A chaotic crypto launch reveals how hard it is to beat Ethereum

Other community members have attacked Aptos for its failure to release tokenomics – a description of the distribution of tokens, how they will work and when they will be released into circulation – before the launch date, which is considered bad form. It’s a bit like asking someone to enter into a contract without first setting out all the terms.

Despite these issues, Aptos CEO Mo Shaikh dismisses much of the criticism of the launch. “[The] The launch of Mainnet has gone better than expected for a completely new network. The network reached close to 3 million transactions and peaks of over 100 TPS in less than two days, he says. This TPS number is higher than the performance of some rival networks, but lower than Solana’s, which currently hovers around 4,500 TPS.

Shaikh says the priority now is to ensure developers get everything they need to start building applications on top of Aptos. Only then will we “see the impressive transaction numbers Apto’s blockchain is built for,” he claims.

Aptos is backed by heavyweight VCs such as Andreesen Horowitz, FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and Binance Labs. Although details of the latest funding round were not disclosed, a Bloomberg report pegged the valuation at $4 billion.

These VC backers are each set to receive a proportionately large volume of tokens, according to tokenomics Aptos eventually published. Developers and private investors will be allocated a total volume of 32.48 per cent, which is increasing questions whether this could distort the economy in the network. Although VCs and developers cannot offload any tokens for at least a year and do not have access to the entire allocation until 2026, this protection does not apply to stake rewards (equivalent to interest payments). In theory, Aptos backers could make large sums of money from their holdings, which could then be dumped on the market, creating downward pressure on the price.

Shaikh admits that tokenomics “should have come out earlier,” an oversight he attributes to the team’s pre-launch workload. But as for concerns about the amount awarded to investors, he claims the stock is “among the lowest […] for any blockchain on the market today.”

Shaikh and his co-founder Avery Ching previously worked together on Novi, a crypto wallet built to support the Diem stablecoin. They refer to the Aptos network as “layer 1 for everyone” – a reference to their ambition to develop a blockchain that is cheap, scalable, versatile and easy to use.

Whether Aptos is able to meet this goal will have a lot to do with the programming language underlying the chain, called Move, which was developed from scratch to power the Diem blockchain. The language enables a peak theoretically performance of 160,000 TPS, far higher than the theoretical peaks of both Ethereum and Solana.

Publicly, the Aptos team resists the “Solana killer” moniker. But much as Solana was designed to process transactions faster than Ethereum, Aptos promises to outperform Solana.

This competition is healthy for a blockchain ecosystem, says David Shuttleworth, senior DeFi economist at ConsenSys, a development studio set up by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin. “Technological progress should always be pursued, at all levels, not just blockchain, and should not be limited to one particular ecosystem or protocol,” he says.