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

Aptos holders are gearing up for 4.5 million APT tokens 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 a build-up leading to the event, APT has managed to outperform Bitcoin and the broader market. While Bitcoin’s YTD gains stood at 82%, APT, on the other hand, was up by 235% during the same period. Over the past month alone, the latter has surged by nearly 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 typically leads to a decline in value. It also gives early investors or project team members a chance to liquidate their initial investment thereby adding to the selling pressure.

Hence, this can be a potential outcome for APT as well because the ongoing price rally signified that holders are front-running the event.

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

Aptos’ last unlock of 4.5 million APT tokens, which is equivalent to approx. 0.45% of its total supply occurred on February 12th. The price tanked larger than that for the overall market, indicating that the token unlock was indeed the cause.

So far, only a little over 15% has been unlocked, worth around 152.72 million. They are scheduled for release every month over the next ten years. Nearly half of the token supply is dedicated to the team, foundation, and investors.

Even if the token unlocks turn out to be a bearish event for the asset, newer market participants raking in existing APT holdings may push the price up.

A Controversial Start

The layer 1 blockchain network aims to compete against the likes of Solana and Cardano. It is based on the Move programming language, which is a Rust-centric programming language. Two of Meta’s Diem leadership team members, Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, are behind the decentralized version of the abandoned blockchain project.

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

But the unveiling was not without challenges. Before the mainnet launch, Aptos boasted an astonishing 130,000 transactions per second (TPS). A launch, however, was reported to have a transaction per second speed of seven TPS less than the Bitcoin blockchain.