Aptos to replace SOL? Project on fire after recent events

• Project Serum and the Sollet-wrapped assets of Solana had major exposure to FTX leading to the SOL price crash.
• Aptos, a new blockchain in the town, is gaining traction quickly and the native APT tokens could be set for a rally.

The collapse of crypto exchange FTX and its trading platform Alameda Research has impacted altcoin Solana the most. During the entire FTX episode, Solana’s native crypto SOL lost more than 70 percent of its value. As of press time, SOL is trading another 9.15 percent down at a price of $11.64 and a market cap of $4.2 billion.

Some of the key projects leading to Solana’s exposure to FTX collapse were Project Serum and the Sollet-wrapped assets. Messari, the leading provider of crypto intelligence products, has offered some key insights into the recent developments.

Since the FTX collapse unfolded, Solana has also faced a major setback in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space. The total value locked by all the DeFi protocols on the Solana blockchain network has dropped by 30 percent.

Project Serum, the central order book connecting the backend of almost every non-AMM piece of the Solana DeFi ecosystem led to a major FUD around Solana. At FTX, an unknown entity was holding the upgrade keys for Project Serum. This led to a major panic within the SOL community.

However, the developers made the changes quickly with a hardfork in Project Serum and the vulnerability to the hack was reduced. The Solana-wrapped tokens also proved to be another point of headache. Thus, the soBTC which was supposed to be pegged to Bitcoin was unpegged in the last few days.

FTX and Alameda had issued Sollet-wrapped assets. However, the news of FTX’s collapse negatively impacted the SOL price as well. Also, other Sollet-based assets such as soETH faced similar issues.

Can Aptos replace Solana

While the recent major fall in the crypto space, one project that is doing relatively well, is Aptos (APT). Aptos is another Layer 1 blockchain platform and a Solana competitor launched just three weeks back.

Aptos is launched by executives who were working on Facebook’s stablecoin project, Diem. Aptos says that it has a greater potential for development and partnerships with similar companies. Interestingly, just a few weeks after launch, Aptos entered into a partnership with Google Cloud.

Besides, some of the very popular funds that have invested in Aptos include Binance Labs, Multicoin Capital, and Circle. But some infamous names such as Jump Crypto and FTX Ventures are also on the list.

Aptos is relatively a very-young blockchain as of now. Although the APT price made some quick gains upon launch, it has come under broader market selling pressure. Currently, the APT token is trading at around $4 with a market cap of $500 million. However, the extremely limited supply of 13 percent of the existing APTs could play in its favor.

The only positive factor for Solana is that the blue-chip NFT floor price has witnessed a significant spike over the last week. This shows that the crypto community still has a good amount of interest in Solana NFTs.