The much-awaited Silicon Valley blockchain startup Aptos, which includes former workers of Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ: META), started logging transactions on Tuesday. But is the buzz justified? The Solana data throughput and Ethereum’s popularity are the targets of the contracts/dApps chain, despite some being unimpressed with its launch.
Following allegations that it was only processing four transactions per second on its first day, the shiny new blockchain, which emerged from Facebook’s abandoned “Diem” stablecoin project, raised a few eyebrows. The mainnet network of Aptos is solid, and transaction flow will grow “beginning tomorrow,” according to the company’s engineers, who also warned customers to “Hold Tight!” as other members of the ecosystem started launching their own initiatives.
Aptos Is “broken”
According to one analyst on Twitter (NASDAQ: TWTR), “Aptos is broken,” as they were unable to connect to validators or log any transactions on the network. Developers, according to “Paradigm Engineer #420,” may be concealing a problem and failing to provide information.
They also questioned Aptos’ tokenomics, pointing out that the network already held over 80% of the company’s 1 billion+ tradable tokens. Since Aptos is not yet listed on a public exchange and has not conducted a pre-sale or airdrop, the development team and investors are the rightful owners of those units. When trading begins on Binance and FTX, they claimed that the remaining 20% will be “ready to dump on retail (investors)”.
Another commenter questioned Binance and FTX for even offering the Aptos asset, given that neither its precise total asset supply nor pace of release have been made public:
“How can there be a spot market if people don’t know what the emissions schedule or total supply of coins is?” they asked.
The purpose of Aptos tokens is to be used for “on-chain governance” on its proof-of-stake (PoS) network. Given that they will shortly be listed for trading on the aforementioned exchanges, it is assumed (though unsaid) that their holders expect them to increase in value. The capacity to buy and sell “votes” on governance on PoS networks, where the precise identities of major holders are unknown, and the ability to transfer substantial quantities of shares with little to no transparency, illustrates a key issue with PoS networks.
Why Aptos Generated Buzz
Diem was Facebook’s attempt to develop a blockchain-based “stablecoin” whose value would be based on a basket of existent currencies. Diem might have developed into a sort of global currency under the authority of a private corporation given Facebook’s (now called Meta) enormous user base. This idea was not well received by American regulators and lawmakers, who put growing pressure on the project until Meta decided to end it entirely in early 2022.
Project creators established a new business named Aptos, which soon caught the interest of technology investors with its promises to build a new blockchain for all kinds of contract-based enterprises. By the time of their debut, the team had secured $400 million in venture capital from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Binance Labs, FTX Ventures, Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) Capital, Jump Crypto, and others.
160,000 Transactions Per Second
The team has promised 160,000 transactions per second, above the theoretical limit of 100,000 transactions per second for Ethereum 2.0 and Solana’s reported rate of 65,000 transactions per second (when the network is running). After first transitioning to a 100% PoS confirmation mechanism last month, Ethereum is still far from that amount, but it has promised to include it in future updates.
Following years of concerns about congestion and excessive usage fees on both BTC and Ethereum, transaction confirmation/throughput has become a major topic in the realm of blockchain and distributed applications (dApps). The focus now is on how much data a network can process in practical timescales, with BTC lagging behind Ethereum at a maximum of 15 and Ethereum averaging about five transactions per second globally.
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