Aptos Blockchain Launches to Concerns Over Tokenomics

The Aptos blockchain mainnet launched last night, but the long-awaited debut was not without its challenges.

"It's exciting to finally bring Aptos to mainnet," Aptos co-founder Mo Shaikh tweeted. "Acknowledged that it could have gone better."

On the technical front, Shaikh explained that the Aptos genesis occurred on October 12, 2022, with 102 validators to secure the network. "These validators have gone through extensive testing ahead of mainnet," he said.

Before the mainnet launch, Aptos boasted an astonishing 130,000 transactions per second (TPS) but, at launch, was reported to have a transaction per second speed of seven TPS—less than the Bitcoin blockchain.

"The majority of these transactions are not actual transactions," wrote aspiring “Twitter VC ghostwriter" @ParadigmEng420. "They are merely validators communicating and setting block checkpoints and writing metadata to the blockchain."

Shaikh says the low TPS is not representative of the network's capacity and was "the network idling ahead of projects coming online, saying the transactions per second number should increase with more activity.

Shaikh then turned his attention to the issue of Aptos' tokenomics, a facet that had drawn considerable questions and concerns following the launch. Shaikh said Aptos tokens are "designed with people at the core," and published a chart listing the four categories of token distribution and what percentage and amount of initial tokens each would receive.

According to Shaikh, many of the tokens included those allocated to the community, with foundation categories staked at the time of the Aptos genesis. He explained that everyone who subsequently stakes would receive a pro-rata staking reward (~7% per yr) that would unlock every 30 days.

Not everyone was impressed.

"Locked tokens are a meme if they're used to farm and dump rewards," tweeted crypto analyst @AkadoSang, calling locking and staking tokens "a sneaky way to get liquidity since backers usually hold [a] great deal of supply."

In addition to the mainnet launch, Binance, FTX, and OKX said they are launching perpetual contracts using the Aptos APT token an hour after it started trading. Perpetual futures contracts allow traders to bet against the price of an asset.

Crypto podcaster Cobie was not impressed with the FTX and Binance listings news, asking how a spot market can operate if traders don't know the emissions schedule or total supply of coins.

Finally, addressing concerns about the brief unavailability of channels in the Aptos Discord server, Shaikh said the service was muted to protect community safety.

"Most projects mute channels due to the high amount of scams," he said. "Community safety is a high priority."

Shaikh says that despite the hiccups at launch, multiple applications will go live over the next few days.

"Building a decentralized protocol from the ground up is tough!" Shaikh said. "Aptos is fortunate to have a fantastic community that's constantly evolving together."