Aptos Ecosystem Update Q3/2022 – Aptos Launches Its Highly Anticipated Mainnet Amidst Cristism

On October 18, 2022, Aptos officially launched on the mainnet. Although there has been a lot of conflicting information and opinions surrounding Aptos’s mainnet launch. The Aptos ecosystem has been growing strongly in Q3 of 2022 with a lot of activities attracting a significant amount of new users and capital into its ecosystem.

Aptos Ecosystem Update Q3/2022

Aptos Grant Program launched

The first featured event of Aptos at the beginning of Q3 was the Aptos Grant Program, which was born with the aim of accelerating the development of the ecosystem. Since the launch of devnet, Aptos has more than 100 projects underway above, and this program will support projects that are not strong in terms of funding, as long as they contribute to the development of the Aptos ecosystem.

Projects in some of the following areas will have more opportunities to receive funding:

• Developer tooling, SDKs
• Open-source, public good products
• Tools and frameworks for governance projects, DeFi, NFT …
• Community education projects
• DApps (DeFi, NFT, social network, gaming, DAO…)

This program shows that Aptos is very interested in developing the ecosystem. Although it is not clear how much funding the projects will receive, but because Aptos has financial capacity from funding rounds, it can be assumed that this event will contribute significantly to promoting the number and quality of projects on Aptos.

Aptos Incentivized Testnet 2 & 3

As soon as the Aptos Incentivized Testnet 1 (AIT-1) program ends, the project continued to launch the Aptos Incentivized Testnet 2 program. AIT-2 is a program that incentivizes users to become node operators, who themselves will experience and test the staking and validating process of the network.

AIT-2 has received the attention of the community. Users attend the program come from a total of 44 countries and 110 cities. There have been 225 community-launched nodes, of which 26 are operated by Aptos and its partners. Validators who complete the criteria in AIT will receive a reward of APT tokens when the project goes mainnet, with a 1-year token lockout period.

After the success of AIT-2, on 1/8, the project continued to launch the AIT-3 program. AIT-3 is responsible for testing important functions when mainnet is on-chain administration and security. In addition, users who participate in running nodes at AIT-3 will receive more rewards due to the project’s decision to increase the reward by 50% compared to AIT-2.

$150 million funding round

On 25/07, the project announced a $150 million funding round led by FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto. In addition, the round was attended by such famous names as Apollo, Griffin Gaming Partners, Franklin Templeton, Circle Ventures, Superscrypt and continued support from a16z, Multicoin Capital.

The project showed how hot it is when it successfully raised $ 150 million right at the time of the market downturn. This is a huge number, especially in the current bear market. The total amount raised by Aptos after 2 rounds have reached 350 million USD and reached a valuation of 2 billion USD. At this valuation, when the APT token launches, it is highly likely that Aptos will have a high level of FDV.

On 15/09, Binance Labs announced an investment in Aptos to help this blockchain build infrastructure and scalability. This can be seen as an extension of the previous funding round, the specific amount of this deal was not disclosed. Previously, Binance Labs also participated in Aptos’s seed round.

Testnet Launch

6 months since the devnet launch, on 19/9, Aptos officially entered the testnet phase. To celebrate this pivotal moment, the project introduced the APTOS: ZERO! NFTs and gave these NFTs to users for free. There are already hundreds of thousands of people who are interested in and have minted this NFT.

Aptos’ launch of the testnet version also shows that the project is confident and prepared in terms of software as well as infrastructure development. However, when compared to the roadmap, the project is behind schedule when it is not possible to launch the mainnet in Q3/2022 as expected.

With this version of testnet, Aptos will no longer have the same data deletion status as devnet, so NFTs and testnet tokens will have a longer existence.

Q3/2022 marked Aptos’s many thorough preparation steps, mainly in terms of ecosystem development. Thanks to community incentive programs such as Aptos Grant or AIT 2 &3, Aptos has attracted a large number of users to become validators and developers to participate in project development. As a result, the Aptos ecosystem has exploded strongly in Q3, with projects spanning all sectors.

Later on the same day, the project finally released its tokenomics.
The next day on October 19, Aptos suddenly announced the airdrop of APT coins just a few hours before the listing time. The airdrop close to the listing time is yet another “inadequacy” for the chaotic launch of Aptos.

Sum up

The Aptos ecosystem looks complete right from Q3 with many positive news. It has drawn a lot of attention and capital into its ecosystem, leading to its expontial growth in Q3. However, although the number of projects is large, the main projects are still copying the model of successful DApps on Ethereum and Solana.

This is acceptable in the early stage because they need to dominate the market share, but we can expect new ideas when competition emerges in the future.