Aptos APT Price Dumps 50% After VC Heavy Tokenomics Come Under Fire

The Aptos blockchain network developed by former Meta employees has launched to mainnet, but the crypto critics have been out in force questioning its tokenomics and TPS claims. Just hours after it started trading on major exchanges, the APT price had already crashed by 50%

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

Aptos is the latest in a long list of launched layer-1 blockchain networks that claim to be a “killer” of those already operating. It aims to compete squarely with Solana as CTO Avery Ching commented that “current blockchains are just not as reliable as existing financial rails, we’ve seen issues of downtime and outages that last for hours” earlier this year when the project was unveiled.  

Aptos transaction teething troubles

Aptos uses a programming language called Move, which has been “natively integrated for safe asset management as well as fast and secure transaction execution.”

The team hopes to lure developers away from current networks and aims to support a wide range of web3 applications. “We are proudly supporting a wide variety of use cases across NFT, gaming, commerce, social networks, and media & entertainment,” they stated in an announcement on Oct. 18.

Aptos claims its transactions per second (TPS) reach 130,000. However, engineers have reported that it is nowhere near that and not even close to that of the Bitcoin network.

The software engineer 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 (investor) support despite tokenomics

Major exchanges, including Coinbase, Binance, and FTX (all of which were Aptos investors), have been fast to list the APT token. The move comes despite it having no transparent tokenomics or emissions schedule, but that doesn’t appear to be of concern to those heavily invested in the project.

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

The engineer that investigated the low TPS also looked into the tokenomics revealing 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 sentiment was shared by other prominent members of the crypto community:

APT price pump and dump

As expected, token prices surged when they hit exchanges a few hours ago, topping out at $13.73 during the morning of Oct. 19, according to CoinGecko.

However, in typical fashion and as predicted by market analysts, APT has already dumped almost 50% to $7.30 at the time of press. This could be a mass offload by VCs and investors, with retail getting dumped on yet again.