On the 18th of October, Aptos foundation, a layer-1 blockchain company, announced 20 million free APT token rewards to its early network participants. Aptos shared on Twitter that this 20 million APT token reward will go to about 110,235 eligible participants. At the time when the foundation did this 20 million APT tokens airdrop, these tokens had a value of around $200–$260 million based on the token’s market price.
According to Aptos, the eligibility for the airdropped tokens was based on two categories. First were those users who completed an application for an Aptos Incentivized Testnet, and second were those who minted an Aptos zero testnet NFT.
Aptos shared that the APT tokens could only be claimed through the official Aptos Community page. On the community page, the company sent out additional eligibility information. The company also cautioned users to only trust official sources to avoid being defrauded.
This airdrop from Aptos to its community comes at a time when its project has been under much scrutiny on Twitter from members of the crypto community. Paul Fidika, a developer of Solana Blockchain, claimed in a series of tweets that the project had Dodgey tokenomics and Fake POS.
Aptos is owned by former Meta employees Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, and they both were also involved in Mark Zuckerberg’s failed Diem blockchain project. This year in February, Diem failed, and its intellectual property and other assets were sold by its parent company Meta.
Aptos also gathered several funds, such as in July, it collected a $150 million funding round from FTX Ventures, Jump Crypto, Andreessen Horowitz, Franklin Templeton, Apollo, and Circle Ventures. According to a Bloomberg report, the funding round doubled the startup’s valuation. In March, its startup valuation was around over $1 billion.
