Solana Killer Aptos Stirs Hype And Criticism Ahead Of Listings
With Aptos, one of the hottest blockchains of the moment celebrated its launch on the mainnet yesterday. Funded by several major crypto ventures – such as a16z, Jump Capital, FTX Ventures and Binance – the project was surrounded by high expectations from its inception and titled “Solana killer”.
The project is a spin-off from former Meta employees who worked on Libra in 2019, which was subsequently renamed Diem. Due to political pressure, Mark Zuckerberg’s company had to shut down the project. However, some developers saw great potential in the technical underpinnings and created Aptos. Their goal is to build a highly scalable, decentralized and cost-effective blockchain solution that will drive Web3 adoption.
The new blockchain allows for parallel execution. With this, a scalability of up to 160,000 transactions per second (TPS) should be achieved. However, yesterday’s release was more than disappointing, as pointed out by a pseudonymous reviewer named Paradigm Engineer #420.
Image: The Layer
The TPS was just four transactions per second yesterday. Furthermore, most of the activity on the network was not actual transactions, but just validators communicating, establishing block verification points, and writing metadata to the blockchain.
Another criticism was that developers could not use the blockchain effectively because there were no rpcs and connecting to validators was not possible. The pseudonymous analyst still criticized:
Aptos knows something is wrong. Between genesis and 1:30 PM PT, Aptos Discord was disabled – users could not chat or ask questions. They have recently opened some channels, but important channels like development resources are still closed.
The Aptos team justified the current state of the network. Via Discord, the developers wrote that yesterday’s four transactions per second does not reflect the maximum TPS. A low network load is normal at the start of the main network. As user activity on the network increases, blockchain will reveal its true scalability, Aptos said.
As always, the safety of the Aptos Community is our top priority. Comments on Aptos channels (Discord and Telegram) have been proactively closed to protect the community from scams during this window.
Developers are actively monitoring and channels will return to normal when appropriate.
— Aptos (@AptosLabs) October 18, 2022
Tokenomics of Aptos raises criticism before listing
With FTX and Binance, the two main cryptocurrency exchanges in the world and also supporters of Aptos, announced that they will list the APT token tomorrow, Wednesday. Both will open trades for the APT/BTC, APT/BUSD and APT/USDT spot trading pairs at 1:00 am UTC.
Tomorrow’s listing on exchanges will have to show whether the project can gain the trust of the crypto community. In preparation, there were strong criticisms towards tokenomics, which have not been released until today. Critics have argued that it is not good for FTX and Binance to list APT without any tokennomics transparency.
What’s funny is that I think Upbit accidentally leaked the token savings in their Aptos PDF report. pic.twitter.com/79cvOiPSwV
“Larry Cermak?” (@lawmaster) October 18, 2022
Even though this criticism was dispelled by a blog post, question marks remain behind the distribution and release of APT for years to come.
The initial total APT supply on the mainnet is 1 billion tokens, with 51.02% allocated to the community, 19% to core contributors, 16.50% to the foundation, and 13.48% to VC investors. The community token pool is for ecosystem-related items like grants, incentives, and other community growth initiatives.
Some of these tokens have already been allocated to projects built on the protocol and will be awarded upon reaching certain milestones. The majority of these tokens (410,217,359,767) are owned by the Foundation, with a smaller portion (100,000,000) owned by Aptos Labs. These tokens are expected to be distributed over a 10-year period.
SOL total market cap at $11.09 billion on the daily chart | Featured image from Unlock Blockchain, Chart: TradingView.com