Founded by ex-employees of Meta Platforms who worked on its defunct payment system Diem, Aptos Labs is developing a Layer 1 Blockchain aimed at web3.

Aptos Labs announced its $150 million Series A round led by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto. New investors coming aboard included Apollo, Griffin Gaming Partners, Franklin Templeton, Circle Ventures, and Superscrypt founded by Temasek. Existing investors a16z crypto and Multicoin also participated. The valuation of the firm in this round was double that of its March valuation of $1 billion.

Aptos said it will use the funding to develop “the most performant and upgradable blockchain technology” and one that will “dramatically elevate the usability and socialization of web3.” The blockchain will rely on the Move smart contract programming language and Move Prover (and the creators, maintainers and brilliant minds behind them) to bring the “simplicity and security of Move to everyone.”

“We’ve known for a while that, due to issues like outages and downtime, current blockchains are not fit for purpose when it comes to mass Web3 adoption,” said Mo Shaikh, Aptos co-founder and chief executive to Silicon Angle. “That’s why we’re building a blockchain to be the reliable foundation for Web3 that ushers in users from around the world to experience the benefits of decentralization.”

The investments in the round reflected strategic support for the Aptos blockchain’s applicability to gaming, social networks, media & entertainment and finance. The blockchain startup has reached 20,000 operational nodes during devnet.

Aptos said the round brought up its total funding to $350 million.

“Developers are flocking to Aptos for its speed and scalability, and as an entirely permissionless, open source, and community-governed blockchain, it’s also optimized for the creation of a new class of Web3-native applications,” said Chris Dixon, founder and managing partner of a16z crypto.

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