Avery Ching

Co-Founder & CEO Aptos Labs

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Avery Ching is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Aptos Labs, the company behind the Aptos Layer 1 blockchain. He is an infrastructure engineer by background rather than a financier: he took a bachelor’s degree and a PhD in computer engineering at Northwestern, spent four years at Yahoo on web search and the Apache Giraph graph-processing system, and then more than a decade at Meta, where he was tech lead for the batch processing infrastructure behind the company’s analytics before moving to lead its crypto platform team and the Diem blockchain. When Meta wound Diem down, Ching and the founding team took its open-source technology and Move language and launched Aptos Labs in 2022. He served as the company’s CTO until December 2024, when co-founder Mo Shaikh stepped down as CEO and Ching succeeded him.

Career Highlights

• Became Chief Executive Officer of Aptos Labs in December 2024, moving up from Co-Founder and CTO after Mo Shaikh stepped down and stayed on as a strategic adviser.
• Co-founded Aptos Labs in 2022 alongside the Diem team, building on the open-source technology and Move programming language developed at Meta; Northwestern reports the company has raised more than $400 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures, and PayPal.
• Led Meta’s crypto platform team, covering all aspects of blockchain technology from wallet infrastructure to Layer 1 development, most notably the Diem blockchain.
• Was the overall tech lead for Meta’s batch processing teams — Spark, graph processing via Apache Giraph, Hive/Hadoop (Corona), distributed scheduling, and the unified pipeline programming model — infrastructure running across hundreds of thousands of machines.
• Spent four years at Yahoo after his PhD working on web search and Apache Giraph, and appears on the Apache Giraph project’s team list as a committer.
• Joined the CFTC Global Markets Advisory Committee’s Digital Asset Markets Subcommittee in June 2025, alongside representatives of Polygon Labs, CoinFund, Nasdaq, Franklin Templeton, and Uniswap Labs.

Professional Journey

Ching grew up in Honolulu and went to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois to study computer engineering, taking his bachelor’s degree there in 2002. He stayed on for graduate study under Professor Alok Choudhary to pursue parallel computing research, defending his PhD in computer engineering on October 5, 2007.

He joined Yahoo out of the PhD program and spent four years there working on web search and on Apache Giraph, the open-source iterative graph-processing system built for very large graphs. In 2011 he moved to Facebook, later Meta, where he stayed for more than a decade. There he became the overall tech lead for the company’s batch processing teams — Spark, graph processing, Hive and Hadoop, distributed scheduling, and the unified programming model for data pipelines — the analytics substrate underneath Meta’s consumer products. His work made Giraph usable at Facebook’s scale; he has publicly described running a PageRank iteration over a trillion-edge social graph on 200 commodity machines in under four minutes.

His focus then shifted to blockchain. Ching led Meta’s crypto platform team, working across wallet infrastructure and Layer 1 blockchain development, with Diem the central project. Meta discontinued Diem under regulatory pressure, and rather than disperse, Ching and the founding team carried its open-source technology and its Move programming language into a new venture, announcing Aptos Labs in 2022. He was co-founder and Chief Technology Officer.

On December 19, 2024 co-founder Mo Shaikh stepped down as Chief Executive Officer and Ching took the role, with Shaikh continuing as a strategic adviser. Since becoming CEO, Ching has taken a more public policy-facing posture, joining the CFTC Global Markets Advisory Committee’s Digital Asset Markets Subcommittee in June 2025. Aptos Labs’ team page still carried him as CEO and Co-Founder when this profile was reviewed on September 19, 2026.

Education

Northwestern University

Bachelor’s degree, computer engineering, 2002

Northwestern University

Ph.D., computer engineering, 2007