Security Token Exchange

The 35th largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of $1.66 billion, the APT token has been up 150.55% in 2023 so far. The token hit its all-time high (ATH) at nearly $20 in late Jan. 2023 but has since lost 56% of its value.

As of writing, APT is trading at $8.79 and is available for trading on prominent crypto exchanges like Uphold, Binance, Kraken, KuCoin, Gate, Huobi, and on various DEXs.

APT is the native token of Aptos, whose genesis took place on October 12, 2022, and its mainnet, “Aptos Autumn,” was launched a few days later on October 17.

The project was co-founded by Mo Shaikh, who headed Meta’s (Facebook) abandoned Web3 project Diem’ and now serves as Aptos’ CEO, and Avery Ching, the CTO. The team works under the name “Aptos Labs” to develop tooling and products on the Aptos blockchain.

Aptos has already raised over $350 million in funding, including a $200 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz and disgraced crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital at a $1 billion valuation.

Click here to learn all about investing in Aptos (APT).

APT: The Native Token of Aptos Ecosystem

As the native token of the Aptos blockchain, APT is used to pay for transaction and network fees on the platform.

Validators can prioritize the highest-value transactions on the network and reject those of lower value to ensure the blockchain operates efficiently even when the system is at capacity.

To become a validator, one must stake a minimum number of APT tokens. And as per the official documentation, the minimum required for staking is 1M APT tokens.

However, last month, the Aptos Foundation released a Core Delegation Pool functionality that extends Aptos’ existing staking protocol. This functionality enables multiple people to contribute to the staking requirement by delegating their stake to another validator.

By allowing many parties to come together to fulfill the minimum staking requirement, Aptos increases the number of validators participating in the network, thus improving the decentralization and security of the blockchain.

Meanwhile, validators can still earn rewards and support network security by delegating their staking power to a validator without running it themselves. This will also help the community bootstrap validator nodes more quickly.

Being a validator allows one to decide on the division of the rewards between themselves and their respective stakers. Stakers, meanwhile, can choose several validators to stack their APT tokens to get a pre-agreed split of rewards.

The maximum reward rate for stakers is currently around 7% per annum. As mentioned in its whitepaper, this staking reward rate will continue to decrease by 1.5% every year until it reaches 3.25%. All reward mechanisms can be changed by governance voting.

Hence, besides being a utility token, APT also acts as a governance token and can be used for voting on upgrades and proposals to the protocol.

At the time of its launch, APT tokenomics was the center of controversy due to being released without disclosing the total supply, distribution, and overall plan.

Later, Aptos Labs disclosed a total supply of 1 billion tokens, of which 51% was allocated to the community. Nearly 13.5% of the token supply went to investors, while 16.5% was allotted to the foundation, and the remaining 19% was set aside for core contributors.

Aptos Blockchain: What Makes it Different?

Aptos is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain that claims to have solved major issues such as slow transaction speeds, high gas fees, and the lack of decentralization faced by crypto networks.

However, it is just the new blockchain on the smart contract blockchain block, which is already overrun by faster and cheaper alternatives to the king Ethereum. To make itself stand out in this highly competitive industry, Aptos utilizes a unique programming language called Move.

Move is a new Rust-based smart contract language created by Diem. It was created as a secure, programmable foundation for Aptos’ vision of creating a financial infrastructure for the masses. It enables fast and secure transaction execution, while Aptos’ Modular architecture allows instant and frequent upgrades.

Unlike other blockchains that use a singular execution model, where transactions are included in blocks one after another and must wait for the previous transaction to complete before the next transaction can be made, Aptos uses parallel execution with multiple chains.

While the singular execution model is easier to confirm the transaction’s status, scalability here is limited. Parallel execution, in contrast, allows multiple transactions to be executed at the same time. This is achieved by taking a snapshot of the current state and processing multiple transactions together.

This makes for faster transaction speeds, and Aptos developers claim that the blockchain has managed 130,000 transactions per second (TPS) in the testnet phase without harming security. In comparison, Ethereum’s current TPS is 30.

As for the Time-To-Finality (TTF), which measures how long it takes to confirm a transaction in the network, Ethereum’s TTF is more than 1 minute, while it takes less than 1 second in the Aptos network.

