Aptos blockchain mainnet launched last night, but the long-awaited debut was not without its challenges.
“Exciting to finally bring Aptos to the mainnet,” tweeted Aptos co-founder Mo Shaikh. — Acknowledged that it could have gone better.
On the technical front, Shaikh explained that the Aptos genesis happened on October 12, 2022, with 102 validators to secure the network. “These validators have gone through extensive testing ahead of the mainnet,” he said.
Before its mainnet launch, Aptos boasted an astonishing 130,000 transactions per second (TPS), but at launch it was reported to have a transaction per second rate of seven TPS – less than the Bitcoin blockchain.
“Most of these transactions are not actual transactions,” wrote aspiring “Twitter VC ghostwriter” @ParadigmEng420. “They’re just validators that communicate and set block checkpoints and write metadata to the blockchain.”
Shaikh says the low TPS is not representative of the network’s capacity and was “idling the network ahead of projects coming online,” saying the number of transactions per second should increase with more activity.
Shaikh then turned his attention to the issue of Aptos’ tokenomics, a facet that had raised significant questions and concerns after its launch. Shaikh said that Aptos tokens are “designed with people at the core”, and published a chart showing the four categories of token distribution and what percentage and amount of initial tokens each will receive.
According to Shaikh, many of the symbols included those assigned to the community, with foundation categories staked at the time of Aptos genesis. He explained that anyone who subsequently bet would receive a pro-rata stake reward (~7% per year) that would be unlocked every 30 days.
Not everyone was impressed.
“Locked tokens are a meme if they’re used to farming and dumping rewards,” tweeted cryptoanalyst @AkadoSang, calling locking and staking tokens “a sneaky way to get liquidity since backers usually hold [a] great offer.”
In addition to the mainnet launch, Binance, FTX and OKX said they are launching perpetual contracts with the Aptos APT token an hour after it started trading. Perpetual futures contracts allow traders to bet against the price of an asset.
Crypto podcaster Cobie was unimpressed with the FTX and Binance listing news, questioning how a spot market can function if traders don’t know the emission schedule or the total supply of coins.
Finally, addressing concerns about the brief unavailability of channels on the Aptos Discord server, Shaikh said the service was muted to protect community safety.
“Most projects mute channels because of the high amount of fraud,” he said. “Community safety is a high priority.”
Shaikh says that despite the hiccups at the launch, more applications will go live in the next few days.
“Building a decentralized protocol from scratch is tough!” Shaikh said. “Aptos is fortunate to have an amazing community that is constantly evolving together.”
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