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Aptos blockchain is supposed to handle an incredible 160,000 transactions per second (TPS) and is currently handling a significantly smaller sum of 4 TPS.
Aptos launched its mainnet on Oct. 17, but the blockchain created by former Meta-employees appears far from ready. After a series of private funding rounds which raised $350 million, the company is now said to be valued at somewhere between $1-4 billion depending on who you ask.
If the project is now to live up to those huge numbers, it will need to swiftly resolve its current woes.
Aptos the Solana killer
Aptos (APT), unironically dubbed the ‘Solana killer’ by some quarters of the internet, has already made a big impression but for all the wrong reasons.
At the time of press, the layer-1 protocol was only managing a tiny fraction of its advertised throughput, fueling speculation that project development is running behind schedule. The Aptos “parallel execution engine” was supposed to deliver an impressive 160,000 TPS but at the time of press, it could only muster a pathetic 4 TPS.
Popular crypto investor “Mac” told his 260K+ Twitter followers on Tuesday that the problem lay with the network itself.
“The launch feels extremely rushed as the network isn’t even properly working,” said Mac. According to Mac, Aptos had their hand forced. The project had to launch the mainnet in October or run the risk of “getting sued according to contracts.”
Having fulfilled that commitment the cracks are beginning to show.
The debatable tokenomics of Aptos
Another major cause for concern is the debatable tokenomics of the Aptos, which look highly centralized and tailor made for a big giant dump on the market.
As Twitter user Paradigm Engineer explained on Tuesday: “The total supply of Aptos is 1,000,739,234.25, however, 821,111,362.91 is currently staked. This means that a bit over 80% of the token supply is controlled by the team and investors, as there was no airdrop nor other method as to earn mainnet Aptos tokens.”
The question is where the remaining 200 million $APT is hiding at, leading to speculation that these tokens are set aside for the big market dump.
“The point is that nearly the entire token supply is going to private parties, there was never a public sale or another method where users could have earned tokens,” said Paradigm Engineer.
According to reporter Jihan Wu, Aptos is now attempting to persuade partners including Binance to delay perpetual contracts which are set to begin on Oct. 19th.
Should Binance and other exchanges including Bitfinex, Coinbase, Huobi and others ignore those pleas, significant numbers of investors may decide to bet against the troubled project.