Aptos (APT) Mainnet Launch: Immediate Backlash and Controversy

Aptos (APT), a highly anticipated blockchain project in recent months, officially launched its mainnet in the early hours of October 18.

Aptos Mainnet Launch: Immediate Backlash

In a blog post on October 18, Aptos announced the successful deployment of its blockchain mainnet after four years of development.

As previously explained by Coin68, Aptos is one of the two blockchains (the other being Sui) emerging from the ashes of Facebook's Libra/Diem stablecoin project, inheriting Facebook's Move programming language. Aptos claims to build a blockchain that addresses transaction speed issues while ensuring network security and stability. Aptos raised $350 million in 2022 and attracted a significant number of projects migrating from Solana.

However, the latest update revealed that Aptos developers did not provide much information about the mainnet's operational status or its timeline for a broader user launch (no RPC endpoints were published). The Aptos ecosystem is also not yet live, with many projects such as wallets, exchanges, DeFi, and NFT platforms still pending. The Aptos token (APT) was also not mentioned in the announcement.

As a result, the Aptos mainnet launch has faced significant criticism from the crypto community. An internal source within Aptos disclosed to CoinDesk that the mainnet deployment "was rushed," leading to an unstable infrastructure.

According to the Twitter account Paradigm Engineer #420, Aptos is currently processing only 4 transactions per second, despite earlier promises of handling hundreds of thousands. Most of these transactions involve communication between validators.

Furthermore, Aptos' Discord channel was reportedly closed to questions due to the high volume of user inquiries about network usage.

Additionally, Paradigm Engineer #420 discovered alarming details about the Aptos token. The total supply of Aptos is 1,000,739,234.25 APT, with 821,111,362.91 APT currently staked. This suggests that over 80% of the total APT supply is held by investors or the project team, as Aptos has yet to conduct any airdrops to the community.

No way over 80% of Aptos tokens are staked right?

Investors and team should be vesting? Unless this is one of those vest but you can stake things. pic.twitter.com/hxbElJCgJm
— Steven (@Dogetoshi) October 18, 2022

For these reasons, several prominent Twitter influencers have started mocking Aptos with the nickname "Craptos."

You can tell who bought the seed round because they’re tweeting “excited for launch ?” instead of calling it Craptos and tweeting about how it already crashed or something
— Cobie (@cobie) October 18, 2022

On the flip side, Aptos tweeted that the project had a successful launch day and that the chat shutdown in social communities was to "prevent potential scams that could threaten users."

Currently, top crypto exchanges Binance and FTX have announced they will list Aptos (APT) at 08:00 AM on October 19, 2022 (Vietnam time). However, it remains unclear which users will have coins to deposit on the exchanges besides the funds that participated in Aptos' funding rounds.

The hasty launch and the listing announcement without available coins have drawn comparisons to the controversial launch of Internet Computer (ICP).