"Aptos, blockchain wonder or hollow promise?"

The Aptos blockchain project announced the launch of its mainnet on October 17.

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The Aptos blockchain project announced the launch of its mainnet on October 17. The highly ambitious project was launched by former Diems developers (formerly Libra) after Facebook's stablecoin was put on ice.

The project has raised more than $300 million from investors like Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), FTX Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures. The project is currently valued at about four billion dollars.

Aptos aims to replace Solana as the "fast" blockchain. The completed blockchain is expected to reach up to 160,000 transactions per second, three times Solana at its best. But the recent launch was less convincing and leaves questions unanswered.

Venture capital's darling?

Aptos has a mixed reputation. Not only does its Facebook-origin past cling to the project. There’s talk of a real risk that retail investors could become cannon fodder for big investors’ profit-taking when the APT token hits the market. Aptos was almost entirely funded with venture capital that could absorb losses. That’s why it’s often mockingly called the "VC darling" in crypto circles. There hasn’t been a public sale yet.

What’s suspicious here is that key details about token distribution were unknown until just before launch. The major crypto exchanges, some of which are investors themselves, naturally want to list the hype token anyway.

Meanwhile the project has published an overview of its token distribution (tokenomics). About half of the tokens are already allocated to internal projects to boost the ecosystem, with the rest held by the investors and the team.

A full 82 percent of the total supply has also been staked. Artificial token scarcity is common with newer blockchain projects. That initial price surge often fuels euphoria, before more tokens are released in a few months and the supply cools off significantly.

Next-generation blockchain?

So far, Aptos hasn't been deterred by the criticism. The tokenomics are designed with the community in mind, they say, and the blockchain has run from day one "as planned," according to the project’s View post on X.

Aptos was founded by Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, who previously worked on Diem. What wasn’t possible with the failed Facebook project, they hope to achieve with Aptos. The team wants to apply years of experience in the traditional tech sector to Web 3.0 and build the "most secure and scalable Layer 1 blockchain".

This would be enabled by a new approach to blockchain programming. Parallel execution is the name of this transaction processing approach, which is expected to handle up to 160,000 executions per second. Plus, the new Move programming language would make life easier for devs and lure them away from Solana or Ethereum.

At first, however, there was apparently little sign of that. One user noted the block explorer logged only four transactions per second (TPS). That would be slower than Bitcoin.

According to Paradigm Engineer, it was also concerning that Aptos deactivated its Discord servers right before launch, a "necessary step" to protect the community from scammers, as shown in View post on X.

According to the developers, the initially low transaction speed is just a result of the still-low activity on the blockchain. Shortly after launch, this is normal, they say in a Discord post. As usage grows, speed should increase.

Marketing or mass adoption?

As always, it remains to be seen whether Aptos can really compete with Solana or if the hype will fizzle out as with previous blockchain revolutions. The memory of the long-hyped and highly unsuccessful launch of the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) looms.

The Aptos blockchain may still be too immature. After nearly four years of development, it’s hard to call this a rushed launch. But the claim that the launch feels premature isn’t unfounded. Competitor Mysten Labs is currently in the final stages of its blockchain called Sui.

That project also counts former Meta developers on its team and uses Move. It’s possible Aptos is rushing to position itself as a pioneer with an earlier start, at the expense of broader functionality.

Either way, both projects will have to prove themselves in the existing blockchain and crypto community. Whether the former Facebook developers have truly solved the blockchain triad or are simply leveraging their marketing chops will likely show in Aptos’ trajectory in the weeks and months ahead.