​Aptos - the belly button ring of the crypto world.

Some ideas sound great at first - like the belly button ring we convinced Seb to get after our last staff party.

The morning after...in retrospect? Not such a good idea.

The hot new token on the block is Aptos, and right now it has big 'belly button piercing got on a whim,' vibes.

Here's the good, the bad, and the ugly of it:

The Good

It's super energy efficient and is designed to run fast n' cheap transactions right out of the box - no secondary Layer 2 blockchains needed to do so, which makes it way easier to use.

(Aptos is positioning itself to be a direct competitor to Solana).

The Bad

Its tokenomics aren't great (think of these like sports stats, but for crypto tokens). 49% of its total supply is owned by a small group of VC's.

They're all reputable investors (inc. the likes of FTX Ventures, a16z, and Binance) but having this sort of concentrated ownership right out of the gates is a bit of a red flag.

It hands over a large amount of upside potential to just a few players.

Meaning that if/when they sell portions of their investments, it could dump the price and hurt anyone that bought the token after its public launch (which was yesterday).

The Ugly

These next two don't necessarily mean anything, regardless - they don't look great.

First: Aptos was born out of Meta's failed 'Diem' (fka 'Libra') token. The technology might be solid, but any attachment to Facebook tends to leave a bad taste in the mouths of the Web3 community.

Second: One of the founders, Mo Shaikh, spoke at the World Economic Forum - they're the folks who envision a future where we will all 'own nothing, and be happy about it.'

(We're all for minimalism - but that's a bit too dystopian for our taste).

Since they launched yesterday, and made their tokenomics public, Twitter has had a field day, calling out the skewed ownership percentages:

...moral of the story:

Don't get a belly button piercing, just because your friends/colleagues tell you to.