Solana Killer Aptos Stirs Hype And Criticism Ahead Of Listings

With Aptos, one of the most hyped blockchains at the moment celebrated its mainnet launch yesterday. Funded by numerous major crypto ventures – such as a16z, Jump Capital, FTX Ventures and Binance – the project has been surrounded by tremendous expectations since its inception and titled “Solana killer”.

The project is a spin-off by former Meta employees who worked on Libra in 2019, which was later renamed Diem. Due to political pressure, Mark Zuckerberg’s company had to shut down the project. However, some developers saw great potential in the technical fundamentals and created Aptos. Their aim is to build a highly scalable, decentralized and cost-effective blockchain solution that will drive mainstream adoption of Web3.

The new blockchain enables parallel execution. With this, a scalability of up to 160,000 transactions per second (TPS) was supposed to be achieved. However, yesterdays launch was more than disappointing as pointed out by a pseudonymous analyst called Paradigm Engineer #420.

Image: The Layer

The TPS was only about four transactions per second yesterday. Also, most of the activity on the network was not actual transactions, but just validators communicating, setting block checkpoints, and writing metadata to the blockchain.

Another criticism was that developers could not use the blockchain effectively because there were no rpcs and connecting to validators was not possible. The pseudonymous analyst further criticized:

Aptos knows something is wrong. Between genesis and 1:30 PM PT, the Aptos discord was disabled – users couldn’t chat or ask any questions. They’ve only recently opened a few channels, but important channels like dev-resources are still closed.

The Aptos team justified the current state of the network. Via Discord, the developers wrote that yesterday’s four transactions per second do not reflect the maximum TPS. A low network load is normal at the start of the mainnet. As soon as user activity on the network increases, the blockchain will reveal its true scalability, Aptos stated.

As always, the safety of the Aptos Community is top priority. Comments on Aptos channels (Discord & Telegram) were proactively closed to protect the community from scams during this window.

Developers are actively monitoring and channels will return to normal when appropriate.

— Aptos (@AptosLabs) October 18, 2022

Tokenomics Of Aptos Raise Criticism Before Listing

With FTX and Binance, the world’s two leading crypto exchanges and also supporters of Aptos, have announced that they will list the APT token tomorrow, Wednesday. Both will open trading for APT/BTC, APT/BUSD and APT/USDT spot trading pairs at 1:00am UTC.

Tomorrow’s listing on exchanges will have to show whether the project can win the trust of the crypto community. In the run-up there was sharp criticism regarding tokenomics, which were not made public until today. Critics argued that it’s not good that FTX and Binance list APT without any tokenomics transparency.

What’s funny is that I think Upbit accidentally leaked the token economics in their Aptos PDF report. pic.twitter.com/79cvOiPSwV

— Larry Cermak 🫡 (@lawmaster) October 18, 2022

Even though this criticism has been dispelled by a blog post, question marks remain behind the distribution and release of APT in the coming years.

The initial total APT offering on mainnet stands at 1 billion tokens, with 51.02% allocated to the community, 19% to core contributors, 16.50% to the foundation, and 13.48% to VC investors. The community token pool is for ecosystem-related things like grants, incentives, and other community growth initiatives.

Some of these tokens have already been allocated to projects built on the protocol and will be awarded upon reaching certain milestones. A majority of these tokens (410,217,359.767) are owned by the Foundation, with a smaller portion (100,000,000) owned by Aptos Labs. These tokens are expected to be distributed over a 10-year period.

SOL total market cap at $11.09 billion on the daily chart | Featured image from Unlock Blockchain, Chart: TradingView.com