$50M APT Unlock Incoming for Aptos: Will The Price Crash?

Aptos holders of 4.5 million APT tokens are preparing to flood the markets, in an event scheduled for April 12th. The tranche is $53 million and represents 0.454% of the total supply.

In the lead-up to the event, APT managed to outpace Bitcoin and the broader market. While bitcoin’s year-to-date gain is 82%, APT, on the other hand, is up 235% over the same period. Over the past month alone, the latter has risen about 12%.

What’s next for APT?

Token unlocks have emerged as a popular way to slowly release locked assets into the market over a set period of time. Such an event means an increase in supply which usually leads to a decrease in value. It also gives early investors or project team members an opportunity to liquidate their initial investment and thus increase selling pressure.

Thus, this could be a possible consequence of APT as well since the continued price hike indicates that the holders are the ones running the event.

While Aptos also went on to become one of the top performing crypto assets in January this year, it will be interesting to see if the token ends up bucking the trend.

Recent Aptos unlocked 4.5 million APT tokens, which equates to approx. 0.45% of the total supply was provided on February 12th. The price fell more than the overall market price, indicating that the unlocking of the coin was indeed the cause.

So far, only just over 15% have been opened, with a value of about 152.72 million. they scheduled To be released every month for the next ten years. Almost half of the token supply is dedicated to the team, the institution, and the investors.

Even if the opening of the token is a bearish event for the asset, new market participants cashing in on existing APT holdings could push the price higher.

Controversial start

The first layer blockchain network aims to compete against the likes of Solana and Cardano. It is based on the Move programming language, a Rust-focused programming language. Two members of the Meta Diem leadership team, Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, are behind the decentralized version of the abandoned blockchain project.

Aptos launched its mainnet last October after seeing a large number of capital infusions from a number of venture capital firms such as Parafi, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), FTX, and Multicoin Capital. Binance has also made a strategic investment later to bolster the ecosystem.

But the disclosure was not without its challenges. Before mainnet was launched, Aptos boasted an astounding 130,000 transactions per second (TPS). However, a transaction per second is reported to occur at a speed seven TPS slower than the Bitcoin blockchain.