Article Author:Thejaswini M A Article Compilation:Block unicorn
Foreword
The Facebook graph has trillions of edges. ... This number is like a milestone in Avery Ching's mind, a testament to what a properly designed distributed system can achieve. A trillion connections have been established between people, photos, posts, and locations. The entire analysis can be completed in four minutes using commercially available hardware from any company. Ching knew this because he had personally built the system that made it all possible. In 2007, Ching, fresh out of his PhD program at Northwestern University, co-founded Apache Giraph at Yahoo! What began as an experiment in distributed graph processing ultimately powered Facebook's graph search and fundamentally changed how tech companies analyze social networks at scale. However, Ching's shift to cryptocurrency wasn't due to the prevailing trend or the influx of venture capital into the field. He worked at Meta for ten years, building the infrastructure for Diem, part of the company's ambitious global digital currency plan. In 2021, Diem collapsed under regulatory pressure, but Ching and his team instead doubled down. A few months later, they founded Aptos Labs with a clear goal: to build a blockchain capable of truly handling global institutional financing. Today, Aptos processes transactions for companies like BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Apollo. The blockchain currently holds over $1.2 billion in tokenized real-world assets. Ching initially focused on building systems to analyze how billions of people connect on social media, but later shifted his focus to building systems that could change the way trillions of dollars flow in the global economy. Avery Ching grew up in Honolulu, attending Punahou School from kindergarten through high school—the same school that produced Barack Obama. He left Hawaii for Evanston, Illinois, to study computer engineering at Northwestern University. The transition from island life to the harsh Midwestern winter might have been difficult, but Ching found a sense of belonging in Northwestern's computer science labs. During his undergraduate studies, he focused on building systems capable of handling complex computations simultaneously across multiple machines. However, what truly laid the foundation for his career was the expertise he gained during his doctoral dissertation defense in October 2007. His doctoral dissertation specifically focused on supercomputing, parallel computing frameworks, and high-performance file systems. These are the foundations of every large system that underpins modern internet services. Ching's doctoral advisor, Professor Alok Choudhary, was researching a problem that companies like Google and Facebook were beginning to face: how to handle massive amounts of data when it's distributed across thousands of machines? The answer lay in designing systems that could coordinate their work across distributed infrastructure, avoiding bottlenecks or single points of failure. This insight, honed in the academic lab, became Ching's secret weapon after entering the industry. Building the System to Map the Facebook Universe In October 2007, the same month Ching defended his doctoral dissertation, he joined Yahoo as chief software engineer. At the time, Yahoo was still a leading technology company, struggling to handle the massive amounts of data generated by hundreds of millions of users. Ching saw an opportunity. Social networks generate a special data structure: a graph. Each user is a node. Every friendship, every message, every interaction is an edge connecting nodes. The question is, how do you analyze these graphs when they grow to billions of nodes and trillions of edges? His answer was Apache Giraph, an open-source distributed graph processing system. This project draws inspiration from Google's Pregel paper but makes the technology accessible to any company wanting to analyze graph data at scale. Instead of trying to load the entire graph into the memory of a single machine (which would be impossible at Facebook's scale), Giraph distributes the graph across multiple machines. Each machine processes its portion of the graph and then communicates with other machines to coordinate the results. The system worked. Facebook adopted Giraph and used it to power Graph Search, a feature that allows users to search for things like "photos of my friends in Paris" or "restaurants my friends like in New York" across social networks. More importantly, Giraph was able to analyze Facebook's entire social graph in four minutes using commercial hardware. Diem's Winding Path In 2011, Ching left Yahoo to join Facebook (later renamed Meta), where he spent the next decade building the underlying infrastructure that underpinned the company's analytics capabilities. His team was responsible for projects such as Apache Spark, Hadoop, distributed scheduling, and a unified programming model, technologies that enabled Meta engineers to analyze data across hundreds of thousands of machines. Subsequently, Meta announced plans for Libra, a digital currency project (later known as Diem). Its vision was to create a blockchain-based payment system serving billions of people globally, particularly those without access to traditional banking services. Meta would provide distribution channels through Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Blockchain would provide the infrastructure for inexpensive, fast, and global payments. Ching was appointed as the technical lead for Meta's crypto platform, and his team was responsible for building the blockchain itself, wallet infrastructure, and ecosystem development strategy. Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, which sacrificed speed for decentralization, Diem was designed to process thousands of transactions per second while maintaining security and compliance. The team developed the Move programming language specifically for Diem, with built-in protection mechanisms designed to eliminate certain types of smart contract vulnerabilities. However, Diem faced problems that engineering could not solve. Regulators around the world were concerned about Facebook's power and influence. What would this mean for monetary policy if billions of people adopted a Facebook-backed currency? What would it mean for financial stability? What would it mean for privacy? Regulatory pressure became insurmountable. By early 2022, Meta disbanded the Diem project. With the company abandoning its cryptocurrency ambitions, years of effort went down the drain. Ching and his core team faced a choice: return to work on Meta's traditional infrastructure or launch what they had already built independently. They chose independence. Building Aptos: In December 2021, Avery Ching co-founded Aptos Labs with Mo