Aptos Released Airdrop Without Anti-Sybil Protection; APT Paid The Price

PATNA (CoinChapter.com) — Web3-oriented company Aptos Labs, which launched its Mainnet on Oct 17 after raising $200 million in Q1 2022, saw its token APT fall 51% in hours on its first day of trading.

The newly launched token of the self-proclaimed “Solana Killer” was trading at $7.4 (at writing), down 46% from the launch price of $13.73, as per data from CoinGecko. However, data from CoinMarketCap showed APT prices falling by only 11.7%.

The reason behind the discrepancy was that CoinMarketCap picked the first trade at 0200 GMT, more than an hour after APT started trading. Hence, the data aggregator recorded APT prices beginning from $8.5, more than 38% down from the token’s launch prices.

Aptos Team Leaves APT Tokenomics Unprotected

The Aptos team, led by ex-Meta employees who departed the company in Dec, ensured the project garnered much hype during the launch of its mainnet and token listing. However, the developers failed to ensure proper tokenomics for APT.

Related: Aptos Labs launches its blockchain – Binance and Coinbase hurry to list APT

Aptos announced a 20 million APT token airdrop for nearly 110,000 eligible people. Aptos Incentivized Testnet participants, or users who minted the APTOS:ZERO testnet NFT, were eligible for the airdrop.

However, Aptos developers didn’t include any failsafe against a Sybil attack. In detail, the attack occurs in peer-to-peer networks when a node operates several active identities simultaneously and undermines the authority of reputation systems.

Hence, an anti-Sybil protection system would have prevented malicious users from obtaining a lion’s share of the airdrop. Independent crypto journalist Colin Wu highlighted how an investor sold 189,567 APT tokens, causing the token prices to fall to $13.

Aptos Mainnet Launch: Patchy At Best

In addition, the launch of Aptos Mainnet on Oct 17 was criticized for vague tokenomics and lower-than-promised transaction throughput. Although the project did release the APT tokenomics later, the reveal did nothing to improve Aptos’ situation.

Per Aptos co-founder Mo Shaikh, nearly 49% of APT tokens are allocated to developers and private investors. The information invited the community’s ire, with speculations of the project catering to VCs gaining ground.

Furthermore, Shaikh explained that the transaction speed would increase once more applications go live on the blockchain and reach the promised 100,000 transactions per second.

However, at writing, Aptos’ TPS was 22.13, per data from Aptos Explorer.

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