Why Aptos

We are building foundational infrastructure for AI. A state machine of the real world. Every business, every inventory change, every API call, every capacity update, indexed and available in real time for autonomous agents. The scope is enormous, and the demands are uncompromising. It has to settle billions of writes a day at costs and speeds that match cloud infrastructure, while guaranteeing transparency, immutability, and freedom from gatekeepers. That's the bar we set. That's why we chose Aptos.

Cost and Speed at Planetary Scale

Most of the crypto conversation compares chains to each other. By that measure, Solana looks fast and cheap. Sub-second optimistic confirmations and fractions of a cent per transaction sound like breakthroughs if your reference point is Ethereum. Shift the comparison to cloud, though, and the picture changes. A typical AWS write finalizes in milliseconds and costs less than a fraction of a fraction of a cent. Measured against that, twelve-second finality and thousandths of a dollar fees look slow and expensive.

Aptos is the first team I've seen design for the cloud baseline, not the crypto baseline. Sub-second finality on writes is standard. Average transaction costs are already an order of magnitude below Solana, and trending further down. With Shelby, they've announced a hot read platform that aims to be directly competitive with AWS on both price and speed, but backed by the immutability and permissionless access of blockchain. That combination is what we need if this is going to scale beyond theory.

Why Blockchain at All

If cloud performance is the bar, why involve blockchain at all? Because without it, the state machine just turns into another platform. Someone owns the data, someone gates the API, and eventually someone starts charging rent. That's how we got the aggregator tax in the first place.

Blockchain guarantees the opposite. Data is public by default. Code is visible. No one can lock up a state feed and demand thirty percent for access. Every action is immutably logged, every dispute can be resolved with evidence on chain, and every participant operates on the same transparent rules. The cost profile must look like cloud, but the governance model must look like a public utility. That's why this has to be blockchain.

The DNA of Aptos

When I first reviewed Move, it felt different. EVM contracts looked like fragile workarounds layered on a weak foundation. Solana's Rust model felt like chewing glass. Move looked engineered. It carried the fingerprints of Facebook. Not the business model, but the engineering DNA of a company that has built some of the most widely adopted systems in the history of software.

Aptos began inside Facebook as the Libra project. The same engineers who worked on building Libra's Move language later left and founded Aptos. These were the same people who built React, the front-end framework that went from an internal project to the global standard in a handful of years. When I read the code, I knew even though Aptos was young, it would be a dominant force for decades. That's why we dumped our Solana MVP and started over. It wasn't a trendy bet. It was a conviction that the right DNA was in place.

The conviction only grew as I began teaching others. I wrote a tutorial series to help developers learn Move. Every time I finished a lesson, it was almost instantly out of date because the team had shipped something newer, faster, better. As an author that was frustrating. As a builder it gave me confidence. This wasn't a group mailing in maintenance patches. This was a team moving forward at speed, listening closely to developers, and shipping major new building blocks like keyless accounts, account abstraction, Shelby, and Decibel.

The Architecture Fit

Epicuri's requirements are straightforward to state and hard to meet. Providers need to be able to publish capabilities as first-class objects with clear boundaries. Agents need to act on those capabilities under spend and scope limits that are enforced directly on chain. The system has to support billions of concurrent updates without losing determinism. And every action has to generate an auditable trail that can be trusted by machines, not just humans.

Aptos hits those marks. Move makes non-forgeable capabilities and bounded parameters first-class concepts. Block-STM gives us deterministic parallel execution so thousands of providers can update state without stepping on each other. Storage and change sets give us an auditable view of reality. The safety model I described when talking about rogue agents is achievable in practice here, not just in theory.

The Enormity of What We're Building

What this unlocks is larger than cost savings or technical elegance. Direct publication of state ends rent-seeking. Restaurants, airlines, creators, and manufacturers capture demand without paying a tax to aggregators. Agents act against real-world data in real time, creating autonomous supply chains, dynamic optimization, and predictive intelligence. Entire new categories of value become possible when reality itself is queryable.

Epicuri is not building another app. We are building the foundational infrastructure for AI. A state machine of the real world. The entire real world.

That vision requires an architecture that can handle billions of updates a day, priced and finalized like cloud infrastructure, but governed as a public utility. Aptos is the only chain we've seen that is credibly on that trajectory. That's why we're here.

Wayne Culbreth, Co-Founder, Epicuri