Aptos, a new Layer 1 network, finally launched its long-awaited mainnet on Monday, leading ahead of the rival Sui, another L1 that emerged from the legacy of Diem, Meta’s failed digital currency project.
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the new blockchain is its native Move programming language, which was initially created by Meta for developing customizable transaction logic and writing secure smart contracts. Another key engineering advancement is Aptos’s “parallel execution,” which is claimed to be able to perform over 160k non-trivial Move transactions per second.
On a testnet, Aptos managed to achieve 130k TPS, compared to the current 30 TPS on Ethereum. However, it failed to replicate — even remotely — such figures on the mainnet, as data from Aptos block explorer shows that the blockchain currently processes just four transactions per second, which is lower than Bitcoin. Yet even these are not actual transactions — as explained by Twitter user @ParadigmEng420, they are merely validators communicating and setting block checkpoints and writing metadata to the blockchain.
Another point of criticism from @ParadigmEng420 was the tokenomics of Aptos. As they pointed out, over 80% of the token supply is concentrated in the hands of a few team members and investors, as there was no airdrop nor any other way to earn APT tokens.
“TLDR: You are going to get dumped on. The only play I would make on Aptos is a quick farm and dump,” they wrote.
In a Discord post, Aptos addressed the confusion about the current unflattering TPS, pointing out that there aren’t any user transactions yet since the mainnet went live just several hours ago. The team expects that the network activity will start to rise tomorrow.
“The TPS shown in the Aptos explorer is a function of current network activity. Having announced Mainnet only a few hours ago, what you are seeing is the number of transactions that are taking place on the network at that exact moment, not the potential number of transactions possible,” the team said.
“Those 4 TPS are system transactions and don’t include any user transactions yet. We expect user transactions to begin starting tomorrow. Hold tight!” they added.
Meanwhile, several crypto exchanges already announced that they will list newly launched APT token. Binance is set to launch USDT/APT spot trading at 1 am UTC on Oct. 19 and will add perpetual contracts with 25x leverage an hour later. OKX already listed Aptos token for spot trading today, having said that perpetual swaps with 75x leverage will be enabled at 1:20 am UTC on October 19.
FTX confirmed it will add spot trading for Aptos, but hasn’t announced any plans for perpetuals yet. FTX Ventures, the investment arm of FTX, is one of Aptos’s biggest investors, having led its $150 million series A funding round.
“After more than four years of hard work, hundreds of contributions from builders, and hundreds of diverse community projects across the globe, we have arrived at Aptos Mainnet,” Aptos wrote on its Medium blog. “This is step one in a long journey to create universal and fair access to decentralized applications for billions of people through a safe, scalable, and upgradable blockchain.”
