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Infrastructure Sectors

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Infrastructure Aptos: Infrastructure Development and Ecosystem Growth

Anil Lulla

•

Dec 19, 2025

Aptos is proving itself as the infrastructure layer for the financial internet. In December 2025, the network achieved sub-50 millisecond block times on mainnet. That's faster than any other major L1 blockchain. Baby Raptr cut validator finality latency by 20%, reducing it by 100-150 milliseconds. Storage sharding eliminated database bottlenecks. The technical capability is proven. The 490x gap between current usage and proven capacity isn't just headroom, it's an open runway for high-throughput applications. Yet infrastructure alone doesn't create adoption. Successful L1s share common patterns. They all have scalable architecture, deep stablecoin liquidity for frictionless capital movement, and breakout applications that drive adoption to scale. Ethereum scaled through DeFi. Solana grew through memecoins. Each found product-market fit when infrastructure met application demand. The Aptos ecosystem is building across multiple adoption vectors simultaneously: trading, storage, and payments. Decibel, a fully decentralized perpetuals exchange targeting sub-20ms block times, aims to rival centralized exchange execution speeds. Shelby, a decentralized hot storage protocol, tackles what blockchains have historically struggled with: fast reads. It combines sub-2x replication overhead with 4K streaming capability and incentivized reads. On payments, stablecoin infrastructure positions Aptos as one of the most cost-effective payment and settlement channels. USDT transfers cost $0.00003 compared to $12 on traditional remittance rails. That's up to a 400,000x cost advantage. The network's stablecoin market cap reached $1.8 billion in December 2025, up 3x since the start of the year. Beyond applications, the ecosystem tackles potential adoption friction at the protocol level. User onboarding friction got addressed through X-Chain Accounts, which enable users to create Aptos accounts using existing Ethereum or Solana wallets. Confidential Transactions provide enterprises with selective disclosure for compliance while maintaining transaction privacy. Institutional capital followed the technical progress. BlackRock's BUIDL deployment scaled to $500M, while PACT Protocol migrated $1B in tokenized loans from Celo. For 2026, the defining questions shift from technical capability to user growth. Can Decibel bootstrap sufficient liquidity to compete with established perpetuals platforms? Will Shelby's performance claims hold and pull users from centralized cloud storage? Can stablecoin cost advantages drive meaningful adoption on Aptos? In our report, we detail the 2025 upgrades that improve performance for latency-sensitive applications, examine how various adoption rails leverage infrastructure development, and profile institutional deployments that validate Aptos’ credibility. The infrastructure works. 2026 shifts focus to how the application layer leverages this performance headroom.

Infrastructure The Year Ahead for Infra 2026

Anil Lulla

•

Dec 17, 2025

Layer 2 / L2 Starknet Is Building Bitcoin’s Economic Flywheel

Anil Lulla

•

Dec 17, 2025

Infrastructure ZKsync: Building a Trustworthy Settlement Layer for Institutional and Sovereign Finance

Anil Lulla

•

Dec 10, 2025

The biggest blocker for crypto capital hasn't been performance. It has been the confidence problem. Regulated finance has never been able to get Ethereum security without sacrificing the privacy and operational control they legally require. For years, the industry operated on a systemic trade-off. This is the gap ZKsync's Elastic Network has finally closed, and why the last few months mark an inflection point. They are no longer pitching the vision for institutional adoption. They are living it. We are now seeing banks, sovereign funds, and major exchanges actively building and deploying on the network, not just running pilots. From the 35+ financial firms in the Prividium workshops to the UAE launching the ADI Chain with ZKsync Airbender integration, the verdict is in. ZKsync finally offers the verifiable settlement, on-demand privacy, and seamless interoperability that institutions require to move trillions on-chain without rewriting their compliance playbook. The shift from theory to deployment is entirely rooted in a massive technical maturation under the hood. The Atlas upgrade pushed the ZK prover out of the lab and straight into one-second finality with a 15,000+ TPS sequencer, all while providing full EVM equivalence that lowers the friction for any Solidity-based enterprise stack. Crucially, the new ZK Gateway architecture makes the entire network a shared liquidity system, breaking the isolation that crippled past appchain attempts. The economic layer is also catching up. The new tokenomics are designed to tie the token's value directly to the enterprise adoption and cross-chain activity one can now see. If you have been waiting for the "institutional blockchain" story to become real, this report lays out the full, compelling picture. ZKsync is positioning itself as the critical settlement layer regulated finance can actually use, and the evidence suggests the bulk of the next wave of capital will likely enter through the Elastic Network, rather than the traditional L1 path.

Infrastructure Sui's Q3 Report - Sui Stack and Momentum Picking Up

Anil Lulla

•

Nov 19, 2025

Infrastructure zkVerify: Building the Universal Proof Layer

Anil Lulla

•

Nov 13, 2025

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Infrastructure Sectors

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