A few days ago, Aptos was trending on Twitter. 

The promise of a perfect blockchain and a 20 million tokens airdrop may have contributed to its popularity.

Or, could it be because the founders are former employees of Meta?

I mean, social media gave Aptos a warm welcome. Talk about 305k followers on Twitter and 11k followers on Medium.

Plus, many big players like Binance and Huobi are backing this project.

Yet the mainnet went live just 10 days ago (17 October 2022).

So, is Aptos worth all the buzz? And are the millions of APT tokens airdropped to users, worth anything today?

Keep reading to get the full gist!

Table Of Contents

• What Is Aptos?
• How Aptos Works
• APT Tokenomics
• Customer Support And Public Opinion
• What Does The Future Hold For Aptos?
• FAQs
• Conclusion

Click on any item above to read its details immediately.

Enjoy!

What Is Aptos?

Aptos is a new Layer 1 blockchain built for safe development and good user experience.

It was designed to provide safe, scalable, and upgradeable web3 infrastructure.

Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching started working on the project in 2018 but the mainnet launched in October 2022.

The goal is to create a perfect blockchain i.e. a blockchain that is decentralized, highly secure, very fast, and charges low fees.

If you’ve read our post on blockchain trilemma, you already know it is practically impossible to achieve that.

As much as we know, there is no existing perfect blockchain.

Thus, many crypto folks looked forward to the launch of the Aptos blockchain.

But they were disappointed because so far, the blockchain has not even measured up to Bitcoin’s speed. Oops!

Furthermore, the founders were a form of attraction to Aptos.

A little background story…

Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching are former Meta employees.

They built Aptos to serve the crypto community with an excellent user experience.

Interestingly, they’ve raised up to $350 million in funding from a series of investor campaigns. 

Before Aptos, Mark Zuckerberg (Meta founder) and his team attempted something similar.

Do you remember Libra? Yes, that was the project. The name was later changed to Diem. It was designed to be a decentralized payment system. 

However, Diem didn’t suit the crypto community because of financial regulations, slow speed, centralization, and the stablecoin nature of Diem (the token).

And the founders of Aptos were part of the team that created Diem.

Little wonder many assume that Aptos is a successor of Diem. But it is not.

They only have similar founding team members.

Besides, Aptos is a smart contract blockchain powered by a cryptocurrency, APT, unlike Diem which is a stablecoin.

Let’s see how Aptos works in the next section.

Keep reading!

How Aptos Works

As mentioned, the Aptos blockchain was intended to develop products and applications that will improve user experience.

Here are the different components that make it work:

a) The Move programming language – an advanced yet flexible language.

It was developed from the Rust programming language (by Diem’s team).

And the core of the Aptos blockchain was designed with Move-inspired protocols.

b) Move Virtual Machine (MVM) – a state machine that simplifies Move modules for the Aptos blockchain.

It works like the popular Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

Note that the Move modules are smart contracts. They are used to approve transactions.

Interestingly, transactions are completed in batches and not individually.

Also, inaccurate transactions are fished out so that accurate transactions will be completed faster.

*Inaccurate transactions are the ones that fail to meet given thresholds like fee amount.

c) PoS Consensus Mechanism – this system uses the Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism to achieve scalability

Therefore, validators on the network verify the integrity of blocks added to the chain and screen out malicious blocks.

Note: there are two types of validator nodes – Full nodes and Light nodes.

Full nodes validate the entire network transactions. Thus, they can affect changes in the network’s history.

For example, they can remove a string of data from the memory of the chain to keep the block size within scalable limits.

Gratefully, the removed data aren’t lost and can be synchronized with the rest of the blockchain when needed.

On the other hand, Light nodes play maintenance roles, keeping the system in check.

d) Sharding – Aptos employs data-sharding technology to maintain scalable block sizes.

This explains why it maintains two types of validators and executes transactions in batches.

For clarification, Sharding means spreading out computational/storage workload across different partitions of a network so that each node isn’t responsible for processing the entire network’s transactions, rather, it focuses on the information related to its partition, or shard.

In summary…

The Aptos blockchain works by combining batch transactions, an advanced programming language, an efficient consensus mechanism, and sharding technology, among others.

You may read the white paper of Aptos to get a clearer picture of how it works.

Next, we’ll talk about the APT token.

Tag along!

