Aptos Foundation announced over 20 million APT tokens airdrop to its early testnet users. However, the airdrop caused the APT prices to plummet after Sybil addresses deposited a large number of APT tokens on Binance. According to X-explore, Binance recorded 28,000 users who deposited 16.3 million APT tokens, with the Sybil address accounting for nearly 40%.
Sybil Attack Risk on Aptos
Aptos Foundation on Wednesday announced that 20,076,150 APT tokens will be airdropped to 110,235 participants. The tokens were only distributed to users who completed an “application for Aptos Incentivized Testnet or minted an APTOS:ZERO testnet NFT.”
WuBlockchain in an earlier tweet reported that the lack of anti-Sybil attack protection for airdrop by Aptos Foundation caused some people to get a large number of APT tokens. A Sybil address even sold 189,567 APT directly on Binance. It resulted in the APT token price to fell from $15 to below $13, later it fell to below $7.
According to further analysis by X-explore, Binance had 28,000 users who deposited 16.3 million APT tokens, with the Sybil address accounting for nearly 40%.
The deposits kept decreasing, but the ratio of Sybil addresses to ordinary users’ deposits remained the same. In fact, the Sybil addresses account for over 65% of total deposits. Also, 7 large Sybil addresses account for over 50,000 APT on Binance.
Furthermore, the team found a correlation between APT price on Binance and the volume of deposits. The APT price fell to a low of $6.7 as a result of massive deposits by airdrop addresses. Thus, it caused selling pressure on the APT price during the early days of the launch despite interest from the community.
Users Criticized APT Tokenomics
Several users criticized Aptos for its APT tokenomics and for controlling the majority of the token supply. According to the Aptos Foundation, 51.02% of APT tokens will be distributed to the community, 19% to core contributors, 16.50% to the foundation, and 13.48% to investors. In particular, users were disappointed with the four-year lock-in period.
At the time of writing, the APT price is trading at $7, up nearly 1% in the last 24 hours. The 24-hour low and high are $6.83 and $8.38, respectively.
