Aptos, the much-hyped venture-backed blockchain project, has just dropped, and so far the reception has been mixed.
It’s been a bumpy ride for Aptos, which has its roots in the one-time Facebook-owned Diem stablecoin project.
But Apto’s launch also comes at an interesting time.
The mainnet has arrived.https://t.co/wZajVZMa5Q
— Aptos (@AptosFoundation) 17 October 2022
With few major projects released since the 2021 gold rush, and the crypto market stuck in a seemingly eternal winter, the blockchain’s launch has many eyes trained on it.
Let’s get the lowest.
Carpe Diem
Aptos has its roots in the Diem stablecoin project, which had its roots in Facebook (before the Meta rebrand).
Facebook was forced to abandon Diem after intense regulatory scrutiny, which prompted PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and all other major project partners to drop out.
US officials were rightly concerned about Facebook’s plans for financial services, given the social media-cum-metaverse giant’s checkered history with privacy.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell voiced his concerns, Zuckerberg cut his losses and Silvergate Bank stepped in and bought Diem’s intellectual property for $200 million.
But former Facebook/Meta employees Mo Shaik and Avery Ching weren’t ready to leave the project.
Diem re-emerged in early 2022, bringing with it $200 million in venture backing from Andreesen Horowitz, Coinbase, FTX and a host of others, as well as a new name: Aptos.
A series of test nets later and the project that first germinated in the depths of Facebook’s engineering department has finally seized the day.
After all this time, is it a success?
Started slow, literally
The Aptos blockchain is currently ticking over at 25.35 transactions per second (tps).
Many Twitter users have deplored such a low throughput – a supposed Solana killer with a tps barely 1% of Solana.
Aptos is broken.
Aptos launched today – 17 October 2022 at 14:22:40
However, Aptos currently has a lower tps than Bitcoin and a majority of tokens are either staked or ready to be dumped on retail investors.
Curious? Thread below
????— Paradigm Engineer #420 (@ParadigmEng420) 17 October 2022
But Aptos’ tps has steadily increased throughout the day, after only starting at a paltry 4tps, so it could simply be teething problems.
The biggest concern may be the current state of the APT coin.
APT received immediate listing support from most major centralized exchanges, including Binance, FTX and Coinbase, but price action has so far been fairly muted.
At the time of writing, APT is down over 42% after launching yesterday. Far from the worst token launch ever, but certainly not the behavior expected of a much-hyped new cryptocurrency, especially one with so much venture capital behind it.
Concerns have also been raised over APT’s tokenomics, with some people criticizing the number of tokens reserved for private investors and the centralized Aptos Labs enterprise.
In fairness, the investor tokens are subject to a four-year vesting plan, so short-term token dumping is unlikely.
Earning plans are used to combat mass token dumping – Source: aptosfoundation.org
But the criticism runs deeper than that – for crypto-heads, any degree of centralization or private token allocation is frowned upon, if not outright condemned.
Aptos has a major advantage over Solana: an as-yet-unsullied safety reputation.
In a year when Solana may have experienced one hack too many, perhaps security could turn out to be Aptos’ killer app.
The fruits of Aptos’ labor
A little-known lending protocol called Apricot Finance just increased its trading volume by over 3000% in one day, despite the fact that there was no hype, upgrades or noticeable increase in total value locked on the protocol.
What does that have to do with Aptos?
In a case of ticker confusion, Apricot Finance shares the same APT abbreviation as Aptos on Gate.io and a number of low-level exchanges.
The few APT holders (of the Apricot Finance persuasion) who saw their tokens nearly triple in price from $0.004 to the princely sum of $0.011 must worship at the Aptos Labs altar right now.
