This week saw the launch of Aptos, which had long been hyped as the ultimate Ethereum (ETH 8.65%) challenger. But everything that could go wrong did go wrong for Aptos. The token fell nearly 50% in its first 24 hours of trading. The team promised 100,000 transactions per second, but missed that in stunning fashion. Aptos immediately became the top trending coin on CoinMarketCap, but for all the wrong reasons.
If you’re an Ethereum investor, of course, this is all remarkably good news. There has been a long line of so-called “Ethereum-killers,” and Ethereum has repelled each one of them. Aptos was the one that everyone thought had a decent chance of actually replacing Ethereum as the top Layer 1 blockchain network. It might still be too early to dismiss Aptos, but it looks like Ethereum now stands as the undisputed Layer 1 blockchain leader.
What went wrong with Aptos?
There were many reasons people had such strong hopes for Aptos. For one, Aptos has a blue-chip developer team. Many of the Aptos developers came from the Facebook unit at Meta (NASDAQ: META), and had experience with Facebook’s much-hyped cryptocurrency project known as Diem. Remember 2019, when Mark Zuckerberg was promoting a crypto token called Libra that some experts said could eventually replace the U.S. dollar? Members of the Aptos team were part of that. As a result, some people referred to the Aptos team as the “Silicon Valley wunderkinds.”
Image source: Getty Images.
By all initial indications, Aptos seemed to have superior technology to Ethereum. Right out of the box, Aptos promised 100,000 transactions per second. That’s blindingly fast, and certainly faster than current Ethereum speeds (25 transactions per second). But when the crypto token started trading, it was only hitting four transactions per second. Yikes!
And, finally, Aptos completely bungled the tokenomics of its launch. This is what most likely led to the crypto token falling sharply in its first 24 hours of trading….
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