Opinion: The quality of Aptos public chain ecological projects in the industrial assembly line is worrying

Note: Articles that indicate opinions contain certain subjective factors of the author and only represent their personal opinions, not Wu Shuo’s position.

On October 18, Aptos, which completed a $150 million financing led by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto in July and was valued at $2.75 billion, announced the launch of the mainnet Aptos Autumn and announced APT Tokenomics. Within just a few hours of the mainnet launch, major mainstream and second-tier exchanges such as Binance, FTX, and Coinbase rushed to announce that they would launch APT spot. However, facing the hot traffic in the bear market, the exchanges were not satisfied with this. Despite Aptos's prohibition on launching futures within two weeks, Binance took the lead in announcing the launch of APT perpetual contracts. After Binance set a precedent for "default", OKX and FTX also "defaulted" one after another, following closely. But the controversy is far from over. When investors discovered that Tokenomics did not include the previously promised airdrop, the community also exploded one after another, questioning the inconsistency of the project party. The next day, within three hours of the APT being launched on the exchange, Aptos announced a plan to airdrop APT to the community and to airdrop to users who participated in the testnet. However, the airdrop plan had almost no anti-Witch measures, and even told users whether they were eligible for airdrops through web 1 mailboxes. The high amount of financing was in sharp contrast to the amateur management level. From the announcement of the launch to the official launch in less than three days, various FUDs emerged frequently. However, pulling the market is justice. After APT was launched, its reputation also reversed. The highest point on Binance reached $100, and almost every user (one address) of the testnet made a profit of $3000-4000.

With the slogan of "the most secure and scalable L1 public chain" and the former Meta employee, Aptos has been attracting venture capital since its birth. This year, Aptos has completed at least two rounds of financing totaling US$350 million, including large institutions such as a16z, FTX, and Binance Labs. According to Paradigm engineer #420's interpretation of APT before its launch, the total supply of Aptos is about 1 billion, but about 820 million have been pledged, which means that more than 80% of the token supply is controlled by the team and institutional investors. In addition, due to the frequent downtime of Solana and dissatisfaction with FTX and SBF's overly centralized solution to Solana, some Solana developers switched from Solana to Aptos under the ecological incentives of Aptos, which also made the style of Aptos quite similar to Solana, especially in the field of NFT. Solana, backed by SBF and FTX, already has a strong capital background.

Previous public chains were speculative and punk. Although financing was indispensable, capital had little say and often found it difficult to participate in actual development and production. Ethereum is an exploration of decentralization and smart contracts; EOS is a belief in the social elite system: community representation; Polkadot optimizes specific scenarios by building parallel chains, achieving high efficiency through specificity; Cosmos focuses on modular functional chains... Different public chains have their own characteristics, and their unique exploration of the future path has formed supporters and crowds, building a prosperous multi-chain hodgepodge.

Unlike the early years when the public chain was emphasized on "metaphysical" exploration, the current public chain production seems to have industrialized and standardized polishing methods. Capital market making and exchange rounding are the epitome of Aptos, and may also be the pattern of the new public chain in the future. Before going online, Aptos relied on capital investment and financing to attract attention; after going online, it relied on low circulation and exchange control to reverse the short-term bad reputation. However, the wealth effect can cover up for a while, but it cannot cover up for a long time, nor can it cover up Aptos' poor performance in community building, business operations, and management capabilities. A large number of witch addresses have made a lot of money, a large number of wool parties are flooding the community, and a large number of inferior projects are pouring in under the wealth effect. An Aptos NFT project owner said that now as long as there is a picture, you can post an NFT project on Aptos at least, and you can earn the equivalent of dozens of Ethereum.

Aptos has very low requirements for project owners, resulting in a large number of low-quality projects flooding it, and it has a tendency to become the most expensive "dog chain". There are many dog ​​projects, but the project owners are not worried about no one paying for them. Because they missed the APT airdrop, users who come to Aptos to dig for gold are more FOMO than the project owners. The simplicity of the airdrop reward has attracted a large number of wool parties to participate in this new chain. Users generally believe that Aptos is not short of money, and the on-chain ecosystem has just started, and there will be a large number of projects that will issue tokens worth digging. This trend of digging for gold has even spread to other star public chains such as Sui, ZK, and LayerZero that are waiting to issue tokens. Even Sui, a public chain that belongs to the same Move language as Aptos, had to publish an announcement in the community that there is no airdrop plan for the time being to dispel users' excessive enthusiasm.

Institutions also need returns, and public chains often have the highest returns. There is reason to believe that industrialized and standardized public chains like Aptos are by no means an exception. In the future, such public chains with huge financing driven by large institutions such as VCs and exchanges, a large number of tokens in the hands of teams and institutional investors, a small ecosystem, and low early participation of community users may become the norm. For users, such a simple and crude airdrop opportunity may be difficult to reproduce. According to the high-value airdrops such as Op, the choice of public chain token rewards is still the first choice for early and real community users.