Aptos Foundation airdrops 20M tokens to its early testnet users

Layer-1 blockchain company Aptos Foundation announced on Oct 18 that it had rewarded its early network participants with free APT tokens.

1/ The Aptos Foundation has provided early network participants with APT tokens. If you are eligible to claim, you will receive an email from airdrop@aptosfoundation.org in the next few hours.

— Aptos (@AptosFoundation) October 18, 2022

The foundation shared that it had allocated an estimated 20 million APT tokens, representing 2% of its initial total supply of 1 billion APT, to about 110,235 eligible participants. The airdropped tokens had an estimated value of about $200–$260 million USD based on the token’s market price at the time the drop took place.

According to the blockchain company, eligibility for the airdropped tokens was based on two categories: “Users who completed an application for an Aptos Incentivized Testnet” and users who minted “an APTOS: ZERO testnet [nonfungible token, or] NFT.” Only the original minters of these NFTs were eligible, not the current or secondary owners of the NFTs.

The company shared that Aptos tokens could only be claimed via the official Aptos Community page with additional information provided in the eligibility email sent out by the company. They cautioned users to exercise extreme caution and only trust official sources and channels to avoid being defrauded.

Aptos Foundation’s first airdrop to its community members comes at a time when the project has been under much scrutiny by members of the crypto community on Twitter.

Solana Blockchain developer Paul Fidika, who had allegedly worked on Aptos staking, claimed in a series of tweets that the project had “Dodgey tokenomics” and “Fake POS.”

1. Dodgey tokenomics. The FTX / Coinbase / Binance tokens going on sale tomorrow are already owned by the exchanges and are already staked (I think???) However these exchanges are marketing as if these tokens are being sold by the community (which is impossible—there was no ICO)

— Paul Fidika | OpenRails.dev (@PaulFidika) October 18, 2022

Aptos was created by former Meta employees Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, both of whom were involved in Mark Zuckerberg’s failed Diem blockchain project. Diem wound down ??in February of this year, with Meta selling its intellectual property and other assets.

In July, Aptos closed a $150 million funding round co-led by venture studios FTX Ventures and Jump Crypto, with additional participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Apollo, Franklin Templeton and Circle Ventures. According to Bloomberg, the funding round more than doubled the startup’s valuation, which was over $1 billion as of March.