Heavy Tokenomics Under Criticism Results in 50% Price Dump of Aptos (APT)

After four years, the team behind Facebook’s failed Diem crypto project has finally finished development of Aptos and has made it to mainnet.

But the Aptos blockchain network have come under heavy crypto critics questioning its tokenomics and TPS claims. The APT price has already crashed by 50% just hours after it started trading on major exchanges.

Aptos is a layer-1 blockchain network who claims to be a "killer" of the current operating ones and aims to compete squarely with Solana as CTO Avery Ching earlier this year when the project was unveiled commented:

Current blockchains are just not as reliable as existing financial rails, we’ve seen issues of downtime and outages that last for hours.

Teething Troubles of Aptos Transactions

Aptos uses a programming language called Move. This has been natively integrated for safe asset management and fast & secure transaction execution.

Its team hopes to lure developers away from current networks and aims to support a wide range of web3 applications. They stated in an announcement on October 18:

We are proudly supporting a wide variety of use cases across NFT, gaming, commerce, social networks, and media & entertainment.

Despite the claim from Aptos that its transactions per second (TPS) reached 130,000, engineers have justified that it is nowhere near that and not even close to that of the Bitcoin network.

The software engineer also said that the current network is not useable, adding:

Aptos knows something is wrong. Between genesis and 1:30 PM PT, the aptos discord was disabled – users couldn’t chat or ask any questions.

Major Exchange and Investors Support Despite Tokenomics

Major centralized exchanges, such as Coinbase, Binance, and FTX have been quick to list the APT token. The move still pushed through despite it having no transparent tokenomics, which apparently doesn’t present to be of a concern to those heavily invested in the project.

It was made clear that a prerequisite to listing should be that users have the basic information on what they’re buying:

A delve into the tokenomics by the investigating software engineer revealed that as much as 80% of the APT supply is owned and controlled by the team and investors.

The point is that nearly the entire token supply is going to private parties, there was never a public sale or another method where users could have earned tokens.

The claim was also shared by other influential members of the crypto community:

APT's Pump and Dump Antics

Token prices surged when they hit exchanges a few hours ago as expected, topping out at $13.73 during the morning of Oct. 19 per CoinGecko.

However at the time of press, APT has already dumped almost 50% to $7.30 as predicted by market analysts. This could have been a mass offload by VCs and investors.