As an interpreted language, Move does not have a compiler, which eliminates compiler bugs and aims to reduce vulnerabilities, such as reentrancy issues. However, it is a new language with limited tooling, resources, and community. Also, except for Aptos and Sui, no major blockchain project has adopted Move to date.

Ethereum’s Solidity Meanwhile is the most popular programming language for blockchain development due to its user-friendliness and widespread use on Ethereum. Similar to languages like C++, Python, and JavaScript, it is easy to learn and has an abundance of good developer tools and open-source libraries. Not only is it the most used language in Web3, but it also has strong community support with multichain compatibility.

While Solidity is more prone to exploitable bugs as a compiled language and usage of sequential processing creates a bottleneck for network throughput, it still accounts for 87.45% of all total value locked in smart contracts.

The Aptos network separates consensus from execution to reduce transaction execution time, optimizing authentication and data structures. Aptos uses BFT consensus and is currently running its fourth iteration. The latest iteration of Aptos BFT is claimed to be the lowest latency and most advanced.

Lately, Aptos is being dubbed as the Solana killer, as it challenges Solana’s fast throughput of 50,000 to 65,000 TPS. Solana started challenging Ethereum but has suffered multiple technical breakdowns over the last few months, hurting its reputation.

For now, Ethereum remains the battle-tested and most widely used network. As for the Aptos blockchain, it has a mountain to climb. However, it is working on attracting developers and users to expand its ecosystem.

Recent Developments: What’s up With Aptos?

In its attempt to play catch up with other top smart contract networks, Aptos has been pushing for more adoption of its services and supporting more development on its network.

Last week, Aptos announced that it had awarded more than $3.5 million to over 50 projects as part of the first phase of its grant program. Deploying grants is pretty common in crypto to attract more projects which usually results in a surge in development activity.

As of writing, the total value locked (TVL) on Aptos is $49.69 million, down from a $64.4 million high last month but up from 429 million in March, as per DeFi Llama. In comparison, the TVL of the entire DeFi sector is $47.82 billion, with Ethereum accounting for most of it at $28 billion, followed by Tron ($5.47 bln), BSC ($4.62 bln), Arbitrum ($2.4 bln), Polygon ($975 mln), Optimism ($877 mln), and Avalanche ($759 mln).

When it comes to Aptos DeFi space, AMM Thala Labs accounts for 41.33% of all of its TVL. Other popular projects building on Aptos include DEXs Pancakeswap and Liquiswap, liquid staking protocols Tortuga and Ditto, lending platforms Aries Markets, Abel Finance, and Aptin Finance, and CDP protocol Argo.

The TVL outflow of Aptos reflects declining confidence across the crypto market, but its grants programs may stimulate more development activity in the future.

Last month, Aptos Foundation also announced an Artist Grants Program (AGP) worth $20 million to attract top talent to Web3, rewarding artists for creating art on Aptos and creating a thriving community of creators.

“Other grant programs in Web3 bring artists and creators into a rigid, well-established system created with little or no input during development,” said Aptos Foundation, adding it “is purposefully bringing in artists and creators early to help shape the values and diversity of the AGP community.”

In addition, earlier this year, Aptos Labs infused money into a social media app, Chingari, to increase its user base, product development, and global expansion. Built on the Solana blockchain with over 2.3 million active wallet users, Chingari will migrate to the Aptos Network by the second quarter of 2023.

“Aptos offers several key benefits, including increased scalability, security, and speed, making it the perfect fit for Chingari’s needs,” said Chingari in a statement at the time.

Most recently, Aptos partnered with Mastercard to create an infrastructure for payment mechanics and on-chain identity. This collaboration will also expand the utility of identity-oriented Web3 solutions to other use cases like ticketing and NFTs.

The partnership with the leading payment-processing company also involved other blockchain developers, including The Solana Foundation, Polygon, and Ava Labs, to create a new common set of standards called Crypto Credential.

This initiative is to help attest to trusted interactions among consumers, businesses, and governments when using blockchain networks.

Overall, Aptos is certainly making strides in having a flourishing ecosystem. Its constant efforts to bring more developers and users to its platform can help the Aptos network’s adoption, fueling its token APT’s value.

Click here to learn how to buy Aptos (APT).