Aptos is a promising layer 1 blockchain,
but its reputation was ruined by its association with FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried.
Can Aptos recover?
And does it have what it takes to be a competitive layer 1?
Well, today, I'm going to get to the bottom of Aptos
and make a case for its potential move in the next bull run.
Let's get it!
Welcome to BitBoy Crypto!
My name is Ben.
Make sure to smash the like button on this video and subscribe to the channel.
So let's talk about Aptos.
What happened with the Aptos launch?
And what did it have to do with FTX?
In July, back when Sam Bankman-Fried still had the wool pulled over everyone's eyes,
Aptos received a $150 million Series A funding round from Sam and FTX.
The launch had a rocky start, to say the least.
The token price plummeted almost immediately.
And the promised lightning fast speeds were moving at a glacial pace.
And even though Aptos only released its tokenomics one day before its token hit exchanges,
FTX along with Binance offered perpetual futures contracts for Aptos right out of the gate.
Some even speculated that FTX shorted Aptos
like it's been known to do with other projects launch on the FTX platform.
Since we covered this part already,
click the link down below in the description for more on that.
Long story short,
despite the promising tech and speed of Aptos,
like ICP, it was taken advantage of and used as a VC pump and dump.
Big surprise.
It's no secret Aptos tanked because of its association with SBF.
Aptos released a statement on November 9 that helped the price recover
since they clarified that no Aptos treasury was being held by FTX.
It doesn't mean FTX wasn't one of Aptos' biggest investors.
They also had funding from Three Arrows Capital before it went bankrupt,
Coinbase Ventures, Paxos and others.
All it told it raised almost $200 million from hedge funds and VCs.
So even though there might have been some bad actors in play,
question is,
is there enough cash flow to really make this blockchain successful?
Yes, thanks to the Block-STM parallel execution engine,
Aptos can theoretically process up to 160,000 transactions per second.
But that doesn't mean there aren't things that could hold it back either.
Actually, it's a project with a laundry list of pros and cons.
So let's go over the cons first.
First is the Aptos token.
Transactions per second were not even close to what it could be when it first launched.
Where it was, only at 4 TPS.
It did speed back up once the ecosystem grew.
But to say that APT got wrecked by FTX,
well, it was a bad start for the coin.
It has an inflationary supply,
meaning that as it stands right now, more tokens can and will be created
which is going to affect its long-term value.
The initial distribution was spread among the community, core contributors,
foundation and investors.
Six months after the listing, more tokens will be released.
And although a lot of these tokens are locked, it's still possible to stake them.
This means locked tokens can still receive rewards
which can be sold and cause downward pressure on the price.
Some investors are concerned that the valuation is no longer $4 billion
after everything that's happened with Aptos post launch,
including the value of the token taking a nosedive and FTX and Three Arrows Capital going belly up.
Others question whether the Aptos team benefited somehow from the chaotic launch
and whether it's doomed to suffer the same regulatory overreach as Libra and Diem.
Although, in my opinion, this is comparing apples and oranges
because outside of Facebook,
this is more like another blockchain project
where before when Libra was being developed under Facebook,
things were just more complicated.
Now, the good news.
The biggest selling feature of the Aptos blockchain and its token APT is the project's code.
It uses its own virtual machine, which is a freeware find.
First, Aptos separates itself from the field by using parallel execution.
This is where the speed comes from.
This is when the transactions are performed simultaneously.
They're validated later down the line.
More like a shoot-first-ask-questions-later type of blockchain
compared to sequential blockchains.
It's flexible, meaning that platforms can choose to manage concurrency or not to manage it.
Concurrency just means whether different parts of a program or algorithm
can be executed out of order without affecting the final result.
You might have heard of Sui,
the blockchain currently in development that also uses Move.
The difference between Aptos and Sui is that with Aptos, you don't manage concurrency
and Sui developers have to manage concurrency themselves.
This means that Aptos is faster and Sui is more flexible.
Aptos uses a classic blockchain approach where validators order and batch transactions,
and Sui uses directed acyclic graph.
That's a little technical,
but now you're ready to bring out the big guns
when someone asks you what you think of Sui versus Aptos.
Aptos is undeniably cutting edge research and development,
and like I said earlier,
Solana devs can easily move to Move without issue.
Despite its rocky start, thanks to Sam and the gang,
I feel that Aptos can come out of this on time.
Don't forget this coin is pegged as a Solana killer.
Sure, they're both VC projects,
but Aptos can process 95,000 more transactions per second than Solana
and it hasn't had to deal with the outages like Solana has either.
No matter how you look at it,
Aptos is on the cutting edge of blockchain technology
and one that has the potential to move in the next bull run.
It's one I'll be watching for sure.
That's all I got.
Be blessed.
BitBoy out.