Aptos is the newest cryptocurrency available on the market. It’s generating a lot of volume in its first few trading days, even though much of the discussion about Aptos has been snide or outright condemnation.
According to CoinGecko, APT, which is the native currency of the Aptos Blockchain, had traded at least $1.3 Billion in volume as of Friday afternoon. This was its first day of trading. This is a fascinating counterpoint to all the ridicule that Crypto Twitter received. It’s the closest thing the industry has ever been to a town square.
On Monday, the much-hyped blockchain revealed its mainnet. The project received much criticism over the next 24 hours for not being transparent about its tokenomics, that is, the details of the cryptocurrency’s economic model and distribution.
Cobie, a crypto podcaster, took aim at the exchanges that were planning to list APT tokens before tokenomics was made public.
The team then confirmed the token distribution details in a blog post. This prompted a fresh round of criticism.
Venture capital firms account for 51% of APT supply. Some traders see this as a sign that the whole project is a “blatant cash grab”, such as an investor who posts under “iamDCinvestor” in Twitter.
Mo Shaikh, Aptos CEO and co-founder, took to Twitter on Tuesday to voice concerns and admit that things could have been better. This was just before the token started trading. In the next few hours, APT plunged by 40%.
Since then, its price has not changed much. According to CoinGecko, the price of the token is currently trading at $7.38 on Friday afternoon. This is 46% less than its initial trade. The token’s market capitalization is still $963 million. This puts it ahead of KuCoin and TrueUSD, Pax Doll, and Maker’s native token MKR.
Even though the majority of the attention has been negative, it’s clear that there have been a lot of APT moving around on crypto exchanges.
Since Tuesday night’s token launch, Binance has been responsible for more than half the daily APT spot trading. The world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, has witnessed $193 million (or 57%) in trades over its five APT trading pairs within the last 24 hours.
Huobi Global, which is normally just outside the top 10 cryptocurrency exchanges in volume, has seen an enviable amount of APT trades. It was responsible for 11% spot volume and had \$39 million in APT trades across its three pairs (Tether and Tron’s USD Coin) since yesterday.
This means that the APT-USDT has performed better on Huobi than any of the USDC, Solana-, and Huobi Tokens-USDT pairs.
The perpetual contracts, which the Aptos team was believed to have been asking exchanges to not launch soon, have seen a lot more action.
One of the many who urged traders to ” Send Aptos to Zero” was an author of a crypto newsletter. He is known by “alpha_pls” on Twitter.
Trading is possible by opening short derivatives positions.
Futures contracts allow investors to place bets on the price movements of an underlying asset. An investor who is short an asset believes its price will fall; an investor who is long an asset thinks its price will rise.
Standard futures contracts expire in a matter of weeks, months, or even years. Perpetual contracts, however, remain open. This means that traders are still at risk of being liquidated if the market moves too far in the opposite direction.
According to Coinalyze, the open interest or number of derivatives contracts for APT peaked at 11 a.m. Wednesday, October 19, at $153 million. This was around the time that APT had slightly rebounded from $6.75. Open interest has remained steady at $130 million since then.
Coinalyze aggregates open APT futures positions across Binance and Bitmex. This doesn’t include all the Aptos exchanges that offer perpetual contracts, but it is the largest.
