Venture capitalists and team control majority of APT token supply.
The Aptos Blockchain network, developed by former Meta employees, has launched on the mainnet, but critics have been questioning its tokenomics and TPS claims. Just hours after it began trading on major exchanges, APT’s price had already plummeted by 50%.
After four years of development from Facebook’s failed crypto project Diem, Aptos hit the mainnet.
Aptos is the latest in a long line of Layer 1 Blockchain networks launched, claiming to be a “killer” of the ones already up and running.
Its goal is to compete directly with Solana. Earlier this year, when the project was unveiled, CTO Avery Ching commented that, “current Blockchains are simply not as reliable as existing financial rails; we have seen downtime issues and outages lasting hours”
Initial Problems: Aptos and their Transactions per Second
Aptos uses a programming language called Move, which has been “natively integrated for secure asset management, as well as fast and secure transaction execution.”
The team hopes to move developers away from current networks, and aims to support a wide range of web3 applications. “We are proud to support a wide variety of use cases across NFTs, gaming, trading, social media, and media and entertainment,” they stated in an announcement on Oct. 18.
Aptos claims that its transactions per second (TPS) reach 130,000. However, engineers have reported that it is nowhere near that, and not even close to the Bitcoin network.
Software engineer @ParadigmEng420 tweeted that the current network is unusable and added the following:
“Aptos knows something is wrong. Between genesis and 1:30 PM PT, the Aptos Discord was disabled: users couldn’t chat or ask questions.”
Huge Support from Exchanges despite Tokenomics
Major exchanges including Coinbase, Binance, and FTX (all of which were Aptos investors) were quick to list the APT token. The move came despite the fact that it does not have a transparent tokenomics or issuance schedule, but that does not seem to worry those who have invested heavily in the project.
It was noted that a prerequisite for listing should be that users have basic information about what they are buying.
@cobie, an engineer who researched TPS, tweeted that, “It’s not great that FTX/Binance, etc., are all listing Aptos without any tokenomics transparency at all. Surely, it should be a prerequisite to listing something that users can have the basic information on what they’re buying.”
He also looked at tokenomics, and revealed that up to 80% of the APT supply is owned and controlled by the team and investors.
“The point is that almost all of the token supply goes to private entities, there was never a public sale or another method where users could have earned tokens,” he explained.
The sentiment was shared by other prominent members of the crypto community.
Aptos Price (APT) Experiences Pump and Dump
As expected, token prices increased when they hit exchanges a few hours ago, reaching a high of $13.73 during the morning of Oct. 19, according to CoinGecko.
However, typically and as market analysts predicted, APT has already plunged nearly 50% to $7.30 at press time.
This could be a massive dump by venture capitalists and investors, and retail trading will take a hit once again.
By Audy Castaneda
