Avery Ching: Systems Thinker

Article Author: Thejaswini M A Article Compiled by: Block unicorn

Preface

The Facebook graph has trillions of edges.

This number is like a milestone in Avery Ching's mind, a proof point of what a well-designed distributed system can achieve. A trillion connections have been established between people, photos, posts, and places. With commercial hardware available from any company, the entire analysis can be completed in four minutes.

Ching knows this because he personally built the system that makes all of this possible.

In 2007, Ching, who had just graduated from the PhD program at Northwestern University, co-founded Apache Giraph at Yahoo. The project was initially an experiment in distributed graph processing, but ultimately provided the technical support for Facebook's graph search and fundamentally changed the way tech companies analyze social networks on a large scale.

But Ching turned to cryptocurrency not because of the trend at the time, nor because venture capital was flowing in that direction. He worked at Meta for ten years, building the infrastructure for Diem, which is part of the company's ambitious global digital currency plan.

In 2021, Diem collapsed under regulatory pressure, but Ching and his team doubled down. Months later, they founded Aptos Labs with a clear goal: to create a blockchain capable of truly handling global institutional financing.

Today, Aptos handles transactions for companies such as BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Apollo. This blockchain currently holds over $1.2 billion in tokenized real-world assets.

Ching initially focused on building a system to analyze how billions of people connect on social media, and later shifted to developing a system that could change the way trillions of dollars flow in the global economy.

The Road of Growth

Avery Ching grew up in Honolulu and attended Punahou School from kindergarten through high school - the same school that produced Barack Obama.

He left Hawaii for Evanston, Illinois, to attend Northwestern University and pursue a degree in Computer Engineering. The transition from island life to the harsh winters of the Midwest may be difficult to adapt to, but Ching found a sense of belonging in the computer science lab at Northwestern University.

During his undergraduate studies, he focused on learning how to build systems capable of performing complex computations across multiple machines. However, it was the expertise he accumulated during his doctoral thesis defense in October 2007 that truly laid the foundation for his career.

His doctoral dissertation specializes in supercomputing, parallel computing frameworks, and high-performance file systems. These are the foundation of every large system that supports modern internet services.

Professor Alok Choudhary, Ching's PhD advisor, was researching the issues that companies like Google and Facebook were beginning to face at that time: how to handle massive amounts of data when it is dispersed across thousands of machines?

The answer lies in designing systems that can coordinate work on a distributed infrastructure, avoiding bottlenecks or single points of failure.

This insight, formed in academic laboratories, became Ching's secret weapon after entering the industry.

Building a System to Draw the Facebook Universe

In October 2007, the same month Ching completed his doctoral defense, he joined Yahoo as a chief software engineer. At that time, Yahoo was still a leading company in the technology sector, struggling to manage the massive amount 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, and every interaction is an edge connecting the nodes. The problem is, how to analyze these graphs when they grow to billions of nodes and trillions of edges.

His answer is Apache Giraph, an open-source distributed graph processing system. The project draws inspiration from Google's Pregel paper but enables any company that wants to analyze graph data on a large scale to use this technology.

Giraph does not attempt to load the entire graph into the memory of a single machine (which is impossible at Facebook's scale), but rather 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 has worked. Facebook adopted Giraph and used it to support image search (Graph Search). Image search is a feature that allows users to search for content in the social network such as “photos of my friends in Paris” or “restaurants my friends like in New York.”

More importantly, Giraph can analyze the entire social graph of Facebook in four minutes using commercial hardware.

The Roundabout Path of Diem

In 2011, Ching left Yahoo to join Facebook (later renamed Meta), and for the next ten years, he dedicated himself to building the underlying infrastructure that supports the company's analytical capabilities. The team he led was responsible for projects such as Apache Spark, Hadoop, distributed scheduling, and unified programming models, technologies that enabled Meta's engineers to analyze data across hundreds of thousands of machines.

Subsequently, Meta announced the plans for Libra, a digital currency project (later known as Diem).

Its vision is to create a blockchain-based payment system that serves billions of people worldwide, especially those who are unable to access traditional banking services. Meta will provide distribution channels through Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. The blockchain will provide the infrastructure for cheap, fast, and global payments.

Ching has been appointed as the technical head of the Meta crypto platform, with his team responsible for building the blockchain itself, wallet infrastructure, and ecosystem development strategy.

Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, which sacrifice speed for decentralization, Diem's design goal is to process thousands of transactions per second while maintaining security and compliance. The team specifically developed the Move programming language for Diem, which has built-in protective mechanisms that are designed to eliminate certain types of smart contract vulnerabilities.

However, Diem faces problems that engineering cannot solve. Regulators around the world are concerned about Facebook's power and influence. What does it mean for monetary policy if billions of people adopt a currency supported by Facebook? What does it mean for financial stability? What does it mean for privacy?

Regulatory pressure became difficult to overcome. By early 2022, Meta dissolved the Diem project. With the company abandoning its ambitions in cryptocurrency, years of effort went to waste.

Ching and his core team face a choice: to return to Meta's traditional infrastructure work or to independently launch what they have already built.

They chose independence.

Building Aptos

In December 2021, Avery Ching co-founded Aptos Labs with Mo Shaikh, who was previously responsible for partnerships and strategy at Diem.

Cryptocurrency prices are beginning a long decline, entering what would later become the bear market of 2022. FTX had not yet collapsed—no one saw that coming.

