The news of a brand new blockchain entering the cryptocurrency market heated up the crypto scene this week.
Especially when considering that Aptos is not just any blockchain start-up.
Aptos Labs – is a startup created by former Meta (Facebook) Platforms developers who used to work on the abandoned “Diem” project. On top of that, one of the largest investors in the startup is Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world.
Yi He, the co-founder of Binance and head of Binance Labs, argues that the programming language Aptos used to construct its blockchain is a factor in the start-latest up’s fundraising, which follows the initial round of funding announced in March.
This week, Aptos was finally launched and the results in its trading debut were not as promising as expected.
According to statistics from crypto price aggregator “CoinGecko”, Aptos token (APT) is down 40.5% on its first day of trading.
The native token for the so-called “Solana-killer” is now worth $8.06, having lost more than a third of its value since the platform caught the initial deal at $13.73.
However, there are already significant differences between numbers on various aggregators. CoinMarketCap, for example, has suffered small intraday losses of 3.5% thus far.
Aptos First Airdrop
On the same day, After Foundation announced that it will airdrop around 20 million APT tokens to its early network members.
However, Aptos lacked adequate anti-Sybil attack mechanisms, which allowed certain users to obtain a large number of airdrop tokens. Over 189,567 APT tokens were sold directly on Binance, lowering the price from $15 to $13.
Aptos Tokenomics Controversy
Despite its brief existence, Aptos already has a good amount of controversy surrounding the blockchain.
On Twitter, a developer by the name of Paul Fidika revealed why he decided to stop developing in Aptos, in a critique of the blockchain’s “dodgey tokenomics”.
“The FTX / Coinbase / Binance tokens going on sale tomorrow are already owned by the exchanges and are already staked,” Fidika wrote on Twitter. “However, these exchanges are marketing as if these tokens are being sold by the community (which is impossible—there was no ICO).”
He also mentioned additional difficulties that prevented him from working on the network, such as the use of the proof-of-stake mechanism for “economics rather than security.”
Other concerns include the likelihood of “network performance (degrading) rapidly if there are a few sluggish validators” due to the usage of the HotStuff algorithm, as well as the elimination of the shared staking option.
