Aptos has created a lot of anticipation in the last couple of months. It started with an incentivized testnet that allowed users to earn APT tokens in return for their service to the testing environment. Today the big release has happened and the Aptos mainnet started. Many investors are anticipated that a successful start could boost the price of the native token, and a large following is cheering over Aptos on social media.

What is Aptos and what has this particular blockchain to offer?

Aptos is often compared with Solana

Aptos is backed by venture capital, which creates a similarity to Solana which also saw a heavy investment from VCs. The second similarity is the speed of its blockchain and the fact that it supports smart contracts, which opens up the option to start its own ecosystem of NFTs and DeFi applications.

There are two major talking points about Aptos. The first one is that the new blockchain is the “Solana killer”. This is particularly interesting, because the benchmark was and is Ethereum. It is true that Solana is offering very fast on-chain transactions, but in terms of user adoption and the variety of dApps, Ethereum is still the market leader.

That being said, it is far away from reaching the promised transaction throughput of over 100.000 tp/s. The actual number after starting yesterday was closer to 7 tp/s which is in fact slower than Bitcoin.

Aptos is recycling Metas technology

It is not only the fact that Aptos has problems at the start, but its connection to Meta is worrisome to some crypto proponents. Before the company went through its rebranding, it started Libra. The so-called “Facebook Coin” was never released due to heavy concerns of politicians and regulators. Even another rebranding of the project from Libra into Diem didn’t help.

Meta buried its plans, but the technology and the people who were building it continued and are the foundation of Aptos. While Aptos is not based on any of the IP that was once owned by Meta, the developers continue some of their ideas that were connected to the project.

Critics believe that this is yet another money grab by venture capitalists who simply bought into Aptos and are now waiting with a ton of tokens to dump on retail investors. This is yet another similarity to Solana which faced almost the same criticism before and after its start. As Solana has already proven, there is more to it than venture capital that flew into its ecosystem. One is well-advised to remind these circumstances and not easily write off Aptos for the same reasons.