Other community members have attacked Aptos for failing to release the tokenomics – a description of how tokens will be distributed, how they will function and when they will be put into circulation – before the launch date, which is considered bad form. It’s a bit like asking someone to enter into a contract without going through all the terms first.
Despite these issues, Aptos CEO Mo Shaikh dismisses much of the criticism of the launch. “[The] Mainnet’s launch went better than expected for a brand new network. The network reached nearly 3 million transactions and peaks of over 100 TPS in less than two days,” he says. This TPS figure is higher than the performance of some rival networks, but lower than Solana’s, which currently hovers around 4,500 TPS.
Shaikh says the priority now is to make sure developers get everything they need to build applications on top of Aptos. Only then will we “see the impressive transaction numbers that the Aptos blockchain is built for,” he claims.
Aptos is backed by heavyweight VCs such as Andreesen Horowitz, FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and Binance Labs. While details of the most recent funding round were not made public, the valuation was set at $4 billion in a Bloomberg report.
These VC backers are each set to get a proportionally large number of tokens, according to the tokenomics that Aptos eventually published. Developers and private investors will get a combined volume of 32.48 percent, which means to ask on whether this could distort the network’s economy. While VCs and developers will not be able to offload tokens for at least a year and will not be able to access their full allocation until 2026, this protection does not apply to strike rewards (equivalent to interest payments). In theory, Aptos financiers could make large sums of money on their holdings, which could then be dumped into the market, putting downward pressure on the price.
Shaikh admits the tokenomics “should have come out sooner,” a mistake he attributes to the team’s workload prior to launch. But as for concerns about the amount allocated to investors, he claims the stock is “one of the lowest.” […] for every blockchain currently on the market.”
Shaikh and his co-founder Avery Ching previously collaborated on Novi, a crypto wallet built to support the Diem stablecoin. They refer to the Aptos network as the “layer 1 for everyone” – a reference to the ambition to develop a blockchain that is cheap, scalable, versatile and easy to use.
Whether Aptos is able to achieve this goal will have a lot to do with the programming language underlying its chain, called Move, which was developed from scratch to power the Diem blockchain. The language makes a peak possible theoretical performance of 160,000 TPS, much higher than the theoretical peaks of both Ethereum and Solana.
In public, the Aptos team opposes the “Solana killer” designation. But just as Solana is designed to process transactions faster than Ethereum, Aptos promises to outperform Solana.
This competition is healthy for a blockchain ecosystem, said David Shuttleworth, senior DeFi economist at ConsenSys, a development studio founded by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin. “Progress in technology should always be pursued, at every level, not just blockchain, and should not be limited to one particular ecosystem or protocol,” he says.