Ching and Shaikh do not care about market timing. They have built a blockchain that they believe is 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's transaction processing speed is faster than existing proof-of-stake systems.

However, the real challenge is whether anyone will care about the quality of the technology when the entire cryptocurrency market is on the brink of collapse.

In the early days of Aptos, Ching and his team had to convince skeptical investors why the world needed another Layer-1 blockchain. At that time, Ethereum already existed, along with Solana, Avalanche, Cosmos, and many other competitors vying for developers and users.

Ching's speech is different from that of typical cryptocurrency founders. He did not promise a decentralized utopia or revolutionary financial inclusiveness. He spoke about what he understands, which is building scalable infrastructure.

He explained: “At Aptos, we believe that focusing on scalability is the most important thing. You can start from one journey, and that journey can ultimately lead to a completely different place because you can constantly push the network forward.”

The focus on scalability stems from painful experiences at Meta. Systems that cannot adapt will eventually perish. The ability to improve infrastructure without disrupting existing applications is crucial for long-term success.

Aptos launched its mainnet in October 2022, coinciding with a deepening bear market in cryptocurrency. The following month, FTX collapsed, causing the industry's reputation to plummet.

As retail investors flee the cryptocurrency market, institutional investors are becoming increasingly interested. The FTX incident exposed the consequences of inadequate cryptocurrency infrastructure. Companies like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton are starting to look for blockchain platforms that meet institutional standards for security, compliance, and reliability.

Aptos's corporate background has suddenly become an advantage.

Tokenized Staking in Progress

By 2023, Ching has significantly narrowed the scope of Aptos's business. He is no longer trying to meet everyone's needs but has positioned the blockchain as the “global trading engine” for tokenizing real-world assets.

The traditional financial system has too much friction. Settlements take several days. Cross-border transaction costs are high. Trading hours are limited. Custody requires multiple intermediaries.

On the other hand, blockchain can eliminate most of such friction. By placing real-world assets on the blockchain, you can trade 24/7, settle instantly, and significantly reduce custody costs.

But tokenization requires not only technology but also collaboration with institutions that hold assets, have regulatory relationships, and possess capital to truly achieve tokenization.

Ching has begun signing these cooperation agreements. BlackRock is introducing its BUIDL fund into Aptos, investing $500 million in tokenized assets. Franklin Templeton has launched a tokenized money market fund on the platform. Apollo has started exploring tokenized credit products.

By mid-2025, Aptos has custody of over $1.2 billion in tokenized real-world assets.

The South Korean market has become another key area of focus. South Korea has high trading volumes, a large retail investor base, and a cultural acceptance of digital assets. Ching has partnered with one of South Korea's largest retailers, Lotte Group, which issues mobile vouchers using Aptos.

Ching stated at the end of 2024: “As we begin to collaborate with large retailers and engage with banks and major payment companies, we are seeing a rapid increase in interest from South Korea. The new government seems to be very supportive of cryptocurrency. I expect the development of cryptocurrency in South Korea to be very fast.”

The collaboration with South Korea validates Ching's strategy: to find practical application cases where blockchain can bring significant benefits and then quickly scale up.

In December 2024, Mo Shaikh resigned from his leadership position at Aptos. Ching, who previously served as the Chief Technology Officer, took over as CEO.

As the Chief Technology Officer, Ching is responsible for technology development. As the Chief Executive Officer, he will be responsible for strategic direction and partnerships, which will determine the success or failure of Aptos.

In the first nine months of his tenure as CEO, Ching focused on enhancing Aptos's market positioning. He did not aim to compete with other blockchain platforms for developers and retail users, but instead concentrated on establishing it as an infrastructure for institutions to tokenize and trade real-world assets.

But Ching's focus is not limited to technology development. He is also actively collaborating with regulatory agencies to help formulate rules for managing tokenized assets.

In June 2025, he was appointed as a member of the Digital Asset Markets Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). This position gives him a voice in shaping the regulatory framework for digital assets in the United States.

Aptos Labs stated upon publicly announcing this appointment: “Avery will work with other leaders from the web3 and financial services sectors to develop regulatory frameworks for digital assets.”

For Ching, this regulatory work is crucial. Institutions need a clear regulatory framework to adopt blockchain. Without such a clear framework, institutions cannot invest funds on a large scale.

Attitudes of Builders Towards Cryptocurrency

Ching did not regard decentralization as the ultimate goal. He also did not promise to disrupt traditional finance or create a new economic system. Instead, he focused on solving practical problems: speeding up transaction times, reducing costs, enhancing security, and fostering new types of financial products.

This pragmatic spirit stems from his experience building infrastructure at Yahoo and Meta. These companies do not pursue theoretical elegance, but focus on how to create systems that can reliably operate for billions of users.

Ching's focus on practical applications has attracted institutions that would not originally consider more ideologically charged crypto projects. For example, BlackRock and Franklin Templeton are not interested in disrupting central banks or creating parallel financial systems. What they need is infrastructure that can help them provide higher quality products to their clients.

Aptos provides them with such infrastructure.

This is the engineer's belief: better tools lead to better results. Efficiency itself has a moral quality. Having something serve a billion people is an idealism in itself.

He is not trying to change human nature, but rather accepting it and building upon it. Ultimately, this may be the most radical stance.