more than 3 years post token launch. Mission not yet accomplished. And while we’ve done a lot of learning from and cleaning up past mistakes, we will look at every option to ensure our mission will be sustainable and successful.

Looking back, we’ve learned from our mistakes, rebuilt, aligned, and are now executing on thesis-driven bets toward the mission. Our world-class team has never been as focused and effective as it is today. The world needs financial freedom and equality more than ever, especially in a world where AI is creating more information asymmetry and inequality. Let’s level the playing field for the future generations of humanity.

[Zekun Li @zekun000]

tired of so many self-proclaimed MEV solutions? only Aptos delivers

[Alexander Spiegelman @SashaSpiegelman]

Aptos hides your transactions in the mempool, but shares the research with the world.

Trade with no MEV on Decibel while learning all about our novel encrypted mempool design in our latest paper ⬇️

[Daniel Xiang @XiangZhuolun]

1/
A good blockchain should protect users from MEV (Maximal Extractable Value).
At Aptos Labs, we built an encrypted mempool to hide your transactions until they’re ordered for execution.
But privacy isn’t free — the question is: How do we deliver confidentiality with efficiency?

[Zekun Li @zekun000]

🔥🔥🔥

[Alexander Spiegelman @SashaSpiegelman]

https://t.co/e0SgB7S71b

[Zekun Li @zekun000]

MCL, APE, optimal consensus latency, Aptos past roadmap is getting tractions

[avery.apt 🇺🇸 @AveryChing]

How is the multi-proposer for Solana described different from the @Aptos Quorum Store deployed back in 2023 @toly?

https://t.co/trprMwYN3e

[Zekun Li @zekun000]

Builders build, together.

[Alexander Spiegelman @SashaSpiegelman]

We are Shelby.

We built Meta’s infra. We built the fastest HFT systems.

Now we’re building the first cloud-grade decentralized infrastructure.

Everyone’s welcome. Let’s break the cloud monopoly—together.

[Balaji Arun @ibalajiarun]

@Aptos Summer is here!

Baby Raptr is rolling out to mainnet starting today! 🚀

Brace for lower and lower and lower latency than ever before, only on @Aptos

Check out the AIP here: https://t.co/avojz5tJTW

[Zekun Li @zekun000]

all you need is raptr, zaptos and block stm v2

[sherry.apt @sherryxiao]

Great to see the space waking up to consensus innovation.

But the future of blockchain tech is Aptos tech.

[Aptos Nerd | Everstake @apt_everstake]

1/ 🌐 rAPTr - Next-Gen BFT for Blockchain

Productive work from @AptosLabs brings us RAPTR - a groundbreaking Byzantine Fault-Tolerant protocol that combines high throughput, low latency, and robust resilience.

@Aptos is leading the way 💪

Here's why it matters 👇

[Aptos Labs @AptosLabs]

X-Chain Accounts on Aptos = The endgame of cross-chain interoperability

✅ Access liquidity & users from any network or wallet
✅ Seamless login & funding, no extra wallet download required
✅ Self-custodial 1-click transactions with session keys

How it works & why it’s a cornerstone of the Aptos Global Trading Engine 🧵

[Zekun Li @zekun000]

Study the new paradigm - prefix consensus

[Aptos Labs @AptosLabs]

https://t.co/pQqxU7K1G1

[Zekun Li @zekun000]

golden standard for building a blockchain🫡

[Daniel Xiang @XiangZhuolun]

Zaptos made simple:
Build a pipeline for high throughput, shrink it for low latency.

Joint article with @zekun000 @SashaSpiegelman, and @cyodyssey from @yzilabs

[Zekun Li @zekun000]

even faster and cheaper!

[George Mitenkov @GeorgeMitenkov]

1/7 Move on Aptos just got faster with Loader V2 – a major upgrade to how the Move VM loads and caches smart contract code.

TL;DR:
⚡Up to 60% faster block execution
⚡Parallel Move contract upgrades
🛠️Cheaper gas coming

🧵 Let’s break it down:

[Zekun Li @zekun000]

@0xd34th feel free to bookmark full zaptos numbers for future reference https://t.co/bFautKVz6Z

[Zekun Li @zekun000]

simple, elegant, while optimal. this is what we’ve been looking for since 2018. after so many iterations, jolteon, decoupled execution, quorum store, order vote, raptr etc, we’re finally here - the end game of high throughput low latency blockchain design!

[Zekun Li @zekun000]

Aptos keeps shipping, one step closer to full Zaptos! ⚡️

[Aptos Labs @AptosLabs]

Most chains get slower as they scale. Aptos keeps getting faster.

Introducing Consensus Observer: Cutting End-to-End Latency by Half at 10k+ TPS.

What you need to know about the latest latency breakthrough to arrive on Mainnet 👀🧵

TLDR; Sub-second isn’t a claim — it’s a commitment.