Against the wishes of the Aptos team, Binance will list an APT perpetual contract product on Oct. 19, with up to 25x leverage, according to Wu Blockchain.
OKX joined Binance with a similar product offering going live on the same date. Perpetual contracts enable both longs and shorts.
Following its recent debut, the controversial Aptos project has been slammed for its underwhelming scalability performance and poor tokenomics transparency.
It’s not great that FTX/Binance etc are all listing Aptos without any tokenomics transparency at all. Surely it should be a prerequisite to listing something that users can have the basic information on what they’re buying lol
— Cobie (@cobie) October 18, 2022
What’s more, some have labeled it a “Diem offshoot,” given its co-founder and CEO, Mo Shaikh, worked on the doomed Meta project, which closed down earlier this year.
In March, Aptos secured $200 million in a funding round led by a16z, with Tiger Global, Katie Haun, Multicoin Capital, FTX Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Binance Labs, and PayPal Ventures joining. This round set the company’s valuation at $2 billion.
Some in the crypto community predict Aptos will go the way of other VC-backed projects that have had insider private pre-sales – which is down. The most pertinent example of this in recent times is Internet Computer.
What happened to Internet Computer (ICP)?
In May 2021, Swiss-based The DFINITY Foundation launched Internet Computer (ICP,) which stormed up the market cap rankings to place fourth just four days after its release.
Despite its sudden and impactful debut, the project had been in the works since 2016. At its peak, ICP was priced at $700 with an $18.5 billion market cap.
The platform’s goal was to extend internet functionality by doing away with centralized servers and conventional cloud services. Instead, apps would run with no fixed address via its blockchain infrastructure of independent data centers.
The project was backed by large VC firms, including Polychain Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z,) CoinFund, Multicoin Capital, and Greycroft Partners.
A private sale conducted in August 2018 netted $97 million at $4 per ICP token, accounting for just under 5% of the initial supply.
Following its peak in May 2021, a sharp sell-off ensued, presumably as insiders offloaded their cheaply acquired tokens. ICP is currently priced at $4.94, a 99.3% drawdown from all-time highs.
Crypto community predicts Aptos will go the same way
The initial token supply of Aptos tokens on launch came in at 1 billion, of which 190 million were distributed to core developers, the Aptos Foundation, and private investors.
Aptos stated that private investors and current core contributors hold tokens in a four-year lock-in period. This stipulation would prevent insiders from dumping their tokens for a quick profit.
Nonetheless, some still expect the APT price to sink in a similar fashion to ICP, with numerous social media comments notifying of intentions to short.
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