Hey everyone. Before we get started, a quick note. This conversation was recorded as a sponsored

interview at the Aptos Experience event in New York City. We're grateful to Aptos for supporting this episode.

Now, let's dive into the conversation I had with Aptus CEO Avery Ching.

So even on like what we consider today to be decentralized exchanges have a centralized component to them. And that could be, for example, you start off with an order flow that begins on chain, but then gets fulfilled off-chain somewhere, like an order-matching system. We don't know what's happening in the order-matching system. Avery, since we just want to make sure everyone's on the same page. Why don't you give a general description of Aptos?

For those you don't know, we have a lot of newbies in the room, which is fantastic.

Aptos wasn't, I mean, we've been in Maineer for three years, but it has actually started a while back.

In 2018, many of us were at Meta at Facebook, working on building out the new payments infrastructure for the world.

And you may have heard this as Libra and Diem.

The idea was to put together a consortium of MasterCard, Visa, Facebook, PayPal, Uber, Lyft and others,

and build out an infrastructure that could support all of their needs for billions of people around the world.

I was the crypto leader of that project, and I got to work alongside many wonderful folks who are still to us today.

And it was a really great time and experimentation for us. And I think we learned a couple interesting and valuable lessons.

First of all, being early is the same as being wrong.

We were definitely too early for the space,

and both the country and also the world wasn't ready for that kind of a vision and product.

But it also gives us a tremendous amount of opportunity.

We left kind of Facebook in the end of 2021,

did a big fundraise with a lot of the founders and backers of Libra, including A-C-ZZ, Kiti Hahn and others, to raise our first seed round

for $200 million.

We raised another Series A round following that, led by Jump Crypto in the summer of 2022.

And our mission has always been the same.

How do you going to build the decentralized

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