A recently announced partnership between Aptos Labs and tech-giant, Microsoft, will see the pair collaborate across areas such as financial services, artificial intelligence, and more.

According to Rashmi Misra, Microsoft’s General Manager for AI & Emerging Technologies, “By fusing Aptos Labs' technology with the Microsoft Azure Open AI Service capabilities, we aim to democratize the use of blockchain enabling users to seamlessly onboard to Web3 and innovators to develop new exciting decentralized applications using AI.”

The nature of the partnership is focused on the overlap between blockchain technology and artificial intelligence, and there already exist plans across a number of areas, including the following implementations:

• A Financial Services (FSI) solution that allows users to bring use cases like tokenization, payments, CBDC, and other related primitives to market.
• Aptos Assistant – a responsible, user-friendly, and secure AI chatbot that will bridge web2 to web3 by demystifying blockchain for the everyday internet user and organization. Aptos Assistant will enable users to seamlessly onboard into web3 by asking any kind of question regarding the Aptos blockchain ecosystem using natural language and developers to build smart contracts and decentralized apps through easy access to resources. 
• A Github Copilot integration for Aptos’ Move programming language will be available to support contract development, unit testing, formatting and prover specifications. 
  

"Artificial Intelligence and blockchain technologies are quickly converging for one important reason: they are both generational breakthroughs that profoundly impact the evolution of the internet and shape society,” said Mo Shaikh, CEO of Aptos Labs. “Together with Microsoft, our shared vision is to ensure that this technology is accessible to more people and organizations than ever before.”

According to the team at Aptos Labs, this is only the beginning, with the two organizations looking to further develop and democratize the overlap between Web3 and AI technologies. 

However, the partnership already extends further, and Aptos Labs will be leveraging Microsoft Azure to run validator nodes on its network, with a view to increasing the blockchain’s security to an even greater extent. 

What is Aptos?

Its mainnet launched in October 2022, Aptos is currently the fastest blockchain available in the ecosystem, with the ability to process some 160,000 transactions per second (TPS), as well as sub-second time to finality. 

Founded by former members of Meta’s blockchain initiatives, Aptos’ native token, $APT, currently holds a market capitalization of approximately $1.5 billion, according to CoinMarketCap, and the network boasts a total value locked of more than $50 million, according to DefiLlama, at time of writing.