A Brooklyn taxi fare first made Mo Shaikh curious about where money goes. After a real estate experiment and a blockchain born from Meta’s abandoned Diem project, he is putting that question to work as an investor.

A circuit-design class sent a Honolulu student toward supercomputing. Two decades later, the systems engineer behind Facebook data infrastructure and Diem is running Aptos Labs - and arguing that the next useful blockchain will look less like a coin and more like a market.