Aptos Labs, a startup founded by employees who built the blockchain behind Meta Platform Inc.’s ill-fated Diem, recently announced its “tokenomics” model amid a rocky mainnet launch that performed slower than expected.
The platform raised $200 million in March, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures, FTX Ventures, Multicoin Capital, and other top crypto venture capital firms. The blockchain’s goal was to build a highly scalable and secure network capable of massive throughput that could outpace other chains such as Solana, by scaling to high transaction throughput.
Prior to its mainnet launch, Aptos boasted of being capable of around 130,000 transactions per second, but when it launched on Monday, it was reported by Paradigm Engineer #420 on Twitter that the blockchain was capable of less than seven transactions per second – less than the bitcoin network.
“Aptos is broken,” wrote Paradigm Engineer. “Aptos currently has a lower TPS than Bitcoin and the majority of tokens are either staked or ready to drop on retail investors. Aptos promises 100k TPS in its finalized version. However, the current TPS is around 4 transactions per second.
Shortly after launch, Aptos co-founder Mo Shaikh tweeted that it was exciting to finally launch blockchain, but the rocky start and low TPS was a result of the network being underutilized and it was just growing pains.
“Recognizing that it could have gone better,” Shaikh wrote. “Building a decentralized protocol from scratch is hard! Aptos is blessed with a fantastic community that is constantly growing together.
According to Shaikh, the current TPS is not representative of network capacity. Rather, it is the network that is idling before projects are put online. It is expected to increase as more projects are added.
Aptos’ tokenomics model unveiled
When it first launched, the community widely criticized Aptos for having an opaque token economic structure. This means that no one knew how its internal tokens, the Aptos Token, or APT, were going to be distributed among investors, developers, and the community.
During the mainnet launch on Monday, the company finally revealed the distribution and unlocked the APT token for commerce, alongside a 20 million token airdrop tuesday. An “airdrop” is essentially a token payment to a number of users directly into their wallets to seed a number of tokens into an ecosystem to kick-start the economy.
“The Aptos Foundation provided the network’s first participants with APT tokens,” the company wrote. “If you are eligible to claim, you will receive an email from [email protected] within the next few hours.”
Blockchain projects primarily use tokens for three purposes: funding the project by selling the token to raise capital, using the tokens to reward developers and creators for their participation in the ecosystem, and as a means for the community to pay for use services on the blockchain.
The initial APT token supply at Monday’s launch was 1 billion. According to the cast, 510 million would go to community members, 190 million to core developers, and the rest to the Aptos Foundation and private investors.
According to Shaikh, many tokens, including those allocated to the community, were staked at the genesis of the blockchain. Staking essentially locks tokens to secure a network from potential attacks and produces additional tokens as a reward of 7% per year, unlocked every 30 days for token holders.
The fact that Aptos only revealed its token model just before its mainnet launch did not go down well with the community. Aylo, Twitter user Noted“Aptos raised a $2 billion valuation and didn’t make its economic information available at launch. There’s no way this was an oversight. It was intentional.
The Aptos token structure reveal and airdrop also did not go down well in the market. Shortly after, the value dropped nearly 50% to trade at $7.27 today from $13.73 at launch, according to price aggregator CoinGecko.
Image: Aptos Laboratories
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