A Chaotic Crypto Launch Reveals How Hard It Is to Beat Ethereum

On October 19, the day after Aptos released the tokens for its new blockchain, frustrated messages flooded the company’s support channel on Discord. Aptos, which was born from the wreckage of Meta’s Diem digital currency project, had been hyped up in crypto circles as a “Solana-killer. ” Soon after its unveiling, it was clear something had gone wrong.

People complained they were unable to cash in on Aptos’ token airdrop, a process that rewarded early supporters with the chain’s native cryptocurrency, APT. Their anxiety was made worse when Aptos temporarily disabled its Discord page on the day of the airdrop, a move the company said was aimed at stopping scammers. “When the drop time came, I was supposed to receive 300 APT tokens [worth almost $3,000], but I didn’t receive any,” says Sasha Poliakov, one of the many asking for help.

He says he’s ready to provide the necessary materials to demonstrate his eligibility, but “support is ignoring all messages. ” There were two ways to qualify, either by completing an application to help with a network stress test or by minting a commemorative Aptos NFT. Poliakov did the former, but people in both camps say they have been left empty-handed.

Other community members may have missed out on even larger portions of the $185 million prize pool, depending on their level of involvement. A week later, Poliakov says he is still unable to claim his reward. Aptos and other competitors, including Solana, Polkadot, and Avalanche, are trying to outrun the Ethereum network, which only processes roughly 15 transactions per second (TPS).

Ethereum had a head start, but its slow upgrade cycle has created an opening for competitors. Their objective is to match the performance of traditional payment networks operated by Mastercard and Visa, the latter of which claims to be able to reach 65,000 TPS at full throttle. However, this ambition has not been borne out in practice.

In the days since Aptos went live, the blockchain has reached nowhere near its maximum level of performance. At the time of writing, the network is recording only 18 TPS, only marginally better than Ethereum, much to the amusement of crypto Twitter. “Wow, what a massive leap forward for the space,” said one skeptic, writing under the username R89Capital on launch day.

“Aptos is broken,” wrote another, who​​ goes by the name Paradigm Engineer #420 . It wasn’t just the performance of the network that attracted smirks; the value of the APT token also fell significantly in the hours after trading began, meaning that community members were left with even less value for their efforts. There is some debate over the degree of the fall, due to differences in the time the first transactions were recorded.

But aggregator site CoinGecko, which claims to have recorded its first trade just three minutes after APT was listed on exchanges, had the token at 50 percent down (from $13. 73 to $6. 75.

) Other community members have attacked Aptos for its failure to release the tokenomics —a description of the distribution of tokens, how they will function, and when they will be released into circulation—ahead of the launch date, which is considered bad form. It’s a little like asking someone to enter into a contract without first setting out all the terms. Despite these problems, Aptos CEO Mo Shaikh dismisses much of the criticism of the launch.

“[The] Mainnet launch has gone better than expected for a brand-new network. The network reached close to 3 million transactions and peaks of over 100 TPS in under just two days,” he says. This TPS figure is higher than the performance of some rival networks but lower than Solana’s, which currently hovers around 4,500 TPS .

Shaikh says the priority now is to ensure developers are supplied with everything they need to begin building applications on top of Aptos. Only then will we “see the impressive transaction numbers the Aptos blockchain is built for,” he claims. Aptos is backed by heavyweight VCs like Andreesen Horowitz, FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and Binance Labs.

Although the specifics of the most recent funding round were not made public, one Bloomberg report pegged its valuation at $4 billion. These VC backers are each set to gain a proportionately large volume of tokens, according to the tokenomics Aptos eventually published. Developers and private investors will be handed a combined volume of 32.

48 percent, raising questions about whether this could skew the economics of the network. Although VCs and developers can’t offload any tokens for at least a year and can’t access their full allocation until 2026, this protection does not apply to staking rewards (equivalent to interest payments). In theory, Aptos backers could earn large sums on their holdings, which could then be dumped onto the market, creating downward pressure on the price.

Shaikh admits the tokenomics “should have come out sooner,” an oversight he attributes to the team’s workload prior to launch. But as for concerns about the amount allocated to investors, he claims the share is “among the lowest [. .

. ] for any blockchain in the market today. ” Shaikh and his cofounder Avery Ching previously worked together on Novi, a crypto wallet built to support the Diem stablecoin.

They refer to the Aptos network as the “layer 1 for everyone”—a reference to the ambition to develop a blockchain that is cheap, scalable, versatile, and easy to use. Whether Aptos is able to meet this objective will have plenty to do with the programming language underpinning its chain, called Move, which was developed from scratch to power the Diem blockchain. The language enables a peak theoretical performance of 160,000 TPS, far higher than the theoretical peaks of both Ethereum and Solana.

Publicly, the Aptos team resists the “Solana-killer” designation. But much as Solana was designed to process transactions faster than Ethereum, Aptos promises to outperform Solana. This competition is healthy for a blockchain ecosystem, says David Shuttleworth, senior DeFi economist at ConsenSys, a development studio set up by Ethereum cofounder Joe Lubin.

“Advancements in technology should always be pursued, at every level, not just blockchain, and should not be limited to one particular ecosystem or protocol,” he says. “A blockchain doesn’t have to succeed to have a positive influence on the overall ecosystem,” says Paul Brody, a board member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, a body dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Ethereum in a business context. But the developers already building software on top of Aptos, who Shaikh is relying on to propel its growth, don’t think it will fail.

The founder of Topaz, one of the first Aptos NFT marketplaces, who goes only by Topaz Nick, says he thought the launch was “super smooth. ” “It’s pretty obvious to us that Aptos is the future of Web3,” he says. “It’s the highest-capacity, most efficient blockchain.

Not only that, but the developer experience is already incredible. ” Another developer, Gabriel Lan Pham, whose team has built an Aptos-native crypto wallet called Fewcha, says choosing to develop for a new platform was a risk, but one worth taking. If Aptos does become as big as Ethereum, Fewcha is likely to benefit from being one of the first out of the gate.

In the worst-case scenario, he says his team will have gained some valuable blockchain development experience. “We have a strong faith that blockchain will be the next big bang in technology, similar to the internet during the 2000s or smartphones during [the] 2010s,” says Lan Pham. Neither developer says they harbor any concerns about the scalability of the network, nor do they pay much mind to the branding of Aptos as an Ethereum- or Solana-killer.

If all Aptos developers feel the same way, the rocky token airdrop and anger from early adopters won’t make a difference to the network’s future—if they build it, new community members will come. “The Aptos ecosystem has potential,” says Lan Pham. “We have to put our heads down and build.

Only good products can last. ”.