On the morning of October 18, 2022, the crypto community was buzzing with the news of Aptos (APT) launching the mainnet and going to be listed. Several exchanges have announced they would list APT, including Binance, FTX, Huobi, Bybit, etc.
It is unusual for project tokens to be listed massively, so ordinary users may develop FOMO. Notably, in the ongoing “crypto winter”, while many projects gradually freeze their activities, Aptos is banging the drum for its tokens.
Therefore, it stands to reason as the community started investigating the project profile to see if APT is potential or is only a “second ICP.”
Why FOMO?
Standing on the shoulders of giants.
The predecessor of Aptos is Diem (formerly known as Libra), which is Meta’s stablecoin project. Diem couldn’t develop due to a series of legal obstacles, not necessarily its “flaws”.
As former Diem employees split up to start two new projects, Aptos and Sui, both received high expectations as they could inherit the legacy of Diem.
Both use the Move programming language that Meta developed itself for Diem. The community sees Aptos and Sui as “Diem 2.0” – a promising next generation with solid backgrounds from the giant Meta.
A wide range of strong backers
With such a background, Aptos or Sui can quickly become a name sought after by VCs. When former Facebook employees raised capital for these projects, they didn’t use marketing much to evoke a particular FOMO.
Particularly in the current gloomy market where investment funds need projects with sufficient potential, Aptos or Sui stood out.
- In February 2022, Aptos raised $200 million, and the project was valued at $1 billion;
- In July 2022, Aptos raised $150 million from many well-established funds;
- In September 2022, Binance made an additional investment in Aptos, when a project was valued at $4 billion.
Thus, Aptos has famous backers and received nearly $400 million in funding with a valuation of $4 billion just in three funding rounds.
Why FUD?
Little information about APT tokenomics
The APT token will be listed soon, but the information about APT’s tokenomics is still surrounded by vagueness. The official website and the listing announcements of the exchanges didn’t mention APT’s tokenomics at all.
At this moment, only a little information is known:
According to Aptos Explorer, the total supply of APT is over 1.8 billion tokens. And over 80% of these tokens have been staked and will gradually be unlocked.
Data recorded on October 18, 2022 at 2:30 pm
According to Larry Cermak of The Block Research, the Korean Upbit exchange “accidentally” published the document on the tokenomics of APT.
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 lol
— Cobie (@cobie) October 18, 2022
According to FTX, the APT token is a governance token used to vote for project updates. Validators and developers need APT to upgrade their software in the ecosystem.
On the afternoon of October 18, Aptos finally announced APT’s tokenomics with a lot of information.
The mainnet is not as expected.
There is little news about the Aptos blockchain, the testnet, and the network deployment. According to the project’s roadmap, the mainnet launch is in Q3 2022. Thus, the project’s announcement of the mainnet launch on October 12, 2022, is out of the blue.
According to Aptos Explorer, Aptos TPS is 4 transactions/second, with 102 active validators. By comparison, the TPS of Bitcoin – the network is said to be unsuitable for microtransactions – is 5 transactions/second. Meanwhile, Ethereum TPS is currently around 24 transactions/second.
The community does not highly rate both the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks because of their transaction processing speed. Hence, new projects often underscore their transaction speed, even comparing them with Visa or Mastercard.
As with the current TPS, Aptos is still far from reaching the “100,000 TPS” goal set by the project. But objectively, the mainnet has only just launched, with limited users and Dapps, leading to few transactions.
Aptos is broken.
Aptos launched today – October 17, 2022 at 14:22:40
However, Aptos is 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) October 17, 2022
The ecosystem is not fully developed.
The ecosystem is an essential factor in evaluating a Layer-1 project as Aptos. Since the release of the project’s information, many parties have planned to build on Aptos as they envision the potential and FOMO of the project.
Although Aptos already has most of the essential components of an ecosystem, such as DEX, AMM, launchpad, and NFT, the project is still very young, and the resources to build the ecosystem are still limited. Soon, when the mainnet is stable, projects on Aptos are expected to develop more.
Final Thoughts
The ICP historical trick is still there, and many investors lost money due to the dump of token prices. Thus, the community is now much more cautious and alert.
The uptrend has shown that VC funds “backing” the project are just whales holding large amounts of tokens who sold off tokens after they were unlocked, leading to substantial losses for retail investors.
Therefore, while it’s clear that Aptos has the potential, it’s essential to stay alert. The project’s roadmap is long, and the ecosystem is fertile, so there are still many opportunities for those who are patient and cautious.
Disclaimer: CoinCulture does not provide financial advice. Any information available on this website is ‘general’ in nature and for informational purposes only.