Aptos Labs, the blockchain startup formed by former employees who worked on Meta Platform Inc.’s ill-fated payment system Diem, today announced that it has raised $150 million in new funding led by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto.

The Series A funding round was also joined by Apollo, Griffin Gaming Partners, Franklin Templeton, Superscrypt founded by Temasek and continued support from a16z crypto and Multicoin. The raise follows a seed round in March and brings the total funding for the company to $350 million.

Aptos Labs is developing a Layer 1 blockchain that uses key technology from the now defunct Diem project and its smart contract programming language Move. These technologies were originally developed by the founding members of the Aptos team while at Meta, then called Facebook, and are now being put to use as an open-source protocol to develop a blockchain technology to rival blockchain ecosystems such as Ethereum, which is the second biggest blockchain by market cap.

“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. “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.”

Web3, also known as the decentralized web, is what technologists describe as the next evolution of the World Wide Web and built on peer-to-peer technologies such as blockchain and token economies. It will require trustworthy and reliable systems that can permit transactions with very little human intervention, as is the objective of blockchains and smart contracts, which enable two parties to program a set of conditions for a financial transaction using digital asset transactions.

The goal of Aptos is to create a reliable and safe blockchain network and a smart contract programming language that will deliver a superior experience for developers and users that will keep their tokens safe.

To that end, the company is currently operating a series of testnets incentivized with rewards for developers to build its community ahead of a mainnet launch later this year. The company also recently announced a grant program intended to accelerate project growth on its platform.

“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.

As part of its biggest value proposition, Aptos developed Move, the open-source smart contract programming language designed to improve security, speed up transaction time and cut costs. Ideally, it would also make it easier for companies to adopt blockchain technology and use it as part of their applications and part of business logic.

“This latest investment is a further endorsement of our team’s work to date, and confirms that there is real appetite for a next-generation Layer 1 – one that prioritizes security, usability and the overall user experience for developers and consumers,” Shaikh said.

The company intends to use the fresh funding to support further development of its blockchain technology and the Move language. Alongside that, Shaikh said, the company will use the funds to further expand its team and continue to build out ecosystem funds designed to attract developers and grow its community.

Google Cloud has already joined as one of Aptos’s inaugural integration partners in April. With the collaboration, developers can launch a node on the network in under 15 minutes and begin building immediately.

The company has also partnered with a number of other companies to test and build projects on Aptos and develop with Move including the crypto exchanges Binance and Coinbase, video platform Livepeer and the NFT platform Rarible.

Image: Aptos Labs