One Mid-Cap Ethereum and Solana Rival Is Flashing a Bullish Signal, According to Crypto Analytics Firm Santiment

August 12, 2023 The Daily Hodl

Solana Rival Aptos (APT) Partners With Microsoft To Work on Aritificial Intelligence and Web3: Report

August 9, 2023 The Daily Hodl

Aptos’ new user growth hits 900% after integration with social media app Chingari

July 20, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Aptos

Chingari started the migration to Aptos in July, seeking an enhanced experience for users following Solana's network outages in 2022.

The Aptos blockchain has seen a surge of activity following its integration with Chingari, an India's social media platform previously powered by Solana. According to on-chain data, the number of new users jumped 900% over the previous month, up to nearly 90,000 daily on-chain onboarding.

Chingari started migrating to Aptos on July 6, seeking an enhanced user experience following Solana's network outages in 2022. "Solana's network downtime posed challenges, compelling us to schedule many transactions [...] Rather than allowing them to be instant, to mitigate the risk of failed transactions," Sumit Ghosh, co-founder and CEO of Chingari, told Cointelegraph.

According to Ghosh, the integration with Aptos has enabled instant on-chain features, such as virtual gifts, leading to a surge of new users on the social media platform in recent weeks. It also introduced Chingari's new wallet, which allows users to earn tokens through engagement and content creation on the platform. The earned tokens can then be used to tip creators, boost content visibility, and purchase virtual gifts and nonfungible tokens (NFTs).

*Aptos network activity over the past 30 days. Source: Aptos Analytics.*

Apart from the improved usability, Chingari's growth relies on India's 1.4 billion-people economy and the booming popularity of cryptocurrencies in the country. According to Chainalysis, India is at the forefront of crypto adoption in the South Asian region.

As of July 14, Chingari accounted for 80% of all daily active users on the Aptos blockchain and 50% of all gas fees paid on the network, up more than 500% from the previous month. The number of transactions had also risen 150%, reaching almost 2 million a day. Continuing at this pace, the company anticipates surpassing the lifetime total of Stepn, the second-largest DApp on Solana, in the coming days.

"If this growth continues [...] We project that Chingari will reach 1.25 million users by the end of July, which is 10x faster than on Solana, over 20 million on chain users by the end of the first year, and a cumulative total of more than 200,000 APT paid as gas fees by the end of Year 1," estimates Ghosh.

Aptos is not the only chain benefiting from DApps seeking better on-chain performance and usability across networks. Game publisher Mythical Games recently moved from the Ethereum blockchain to the Polkadot ecosystem, citing slow transaction speeds and high transaction costs on Ethereum.

Magazine: ‘Moral responsibility’ — Can blockchain really improve trust in AI?

Newly Launched Aptos (APT) Rival Officially Kicks Off Trading Under Coinbase’s Experimental Label

May 20, 2023 The Daily Hodl

Libra-related Sui blockchain fixes critical bug that put ‘billions’ at risk

May 16, 2023 Coin Telegraph

The vulnerability was located in a file that translates human-readable code into machine language for storage.

The Sui blockchain network quietly fixed a bug that could have put “billions of dollars” at risk, according to a May 16 announcement from Zellic, the security firm hired to audit the network’s security.

Loss of Funds Bug in Aptos and Sui

Quick spotlight on an unpublished (but fixed) loss-of-funds bug in the move verifier that seems to have been found by @zellic_io.

This would have allowed many types of exploits against Aptos or Sui based protocols.

— Jasper | Neodyme (@JasperCPS) April 11, 2023

The bug was in a dependency of the bytecode verifier, which ensures that the human-readable Move language used to write smart contracts on Sui is correctly transcribed into machine code during deployment. Had the bug not been fixed, it could have “allowed attackers to bypass multiple security properties, leading to potentially significant financial damages,” the announcement said.

In a statement to Cointelegraph, Mysten Labs confirmed that the the bug has been fixed in the SUI version of MOVE.

Zellic claimed that the bug may have also been present in other Move-based networks, including Aptos and Starcoin. However, they stated that the Aptos version of it was eliminated with a patch on April 10, according to the Zellic team.

Cointelegraph reached out to Aptos for comment but did not receive a response by publication.

In a conversation with Cointelegraph, a representative from the Move-based 0L network stated that the bug does not affect its version of Move. On May 15, 0L added a series of tests to their GitHub, which it says proves the exploit is not possible on the 0L version. The Starcoin team told Cointelegraph that their version was eliminated on April 5.

A blockchain network developed by Mysten Labs, Sui was founded by former Meta Platforms engineers. It’s a fork of the open-source Libra project created by Facebook-parent Meta. Libra was shut down in 2019.

Some developers favor Move smart contract language because its security features specifically benefit blockchains. For example, it allows developers to create custom data types, including a “coin” type that cannot be copied or deleted.

Like other blockchain networks, Sui does not store code in the same language it is written in. Instead, it converts this code from the network’s human-readable language to machine-readable bytecode.

In making this translation, Sui runs a series of verifications to ensure the translated code does not violate the security properties of the network. For example, it ensures that coins can’t be deleted or copied.

According to Zellic’s explanatory blog post, it was hired by Mysten Labs to do a security assessment of this verifier program. It did not find a bug in the verifier itself. However, it found a bug in the “Control Flow Graph” or “CFG” file that the verifier uses to accomplish many of its tasks. Because of how it was written, the CFG could allow certain lines of code to be hidden from the verifier, allowing code that violates the network’s security principles to be stored and run without getting caught.

In its explanation, the team stated that the most obvious way this vulnerability could have been exploited is by malicious borrowers taking out flash loans. When flash loans are implemented on Move-based networks, the loan protocol usually sends the borrower an asset that cannot be deleted. If the borrower can delete this asset, they “could successfully take out a flash loan and not repay the borrowed funds,” the team said. Other types of exploits could also have been possible since the vulnerability allowed the basic principles of Move security to be violated. It, therefore, “[placed] potentially billions of dollars at risk,” the security firm stated in its post.

Move-based networks and their apps have been making waves in the fundraising world lately. A Sui-based decentralized exchange called Cetus raised over $6 million in one minute on May 8. The company behind Aptos also raised over $150 million in July 2022.

This story was updated on May 16 to include statements from Mysten Labs and Starcoin confirming that the bug existed but has been eliminated through software updates.

Aptos