Self-acclaimed Solana-killer Aptos is currently enmeshed in controversy following its mainnet and token launch. The Aptos token ($APT) began trading across top exchanges in the early hours of Oct 19. According to price aggregator CoinGecko, the token is trading at $7.6 (at the time of writing this report), declining by 45% from an all-time high of $13.73.
However, there are currently disparities in the all-time high across exchanges where the token is listed. Leading exchange, Binance reports Aptos’ ATH as $59. On MEXC, Aptos began trading at $9.5.
Since launching, the token has amassed a trading volume of over $430 million based on CoinGecko’s data. Such massive trading volume resulted from the airdrop distributed to early network participants. Each participant received 150 APT tokens worth $7500 at its ATH. Currently, the airdrop is worth around $1000.
Aptos Rocky Mainnet Launch
The Aptos mainnet launched on October 17, kicking off a wave of controversy around its tokenomics, lower transaction throughput, and non-transparency of the team(the Aptos Discord community was grounded for a while).
A tweep revealed that the layer-1 blockchain was running on a lower TPS (transactions per second) than promised. The Aptos team promised 100,000 TPS on the mainnet, but the chain was running at 4 TPS. In their defence, Aptos co-founder Mo Shaikh claimed no dApp was yet to launch on the mainnet, hence the low TPS. He also claimed the Discord community was muted to prevent scams.
After the community raised hell concerning the absence of $Aptos tokenomics, the team released an article detailing the token’s allocation and distribution. However, this drew more ire as the community complained of high allocation (49%) to developers and private investors. In addition, the Aptos team was accused of conspiring with VCs to dump the token on retailers.
The APT token airdrop seems to have assuaged the community’s reservations towards the blockchain and Aptos team. A total of 20,000,000 million tokens was allocated as an airdrop. Eligible participants minted the APTOS: ZERO NFT on testnet and received an email from airdrop@aptosfoundation.org to claim their tokens.
A massive dump-fest has occurred as participants converted their $APT tokens after claiming. In addition, some exchanges have listed APT/USDT PERP for futures trading, allowing traders to short the token’s price.
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