Aptos is quietly doing what most blockchains only promise.
Built from the ashes of Meta’s abandoned crypto ambitions, the company has turned that legacy code into one of the fastest and most enterprise ready Layer 1 blockchains in the world.
While much of the industry fights over retail traders and meme speculation, Aptos is embedding itself in the financial infrastructure of major asset managers, stablecoin issuers, and even central banks. Its focus is precision, regulation, and throughput — the ingredients that institutional capital actually respects.
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In an interview with TheStreet Roundtable’s James Heckman in Singapore, Aptos Chief Business Officer Solomon Tesfaye made it clear that the blockchain wars are no longer about hype or token speculation. They are about performance, regulation, and institutional trust.
Tesfaye, who previously helped steer digital asset growth at CME and Nasdaq, now leads strategy and growth for Aptos, a Layer 1 blockchain built to do what so many others have only promised.
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“Aptos is a layer one blockchain, institutional grade layer one blockchain,” Tesfaye said. “The history of Aptos actually stems from Meta’s Diem program.” He pointed out that Meta’s in-house team created the Move programming language, which today forms the foundation of Aptos’ infrastructure.
“From an institutional perspective, we’re supporting BlackRock’s Money Market Fund, Franklin Templeton’s Money Market Fund, Apollo’s Diversified Private Credit Fund,” Tesfaye noted. “From a real world asset perspective, we’re top three chain.”
Aptos has also processed roughly $68 billion in stablecoin transactions in the past month alone, a staggering volume in a sector still in transition from theory to implementation.
For the best experience, download the Roundtable app from the App Store or Google Play Store and watch the full, uncut interview.
Aptos is chasing throughput, stability, and compliance, the elements that make it attractive to regulated capital.
“We really thrive at high volume applications,” Tesfaye said. “Really a lot of chains just can’t support the type of volume that I’m highlighting here.”
Bitcoin has received criticism for the low transactions per second (TPS) that it can perform. Even quicker and more efficient chains like Ethereum have experienced bottlenecks where fees can quickly grow into the hundreds of dollars.
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For the best experience, download the Roundtable app from the App Store or Google Play Store and watch the full, uncut interview.
Aly Madhavji, managing partner of Blockchain Founders Fund and an early Aptos advocate, explained why developers are migrating.
“We’ve seen many of our portfolio companies come to Aptos. There’s incredible tooling, building on the Move language has been easier for many developers to take on,” Madhavji said.
He compared Aptos to “the foundation of a house” with super apps built on top, an analogy that has started to feel increasingly accurate as consumer facing fintech and DeFi projects shift to Aptos’ rails.
For the best experience, download the Roundtable app from the App Store or Google Play Store and watch the full, uncut interview.
“For the first time in human history, people have the choice whether or not to use their national currency,” Madhavji said. “You can basically hold your politicians, your central banks accountable by not using their currency.”
That shift has begun to play out in places like Bhutan, where stablecoins like USDT are replacing local currencies in daily commerce.
When asked how Aptos plans to move the banking world from a 1930s financial infrastructure to a blockchain based one without disruption, Tesfaye likened it to the rise of electronic trading.
“It didn’t happen overnight. I believe it was like five to seven years before they actually moved all the systems over,” he explained. “Once we stop talking about blockchain, then we know that there’s really true adoption.”
For the best experience, download the Roundtable app from the App Store or Google Play Store and watch the full, uncut interview.
This story was originally reported by TheStreet on Oct 14, 2025, where it first appeared in the Innovation section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.