PANews reported on April 18 that according to The Block, Aptos Labs has established a new partnership with Microsoft, Brevan Howard, SK Telecom and Boston Consulting Group to develop Aptos Ascend. The institutional platform aims to expand decentralized finance to institutional capital through the Aptos network and increase tokenized asset liquidity globally.

Aptos Ascend is a digital asset management platform for financial institutions. The product will use Microsoft Azure (a cloud computing platform) and Azure OpenAI services (large language models that support generative artificial intelligence applications). Aptos Ascend will also use Brevan Howard's market investment expertise to guide financial institutions in providing digital currency and asset management services to customers, as well as SK Telecom's Web3 technology, such as wallet-as-a-service capabilities.