Key Takeaways
According to its creators, Aptos is “the world’s most production-ready blockchain.” And since its genesis in October 2022, Aptos Labs has marketed the platform as a highly capable and developer-friendly choice for building decentralized applications.
Now, more than a year since its mainnet launch, a booming Web3 sector is fueling a surge in Aptos Adoption. In the latest instance of the phenomenon, South Korea’s largest mobile operator, SK Telecom (SKT), has chosen Aptos to power its latest Web3 project – a mobile-compatible wallet that supports cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and digital credentials.
In a statement announcing plans for a new digital wallet service, SKT said it had signed an agreement with AhnLab Blockchain Company and Atomrigs Lab to develop the technology.
“The current online environment is transitioning to the Web3 era where users directly own and manage all data,” SKT Vice President Oh Se-hyun commented. He added that the joint wallet project “is an important starting point” for SKT’s response to the market.
With a focus on usability, the collaboration aims to provide decentralized personal wallets on a large scale. By emphasizing user experience, the South Korean telecoms giant reflects what has become a central tenet of Aptos’ development philosophy.
Recognizing that existing trade-focused blockchain use cases will never attract the hundreds of millions of users mobile apps and gaming could, Aptos Labs’ founders have often discussed the platform’s potential to support the mainstream adoption of blockchain technology.
During Shanghai International Blockchain Week in September, Aptos Labs’ co-founder and CTO Avery Ching delivered a speech discussing barriers to the mass acceptance of Web3 technologies.
Observing that there is just one blockchain user for every 250 internet users, he acknowledged that Web2 platforms like Netflix and Amazon attracted the global user base they have today by tuning their user experience over decades.
“Blockchain needs to get close to that,” Ching stated, adding that: “It needs to be intuitive. It needs to be safe and have simple transactions.”
Continuing, he argued that the first step toward building a Web3 ecosystem with internet-level usability is to create a wallet system in which account creation, management and recovery is as easy as managing a traditional online login.
Already, Ching remarked, Aptos-based applications in the fields of gaming, media and entertainment, have achieved significant adoption by replicating a Web2 user experience that moves blockchain connectivity to the back end.
On gaming specifically, he noted that the Asia-Pacific region is “a very big support for Web3,” which currently generates around half of the blockchain gaming sector’s revenues.
But Aptos Labs isn’t the only company that sees the potential in Asia’s emerging Web3 economies, SKT’s latest initiative demonstrates. Incidentally, in light of Ching’s assertion that more user-friendly wallets hold the key to mass adoption, the mobile network operator’s decision to partner with Atomrigs makes a lot of sense.
Founded in 2018, Atomrigs’ existing products include ABC Wallet, a mobile Web3 wallet that implements a keyless access management system. Alongside the company’s NFT game Fortress Arena and digital collectible marketplace TopPort , ABC Wallet is an artifact of to South Korea’s burgeoning blockchain sector.
Significantly, although the country has been home to an active crypto market for years, the latest generation of Web3 startups have turned their attention beyond the realm of crypto trading.