Aptos: does the crypto industry need another PoS blockchain?

Released this Monday, Aptos is a new blockchain that has got the crypto space talking, but now always in good terms.

Aptos proponents point at its founders’ track record: former Meta employees, Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching worked on Novi, a wallet that was supposed to accompany Diem (Libra) stablecoin. The project was stopped due to regulatory rejection, so Mrs Shaikh and Ching decided to pursue their work independently.

? Unsurprisingly, Meta vets secured a nice initial funding of $400 million from leading crypto VCs: a16z, Tiger Global, FTX, Coinbase and Binance VC arms, which brought Aptos valuation to $2 billion.

? These intellectual and financial forces resulted in a BFT-based Proof-of-Stake blockchain that positions itself as “safe, scalable and upgradeable”. Innovations that are supposed to ensure that include a new programming language Move and a novel approach to transaction flow and parallel execution.

❓ But is Aptos so novel, really?

There are already quite a few scalable PoS blockchains: Solana, Avalanche, BNB Chain, Near, Tron, Flow, Polkadot… even Ethereum, when it completes the sharding upgrade.

? Aptos may (or may not) give a slightly better variant of the above, but it will still be another PoS blockchain, with all its inherent problems, such as risks of progressive centralization. Aptos itself isn’t off to a good start in this regards: all its 102 validators have been hand-picked.

? Aptos detractors point out at a possibility that it could be another farm and dump project, especially taking into account the very clumsy way the company tackled its tokenomics.

❓ How are $APT tokens distributed?

A blog post dating October 17 indicates a “a summary version” of it tokenomics, which did not precise neither the emission schedule, nor the total supply.

All we know at this stage is that the “initial” supply of 1 billion $APT is supposed to be shared between the founders/investors (49%) and the community (51%). The process of allocation to the latter is not precised, so “community’s” tokens are de facto managed by Aptos.

As of today, 82% of $APT are staked, and the company and its investors control almost all of the supply.

2% of $APT were airdropped to early testnet users, who didn’t fail to dump them after receiving: the coin has lost 50% since its listings ?

Did the market really need it?..