Anything’s possible in crypto, and it doesn’t have to make sense.
For instance, it’s possible that Aptos is so wildly innovative, so utterly different from everything that has come before, that it will wake us all from our hibernation stupefaction and lead us into a glorious future with perfect UX, no hard forks, and egalitarian governance.
And judging from the price action, one might think it’s not only possible… but likely.
It’s run up from $3.08 to almost $20.00 in just a month! It’s CLEARLY a winner! Because everyone else obviously thinks so! And narratives drive price! WAGMI!
Aptos’ native token, APT, is trading at (checks) $18.15, and it has a circulating supply of 160 million with a market cap of $2.91 billion… which is rather a lot of money for something that’s yet to demonstrate very much of anything.
But wait up… what’s this? I guess some people don’t have the Fully Diluted Value button checked on CoinGecko.
Because while Aptos is trading at $18.15, its fully diluted value (the market cap taking into account tokens that are not yet issued, but that will be released into the supply over time) is an absolutely crazy $18.46 billion.
EIGHTEEN AND A HALF BILLION DOLLARS!
For a project that has fewer than 50 active developers!
For a project that only has between 15k and 30k users!
For a project that lists TPS (anyone here from 2017 remember that?) as a key metric on its own block explorer!
The Blockworks Research team added a thoughtful caveat to my all-caps scream into the void here: “While we like to remain open-minded to new projects and innovative teams, the FDV of APT is now greater than the FDV of UNI, LINK, LDO, and AAVE combined. Anything is possible in crypto as far as price action goes, but this isn’t a rally we are chasing.”
I have virtually no knowledge of Aptos’ tech. For all I know, this might make total sense to somebody, somewhere — some wild-eyed cryptomaniac who still sees the upside in an early-stage company with a diluted value higher than Rivian’s market cap, or Fox Corporation, or Snap, or Etsy, or Royal Caribbean, or United Airlines, or Coinbase, or Paramount, or Akamai, or GoDaddy, or… well, maybe you get my point.
Is this just a massive short squeeze? Maybe. Wink.
Have the tokenomics been described as ‘predatory’? Maybe… wink wink.
Are a bunch of VCs using retail investors as exit liquidity again? Maybe… wink wink wink wink until my right eye hurts.
But whatever the reason for the current price of APT, you’d imagine someone’s in for a world of hurt when the market figures out some key statistics.
Aptos’ active wallet number is ~20,000 on average, which is 4% of Ethereum’s ~450k active wallets per day over the past year.
Aptos’ developer count of 50 is around 1% of Ethereum’s 5,800+ developers.
Remember: Aptos’ current FDV is $18.46 billion, which is 9.5% of Ethereum’s $193.45 billion FDV.
These numbers just don’t add up, even assuming Ethereum is the right benchmark (it’s probably not — but compared to Solana, the numbers for Aptos are even less forgiving).
Mind you, Cardano’s still around and somehow has a $17.4 billion FDV. And XRP’s is over $41 billion, so feel free to ignore me. Commonsense and logic have no place here.
But I hope if you APT into it, you are able to ape back out again safely.
