Aptos Trading Set to Go Live—Here’s Why Traders May Be Lining Up to Short It

Aptos, a VC-backed layer-1 solution that sprang from the ashes of Meta’s bankrupt Diem project, launched its mainnet on Monday. And its native cryptocurrency, APT, is about to make its market debut.

APT is the Aptos equivalent of ETH to Ethereum. The Aptos blockchain’s native token will be on sale later today on Binance, Coinbase, and FTX. The cryptocurrency will also be accessible for trading on MEXC, ByBit, Bitfinex, Huobi, and OKX on October 18 at 9 p.m. ET (or 1 a.m. UTC on October 19).

However, a number of these exchanges are offering a new APT product. Binance, FTX, and OKX have all said that they will issue APT perpetual contracts roughly an hour after the token begins trading.

Perpetual contracts are a sort of futures contract in which investors can speculate on the price changes of an underlying asset. An investor who is short on an asset believes the price will fall; an investor who is long on an asset believes the price will rise. And, since its debut on Monday, Aptos has experienced a barrage of criticism directed at both the initiative and its early backers.

One of the most contentious issues has been the project’s team’s decision to wait so long to provide information on token distribution after it had already been exposed online. However, once it was revealed that 51% of the initial 1 billion APT supply was held by VCs, along with an additional 190 million APIT core developers, the attacks continued.

That’s why there’s been a lot of concern about launching perpetual options immediately after the token hits exchanges. With so much negativity surrounding APT and its tokenomics, open interest in options contracts that bet against the nascent token might become a real-time barometer of how many people are anticipating or rooting for the project to fail.