APT Tokenomics

The Aptos coin (APT) powers the Aptos blockchain and its ecosystem. 

It serves as both a utility and governance token.

Therefore, builders on the platform will pay gas fees in APT.

Also, the coin is used to incentivize community contributions and reward validators for securing the network.

Additionally, APT holders can submit improvement proposals for community deliberation or vote for existing proposals.

One billion APT tokens were minted at launch (October 12, 2022).

They will be distributed to investors, community members, and the project team. 

Have a look:

Therefore, 51% of the token supply is reserved for the Aptos community which will be managed by the Aptos foundation.

Then, 19% is allocated to the core team which is vested for a year and will be gradually released over time.

Also, 16% is for the Aptos foundation to provide grants, community incentives, and fund growth initiatives.

Lastly, seed and funding round investors will receive 13% of the token supply.

Furthermore, on October 19, 2022, the Aptos foundation allocated an estimated 20 million APT tokens, to about 110,235 eligible participants. 

The recipients were “users who completed an application for an Aptos Incentivized Testnet” and users who minted “an APTOS: ZERO NFT.” 

If you missed the airdrop, you can buy APT from any of these exchanges: Binance, Huobi Global, MEXC, OKX, and FTX.

Currently (27/10/2022), the APT token is priced at $9.282.

Also, you can store it in any of these wallets: Pontem, Petra, Martian, and Fewcha wallets.

Continue reading!

Customer Support And Public Opinion

Aptos has a Developer document that enables developers to learn how to build on it.

Also, users can join its discussion forum to get involved in projects building on Aptos.

Additionally, they can stay updated via these channels:

• https://discord.com/invite/aptoslabs
• https://twitter.com/aptos_network

Then I checked Aptos on TrustPilot but I found no reviews, which is understandable because the platform is new.

On SCAMADVISER, Aptos has a 72% trust score which is good for a new platform.

Although it does not have an active group on Reddit, many folks are sharing their opinion about Aptos. It’s a mix of negative and positive.

So, is the future bright for Aptos? Find out in the next section!

What Does The Future Hold For Aptos?

Based on its purpose and framework, the future looks bright for Aptos.

It offers a scalable web3 infrastructure for developers to build on.

And using data-sharding technology, it maintains data blocks at scalable sizes.

Additionally, the commitment of the Aptos Foundation to the growth of Aptos is encouraging.

Little wonder that top crypto exchanges like Binance and FTX did not waste time listing the APT token on the day of launch.

However, many people argue that Aptos is just an upgrade of Diem.

Looking at it objectively, the assumption makes sense considering that Aptos founders were members of the Diem founding team.

So, it seems like they just improved on the shortcomings of Diem.

Instead of a stablecoin backed by fiat currencies and suffering from financial regulations, they created a blockchain network backed by cryptocurrency.

That notwithstanding, Aptos didn’t do as well as promised upon launch.

Less than 7 TPS is too disappointing compared to the proposed 100,000 TPS.

Turns out, no blockchain can overcome the trilemma after all.

Nevertheless, the team is working to fix the speed of the network.

Aptos co-founder Mo Shaikh took to Twitter yesterday and explained that the transaction throughput is expected to increase once more applications go live on the blockchain.

Report from Decrypt on October 19, 202

Gratefully, they have the experience and skills required to scale the platform.

Also, the APT token was down 40.5% on its first day of trading; the first trade was captured at $13.73.

But we can let this slide because of the bear market even though some folks are not happy with the APT tokenomics.

They claim that allocating 49% of the token supply to seed investors, core contributors and foundation is a lot.

Remember the platform uses PoS consensus, which means that these big players will have more say on what happens on the platform.

And that’s a threat of centralization, right?

All the same, Aptos is still new, barely a month old, let’s hope for the better as it grows.

FAQs

Conclusion

We have now come to the end of our discussion on Aptos. I hope it was worth your time.

This platform is modifying existing technologies to achieve security, decentralization, and scalability at once.

It is still young to judge its progress but hopefully, it succeeds, as it will solve the important issues faced by the regular blockchain user.

Do you still have questions about Aptos? Or opinions to share? Please drop them in the comments section below.

I’d also love to know if you will buy or are already trading APT and how profitable it has been. Let’s engage in the comments!

Lastly, I will appreciate it if you hit the social media icons below to share this post with your friends. Thank you!