On Monday, 17th of October, Aptos, a VC-backed, layer-1 solution, launched its mainnet, through which its native cryptocurrency, APT, is now ready to debut on the market. Aptos will know as APT, like SOL to Solana and ETH to Ethereum.
Aptos will start trading from the 18th of October on Coinbase, Binance, and FTX. Moreover, it will also be available for trading on ByBit, MEXC, Bitfinex, OKX, and Huobi, but some of those exchanges are launching another APT product. However, FTX, Binance, and OKX have said that just an hour after the token starts trading, they will launch perpetual contracts for APT.
Perpetual contracts are a type of futures contract that gives an option to investors to bet on the price movements of an underlying asset. In standard future contracts, there is an option in which expiry and settlement happen at regular intervals. Since its mainnet launch day, Aptos has faced criticism aimed at the project and its early investors.
The main point is that the project’s team waited as long as Aptos did to release information about token distribution, but it had already been leaked online. However, once the news that 51% of the initial 1 billion APT supply is sitting with VCs and another 190 million APIT core developers got out, the criticism kept coming.
As APT and its tokenomics are surrounded by all the negative sentiment, and there is open interest in options contracts, it could become a real-time indicator of how many people expect the project to fail.
On Tuesday, Colin Wu, a crypto reporter, said on Twitter that the Aptos team has been trying to persuade Binance to wait two weeks before launching its perpetual APT contracts. Binance is an Aptos investor, and they did this step to avoid shorting and downward pressure on the price of APT.
