Martian, a cryptocurrency wallet for the newly released Aptos blockchain, has closed a $3 million pre-seed funding round sponsored by Race Capital.
According to a corporate press release, Aptos’s other investors include FTX Ventures, Superscrypt, Jump Capital, and Aptos itself. It provided no information regarding the Martian’s worth.
Martian is a web3 wallet that allows Aptos ecosystem users manage their crypto assets. Utkarsh Sinha and Siddharth Jain, who are both in their final year of graduate school at Columbia University, launched the firm at the first Aptos hackathon that took place earlier this year.
Sinha informed The Block that the financing was a combination of equity and a simple agreement for future tokens (SAFT).
What is Aptos?
Aptos is a new blockchain that was co-founded by Avery Ching and Mo Shaikh, who both worked on the Diem project at Meta. Just last week, the blockchain went live on the mainnet alongside the public trading of its native coin APT. This year alone, it has raised $350 million from venture capitalists, including FTX, Andreessen Horowitz, and Multicoin Capital.
Move is a programming language that builds upon Rust, the language utilized by the Solana blockchain. Sinha and Jain were thrilled to build on Aptos because of the Move programming language.
“As a network, it has all the other characteristics that Solana can offer like high speed, transaction processing, low gas fees but Move is a great way for more and more developers to build in this ecosystem and make more composable to blockchain programs,” Sinha said.
Making waves in the ecosystem
Martian is already making waves in the Aptos ecosystem, having gained collaborations with Topaz, Souffl3, and Aptos Name Service, among others. According to data from the Google Chrome online store provided by the wallet’s creators, the wallet has approximately 1 million cumulative installations.
Sinha stated that Martian is concentrating on user feedback in order to compete with rival Aptos wallets such as Rise Wallet, which was built by the same team that developed the Solflare wallet on Solana.
“It’s very important for us to take user feedback and work on it,” Sinha said. “Most of our priorities on like product are based on the feedback that we receive. Our Discord server right now has more than 100,000 members and all of them are still adding feedback and were like hearing them out, we are making those changes.”
“I think build a great community, ship fast, take user feedback as very important advice, these are a recipe for a great product,” he added.
Jain stated that another benefit is that the Martian team works directly with the core Aptos engineering team, allowing them to rapidly launch products and features whenever a significant change occurs. He stated that Martian has gotten a grant from Aptos.
The funding will be utilized to expedite the hiring process and develop new wallet features. There are presently eight members of the Martian team.
