An Aptos-branded hat. (Danny Nelson/CoinDesk)

Aptos Token Rebounds After Upstart Blockchain’s Dismal Debut

We will show Aptos Token Rebounds After Upstart. Layer 1 blockchain Aptos’ token has enjoyed a powerful rally following last week’s inauspicious start, rebounding nearly to the price where it originally went live.

The APT token was trading at $9.17, up 36% compared with last week’s low of $6.75, based on CoinGecko data. At that pace of recovery it’s fast approaching the $12 price where it launched on multiple exchanges, based on data from Riyad Carey, a research analyst at crypto data firm Kaiko. In the early hours following the Oct. 19 launch, the token was trading around $9 on the Coinbase, Huobi, FTX and Binance crypto exchanges.

Aptos Token Rebounds After Upstart

“I certainly think it’s possible that APT could rally above the open price, especially if crypto continues to outperform equities and if Aptos is able to generate some activity, whether in DeFi or NFTs,” Carey said.

Aptos Token Rebounds After Upstart

The token quickly plunged below $7 on its first trading day and struggled, as community criticism over the number of APT tokens held by private investors and developers mounted Aptos Token Rebounds After Upstart, according to Carey.

There were also jabs related to the blockchain’s processing speed, initially at four transactions per second (TPS) – a far cry from the 160,000 TPS capability touted by the Aptos team. (A quick spot check of an Aptos blockchain explorer showed the current rate at 12.5 TPS.)

According to a web statement from the Aptos protocol about its tokenomics, the project minted a total of 1 billion tokens, with some 510 million distributed to community members (around 51%), 190 million to core developers (around 19%) and the remaining to the Aptos Foundation (around 16%) and private investors (around 13%).
The Aptos Foundation’s allocations quickly raised a Twitter backlash Ether Becomes Deflationary, with critics questioning Aptos’ fairness and commitment to its community. The tokens held by private investors and current core contributors are subject to a “four-year lockup schedule” from the blockchain launch, according to Aptos.

Because of a relatively small circulating supply and a fairly small airdrop, there is “not a lot of built-in selling pressure” in Aptos, Carey said.
The rally has pushed APT’s market capitalization over $1 billion, ranking it among the 50 biggest cryptocurrencies overall, according to CoinGecko. The fully diluted valuation – including all tokens in existence, not just those that are circulating – is over $9 billion, according to the site.
Backed by FTX and the crypto-friendly venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Aptos is a layer 1 blockchain led by ex-Meta employees who pioneered the company’s failed diem stablecoin. The blockchain relies on a Rust-based programming language named “Move” – also the programming language for another upstart blockchain, Sui.

While Aptos had “a bumpy start,” observers’ interest in Rust-based layer 1 blockchains, including Aptos, Sui and Radix, remains high, said Adrian Fritz, research associate at 21Shares.

Aptos’s new layer-1 blockchain launched on Monday but was widely panned for its opaque tokenomics Russian Government to Hold Key Crypto Regulation, inconsistent communications (the Discord was briefly frozen), and a significantly lower transaction throughput than promised.

Aptos Token Rebounds After Upstart

Aptos did eventually release tokenomics for the APT cryptocurrency, but the reveal attracted even more criticism for the high allocation (49%) to developers and private investors, giving rise to quips that the network catered for venture capital.

Aptos co-founder Mo Shaikh took to Twitter yesterday and explained that the transaction throughput is expected to increase once more applications go live on the blockchain. He also said the team muted the Discord for a few hours on launch day to protect the community against scams.

Aptos also announced a 20,000,000 APT token airdrop last night, which a little over 110,000 people are eligible to receive. “The Aptos Foundation has provided early network participants with APT tokens. If you are eligible to claim, you will receive an email from [email protected] in the next few hours Aptos Token Rebounds After Upstart,” tweeted the project.

Participants in the Aptos Incentivized Testnet or those who minted the APTOS:ZERO testnet NFT will get up to 150 APT tokens.

And based on the timing, it looks like at least a few of them dumped their newly-earned tokens on arrival.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated on September 19 at 8:30 am ET to reflect that the APT token crash began after the airdrop.

Others weren’t convinced that Aptos — legally Matonee Inc. — will work out its bugs anytime soon. Many blockchain projects that predate Aptos have made similar promises about speed and the ability to scale up, Ryan Watkins, co-founder of cryptocurrency-focused hedge fund Pangea Fund Management Aptos Token Rebounds After Upstart, told The Defiant, an industry-focused news outlet. Those have largely been unrealized.

What’s happening with Aptos is “a story we’ve heard before,” Watkins told The Defiant. The startup’s technology, he continued, “ultimately faces a long road like every other chain that’s come before them.”

The brouhaha was the result of the opening of Aptos’ blockchain to the public on Monday and the beginning of public trading of its eponymous token on Tuesday.

Aptos token’s price fell
Tokens serve as the currency of blockchain projects. Blockchain operators sometimes sell them to investors to raise cash or issue them to developers or miners to reward them for participating in their ecosystems. Tokens can also be used to pay for services recorded on the blockchain.

In Aptos’ case, it reportedly gave away 510 million of its first 1 billion tokens to community members. It gave another 190 million to core developers on its service and divided the remaining 300 million between private investors and the Aptos Foundation, whose mission is to support adoption of the network.

After debuting at $13.73 each — at least according to CoinGecko, which tracks cryptocurrency prices — the aptos token quickly fell. Thursday afternoon, it was trading at $7.30 a piece. The total value of all the tokens in circulation — about 130 million — was around $950 million Aptos Token Rebounds After Upstart, according to CoinGecko.

In addition to the price plunge, some investors and cryptocurrency enthusiasts took to Twitter and other online forums to complain about the performance of Aptos’ blockchain. The startup’s founders had projected the system would handle three times the amount of transactions per second that Solana’s rival blockchain does. But the network reportedly moved at a much slower pace than that on its first day.

Even so, the company, which has has designed its blockchain to be used in gaming, social networks, media and entertainment and finance, asserted in a tweet Monday its system was “performing as expected.”

Shaikh and co-founder Avery Ching launched Aptos last year after leaving Meta Platforms Inc. (Nasdaq: META), where they had worked on the tech giant’s cryptocurrency effort. They left Meta last fall, just before it started to wind down that project.

Aptos raised $400 million total in jumbo-sized seed and Series A rounds earlier this year. Its investors include Andreessen Horowitz, FTX Ventures and cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase and Binance.

The Move programming language, originally developed by the Diem team, allows Aptos to make use of safe resource management and verifiable on-chain executions. Accounts, transaction fees, a standard library, validator node management, and configuration are all implemented with Move Aptos Token Rebounds After Upstart, according to the Aptos team.

The unique consensus protocol and a tailor-made Move language enable Aptos to tackle blockchain congestion stemming from an increasing number of decentralized applications (dApps), decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The team believes that the Aptos mainnet, once fully rolled out, will be capable of serving billions of users. While still in the early stages of development, the Aptos blockchain is capable of processing over 10,000 transactions per second (TPS). However, a lower finality could lead to a considerable TPS boost going forward. For context Aptos Token Rebounds After Upstart, Bitcoin and Ethereum can process at most 7 and 30 TPS, respectively.

Thanks to the robust blockchain foundations, the Aptos ecosystem could grow to become a hotbed for blockchain-powered gaming, entertainment, and social media applications. A number of Web3 projects have already joined the project’s incentivized testnet, including on-chain order book Econia, a mobile multi-sig wallet hive, and a dedicated Aptos wallet called Martian.