Shaikh, who had previously been responsible for partnerships and strategy at Diem. Cryptocurrency prices were beginning a long decline, entering what would become the 2022 bear market. FTX hadn't collapsed yet—nobody predicted it. Ching and Shaikh weren't concerned with market timing. They had built a blockchain they believed was technically superior to any other existing system. With the Move programming language, a parallel execution engine called BlockSTM, and a Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus mechanism, Aptos processes transactions faster than existing proof-of-stake systems. However, the real challenge lies in whether anyone will care about the quality of the technology when the entire cryptocurrency market is on the verge of collapse. In Aptos' early days, Ching and his team had to convince skeptical investors why the world needed another Layer-1 blockchain. Ethereum already existed, along with Solana, Avalanche, Cosmos, and numerous other competitors vying for developers and users. Ching's presentations differed from those of typical cryptocurrency founders. He didn't promise a decentralized utopia or revolutionary financial inclusion. He talked about what he understood: building scalable infrastructure. He explained, “At Aptos, we believe that focusing on scalability is paramount. You can start with one journey and end up in a completely different place because you can continuously push the network forward.” This focus on scalability stems from the painful experience at Meta. Systems that cannot adapt eventually perish. The ability to improve infrastructure without breaking existing applications is crucial for long-term success. Aptos launched its mainnet in October 2022, at a time when the cryptocurrency bear market was deepening. The following month, FTX crashed, and the industry's credibility collapsed. While retail investors fled the cryptocurrency market, institutional investors became increasingly interested. The FTX incident exposed the consequences of inadequate cryptocurrency infrastructure. Companies like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton began seeking blockchain platforms that met institutional security, compliance, and reliability standards. Aptos's corporate background suddenly became an advantage. By 2023, Ching had significantly narrowed Aptos's business scope. Instead of trying to meet everyone's every need, he positioned blockchain as a "global trading engine" for tokenizing real-world assets. Traditional financial systems suffer from excessive friction. Settlement takes days. Cross-border transactions are costly. Transaction time is limited. Custody requires multiple intermediaries. Blockchain, on the other hand, can eliminate most of this friction. By placing real-world assets on the blockchain, you can trade 24/7, settle instantly, and significantly reduce custody costs. But tokenization requires more than just technology; it also requires partnerships with institutions that own the assets, have regulatory relationships, and capital to truly achieve tokenization. Ching has begun signing these partnership agreements. BlackRock brought its BUIDL fund to Aptos, investing $500 million in tokenized assets. Franklin Templeton launched a tokenized money market fund on the platform. Apollo began exploring tokenized credit products. By mid-2025, Aptos will have over $1.2 billion in tokenized real-world assets under custody. The South Korean market has become another key area of focus. South Korea boasts high trading volumes, a large retail investor base, and a high level of cultural acceptance of digital assets. Ching has partnered with Lotte Group, one of South Korea's largest retailers, which uses Aptos to issue mobile vouchers. In late 2024, Ching stated, “As we begin working with major retailers and engaging with banks and large payment companies, we are seeing rapidly growing interest from the South Korean side. The new government seems very supportive of cryptocurrencies. I expect cryptocurrency to develop very quickly in South Korea.” This collaboration with South Korea validated Ching’s strategy: find real-world use cases where blockchain can deliver tangible benefits and then scale rapidly. In December 2024, Mo Shaikh resigned from his leadership role at Aptos. Ching, who had previously served as Chief Technology Officer, took over as CEO. As CTO, Ching was responsible for technology development. As CEO, he will be responsible for strategic direction and partnerships, which will determine Aptos’ success or failure. Ching’s first nine months as CEO focused primarily on enhancing Aptos’ market positioning. Instead of competing with other blockchain platforms for developers and retail users, he focused on building Aptos into an infrastructure for institutions to tokenize and trade real-world assets. However, Ching's focus extends beyond technology development. He also actively collaborates with regulators to help develop rules governing tokenized assets. In June 2025, he was appointed to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission's (CFTC) Digital Asset Markets Subcommittee. This role gives him a voice in shaping U.S. digital asset regulations. Aptos Labs, in announcing the appointment, stated, "Avery will collaborate with other leaders from the web3 and financial services sectors to develop digital asset regulations." For Ching, this regulatory work is crucial. Institutional adoption of blockchain requires a clear regulatory framework. Without such a framework, institutions cannot commit capital on a large scale. Ching's Attitude Towards Crypto: Ching doesn't see decentralization as an ultimate goal. He hasn't promised to disrupt traditional finance or create a new economic system. Instead, he focuses on solving practical problems: speeding up transactions, reducing costs, improving security, and fostering new financial products. This pragmatism stems from his experience building infrastructure at Yahoo and Meta. These companies didn't pursue theoretical elegance but focused on building systems that could reliably operate for billions of users. Ching's focus on practical applications attracted institutions that wouldn't normally consider more ideologically driven crypto projects. For example, BlackRock and Franklin Templeton weren't interested in disrupting central banks or creating parallel financial systems. What they needed was infrastructure that could help them provide better products to their customers. Aptos provided that infrastructure. This is the engineer's belief: better tools lead to better results. Efficiency itself is ethical. Making something serve a billion people is itself a form of idealism. He is not trying to change human nature, but rather accepting it and building upon it. Ultimately, this may be the most radical stance.