Mohammad Shaikh (also known as Mo Shaikh) is an entrepreneur and investor best known for his role as the Co-founder and CEO of Aptos, a layer-1 proof-of-stake blockchain infrastructure. ^[1][2]

Early Life & Education

Mo Shaikh is a first-generation immigrant who was raised by a taxi driver and housewife on Welfare in Brooklyn. He attended Hunter College and graduated with a B.S. in Psychology, Economics, and Accounting. He also attended the University of Rochester - Simon Business School and graduated with a Master of Business Administration (MBA) in Organization Strategy & Finance. ^[3][1]

Career

Mo Shaikh started his career as a Senior Associate at KPMG (June 2007 - November 2010). In October 2010, he served as the Senior Analyst at Royal Bank of Canada Capital Markets. In August 2012, he became a Real Estate Associate for BlackRock in New York. In June 2015, he served as a REIT Analyst (Summer) at ClearBridge Investments. In August 2015, Mo served as a Private Equity Associate (Summer) at The Abraaj Group in Karachi, Pakistan. He became a consultant for the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in September 2016. ^[1]

In September 2017, Mo Shaikh worked at ConsenSys as the Director of Strategy dealing in blockchain, infrastructure, growth, capital allocation, and incubation. ^[4] In September 2017, he founded and served as the CEO of Meridio^[6], a blockchain-based platform for investing in and trading fractional shares of real estate with liquidity. ^[5] He joined Meta in May 2020 and worked in Strategic Partnerships @ Novi / Meta until December 2021. ^[1]

Aptos

In December 2021, Mo Shaikh co-founded Aptos alongside Avery Ching and he serves as the CEO of the company. Aptos is a layer-1 proof-of-stake blockchain (PoS) infrastructure developed on a combination of system securities, smart contract design, decentralization, consensus & performance technologies. Aptos uses a parallel execution engine (Block-STM)  — a Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) PoS consensus mechanism that provides a greater speed of processing transactions.

"Aptos is designed differently. We are a proof of stake network that uses very little energy, we are a network that costs pennies to be used for an individual so it doesn't cost high gas fees like other blockchains, it's incredibly fast & transactions can be in the blink of an eye" - Mo Shaikh on how Aptos benefits users.

Aptos has partnered with several organizations like the Korean Triple-A gaming studio - NPIXEL, Google Cloud, Pontem Network, and MoonPay to improve gamer experience and to facilitate the running of Aptos nodes and decentralized applications (dApps) on different platforms.

“Using blockchain-based technology can be complex, frustrating and slow. Lack of usability is one of the biggest barriers of widestream adoption. Through our integration with MoonPay, we are creating a seamless and enjoyable experience for Petra users as they navigate the Aptos blockchain.” said Mo Shaikh, on partnership with MoonPay.^[7]

APT is the utility and governance token for the Aptos network. The Aptos Foundation^[8] as of February 2023, is planning a network upgrade and is revisiting its tokenomics with the goal of providing greater transparency. ^[9][11]

“We are going to provide a little bit more clarity and more details behind the principles, and how we came to the decision that we made. But a lot of it all goes back to thinking about the people, so we're gonna have a fairly detailed document that's going to go live at some point.” - Mo Shaikh, Aptos CEO, told Decrypt.

On plans for the future, Mo Shaikh said:

"In 5 to 10 years time, what I would love to see as a builder in the space is us being a very important part of the ecosystem and sending economic value across the world whether through NFTs or global currency". ^[10]