Aptos — The Last Bastion of Retrodrops or The Most Important Article in My Life

For several hours in a row, I have been trying to write an article about Aptos. I write and erase, write again and erase again. To be honest, I simply lack the words to describe everything I feel for this project and share my story. No project before or after will be able to conquer my heart as much as Aptos did.

Disclaimer: This content is not financial advice. Perform your own research. I am not sponsored or compensated by any mentioned company.

To earn a million dollars on Aptos right now is real. This is no byte, no schizophrenic nonsense, no fiction. Let’s get started…

Back in March 2023, almost immediately after the Arbitrum drop, I decided I needed a new life-changing event. Arbitrum gave tens of thousands, a lot of experience and everything some of my friends who listened to me have now, but it’s still not enough. An important day — March 29th. In the evening of that day, I decided that Aptos was my favorite.

Why? There are other projects.

Aptos combined everything I needed so much. Other projects didn’t suit me for various reasons.

1. A huge investment of $350M
2. 51% of the tokenomics for the community
3. They showed with their first drop that they are ready to give out tokens
4. Minimal costs
5. No one was talking about Aptos

And now let’s just model the situation for a moment:

Aptos gives a second drop to 1 million users. It distributes 5–10% of the remaining 49% allocated to the community. Of these, 15.6% is already unlocked and sitting in the Foundation’s wallets waiting. At the current rate, this is $1.5B. They give the drop. It would seem — the price should drop, mission complete. But no.

After the drop.

Objectively, when I started spinning Aptos — it was the deadest blockchain. No users, no ecosystem, no profit. And now imagine for a moment — Aptos distributes 5–10% of the remaining 49%. Another 40% remains. Sybils, builders and just those who love money will flock to Aptos with a simple goal — to get the next drop. I’m sure this will be the strongest boost to the blockchain ever. Did you see Solana’s boom, drops in the ecosystem, dozens of X’s? Forget it! The market is simply boiling with excitement, sybils start shaking with euphoria at the word drop. Just imagine what will happen to Aptos, its projects and ecosystem, when sybils get money from other drops and even the slightest chance of another drop from Aptos. Combine this with pennies in gas costs — and we get hundreds of millions of wallets on Aptos. Insanity, price growth, ecosystem boom, drops and NFTs on Aptos.

Not distributing tokens within the next 2 months would be madness that no project would go for.

Now is the time when the market, atmosphere and circumstances will simply force them to give a drop. This is exactly why they launched quests in December, which we will discuss in more detail. The denouement is near. Already in Q1 2024 we are awaited by the unlock of investor tokens totaling $500 million, and someone might say that the token will drop, but that’s nonsense. We’ve already seen major unlocks in the fall of ’23, since then the token has made 2x, no selling pressure on the order book. The drop is the reason for growth, the drop is the reason to remind about APT, in order to pump the token to the skies.

A few numbers.

The average number of days on an Aptos wallet is 1.96. If you make a transaction on 2 different days — you’re better than half.
The average number of participants in official Aptos quests is 155k.
63k participants claimed all 3 oats.
A total of 600k claimed the commemorative NFT for the doodling, most of them are not active on the blockchain.
Most addresses were created for the bridge from L0 to Aptos, they have 2 transactions.

Is it too late already?

At the beginning of December, Aptos launched a series of 4 quests called “Aptos Fundamentals”, where each week there were on-chain tasks for which you could claim 1 of 4 oats. Regular quests, it would seem?))) NO! There are many preconditions that suggest that these are not just regular little quests on Galaxy. I saw some screenshots from the discords of bluechip collections on Aptos, where the CEO wrote that under no circumstances should these quests be skipped and that they should be done. Out of the blue?

What project would call useless oats “FUNDAMENTALS”? Essentially, Aptos has nothing to give a drop for except transactions, days, months, liquidity, names, NFTs and doodles. To scrape together users in order to distribute a decent drop — it’s needed. And of course, we shouldn’t forget that most likely at least a third of the accounts that will receive the drop are the team’s wallets, but that’s even better for us.

How to protect yourself from diehard sybils?

Let’s introduce a Twitter task for the first quest, like, subscribe and buy a $10 domain per account. Expensive, troublesome. Result: 115k participants. The guys extended the form several times so that everyone who wanted to could claim it.

Then the second week, a task with transactions on DEXes and attention — binding and subscription in Telegram. Here quite a few sybils fell. Implementing on-chain and Telegram tasks is a difficult thing. Result: 85k accounts

The third week was related to NFTs. It was easiest to complete, as closer to the end they canceled the task with social media due to a Galaxy bug. Result: 260k participants.

The fourth week is coming soon. No one knows what will be there.

What is the conclusion about Aptos Fundamentals?

What is there to give a drop for, if not for this? Preconditions from the alpha channels of bluechip collections on Aptos, a small number of participants, obstacles to shave off sybils, difficult and costly tasks, the name “Fundamentals”. What other arguments do you need?)

Question: can they distribute if you don’t have all 4 NFTs — most likely yes. They had problems with the form in the first two weeks, not all accounts went through, even those who did everything they needed to. I think the minimum threshold will be 2 NFTs. Maybe even 1 NFT. Obviously different rewards for those who have 1 and 4 NFTs, but they should reward all participants.

My condolences to everyone who skipped.

Delegate.

Useful for the network, costly, honorable. They will reward in order to motivate delegating your drop and get rewards for it. The minimum threshold is 10 APT. Possibly a top 1 criteria for which they will shower rewards.

Minimum balance.

After StarkNet, this topic is more than relevant. On Aptos, transactions cost less than a cent, so there’s no point in keeping a lot of native currency in your wallet. This is not StarkNet for you.