Aptos’ Ash Pampati: Building in a Choppy Market

After three years on mainnet, Aptos still occupies an unusual position in the blockchain ecosystem. Born from Meta’s abandoned Libra project with backing from top-tier VCs, it entered the market with high expectations and even higher valuations.

Aptos is known as a high-throughput, relatively cheap chain, built on the Move programming language for enhanced security. Yet while its technical capabilities are undeniable, the project’s path to widespread adoption remains less certain in an industry where the gap between technical superiority and actual usage often seems unbridgeable.

Ash Pampati is a speaker at Consensus 2025, taking place in Toronto May 14-16.

I sat down with Ash Pampati, the head of ecosystem in Aptos, to discuss how the project is navigating these challenges, what sets it apart from competitors, and whether its institutional DNA is a help or hindrance in today’s market.

Before joining Aptos as Head of Ecosystem, Ash Pampati was Business Lead at Metaplex Studios on Solana and spent seven years at YouTube leading music industry partnerships. The YouTube-to-blockchain experience informs his approach to Aptos’s adoption.

“Our overarching thesis is that all the world’s assets will come on-chain,” he said.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

CoinDesk: I’ve noticed Aptos evolving toward a more grassroots builder culture. What drove this shift?

Pampati: The scarcest resource in Web3, aside from time, is talented developers. All ecosystems are competing for developers with great ideas who are motivated to ship against all odds.

The community-building strategy begins with a fundamental question: How do we convince a developer not only to choose Aptos over other chains but to choose Web3 over Web2?

Your developer outreach in Southeast Asia has been notable. Is this a strategic focus because those markets are more receptive, or because established developers have already committed to other chains?

We’ve built amazing grassroots relationships with talented students worldwide — California, U.K., Singapore, India, Hong Kong. We’re showing them the value of Web3 and how a consumer-oriented, high-performance chain like Aptos can help them launch DApps in a week if they have the ideas and infrastructure ready.

When you do that well, you must be ready to invest in talented and motivated people immediately. We have an opinionated but effective grants program where we coach people through accelerators, invest directly from the foundation, or connect them with investors who share complementary visions.

Solana faced similar technical promises but saw its ecosystem dominated by pump.fun and $fart and $dawg, and, well, you name it. With your institutional approach, does Aptos risk the opposite problem — impressive technology but not a lot of speculation?

For Aptos, we don’t have that baggage, for better or worse, of the meme coin frenzy adding assumptions about our identity. We believe tokens and tokenized assets enable businesses to emerge that otherwise couldn’t in any other market, and they allow users entry into businesses they wouldn’t otherwise have.

Do I believe 60,000 tokens should emerge daily on Aptos? Not necessarily. But do I want a consistent stream of quality projects using tokens to align their communities or build products? Absolutely. Those are the kinds of builders we want to attract.

What strategic areas is Aptos focusing on now?

We have three core focus areas that help us overcome adoption challenges. First, asset tokenization. Our overarching thesis is that all the world’s assets will come on-chain. We’re seeing that convergence now with RWAs, institutional interest converging with native DeFi, tokenized cryptocurrencies, and stablecoins. We want to build a network that enables the global trading engine of these assets.

The second area is payments, which leverages Aptos’s technical advantages. We’ve integrated the top three stablecoins on Aptos in just three months, reaching about a billion dollars in total market cap. Aptos is orders of magnitude cheaper from a transaction cost basis — by a factor of a thousand — compared to the next high-throughput blockchain. We also have the fastest finality at sub-second speeds.

Our third focus involves decentralized infrastructure supporting emerging technologies. With slight improvements above and below, you can unlock capabilities around storage and compute never seen with previous blockchains. This enables running AI and ML infrastructure on fully decentralized networks, helps with data discoverability for banks, and evolves content delivery frameworks.

Your examples frequently focus on institutional use cases. Is there a disconnect between Aptos’ vision and where the market actually is today?

Our PACT protocol exemplifies what we want the next five years to look like. It’s utilizing on-chain rails on a high-throughput blockchain with stablecoin integration to extend credit networks to people in markets who never had access to credit before.

For example, a rickshaw driver in India who needs a loan to fix their vehicle can now get one. Democratizing access to financial markets gives me goosebumps, and I want to accelerate this further.

Additionally, within DeFi, which has had product-market fit for several cycles and been pioneered within the Ethereum and EVM L2 communities, we’re exploring what a healthy DeFi ecosystem looks like on a high-throughput blockchain that abstracts much of Web3’s friction.

Can my father, a doctor in Kentucky who saves all his passwords on notepads, park some stablecoins in a reliable place to earn yield and participate in the on-chain economy with limited friction? Not having to save a passkey while still benefiting from decentralization and self-custody? Making it easier for people to onboard and earn money in the on-chain economy is very exciting for us.

We’re in a period where many crypto projects have fallen short of their promises. What keeps you confident that Aptos can succeed where others have struggled?

Speaking broadly to the industry of founders: the macroeconomic environment is uncertain, and there will always be volatility in this market. But foundations like ours and others remain focused on the goal and are willing to invest in people to continue the mission.My biggest fear is talented people leaving Web3 for more stable environments. Anything we can do to retain talented people to continue the mission of decentralized networks, self-custody, and provenance, we need to do it — not just from our side, but from any foundation or ecosystem.

We need to keep people building or, otherwise, we’ll never see the revolution in the world we want to see on a timescale that matters. We shouldn’t take progress for granted. It takes work to keep people building for the future.