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Aptos Token Plunges in Trading Debut

FTX, Coinbase and Binance were among the first exchanges to list the buzzy new layer 1 token.

Updated May 9, 2023, 3:59 a.m. Published Oct 19, 2022, 5:05 a.m.

Newcomer cryptocurrency aptos plunged in value early Wednesday in its debut on major exchanges as traders welcomed APT into crypto winter.

The hotly anticipated layer 1 blockchain's token was listed in the $9 range – down over 30% – on CoinGecko within its first hour of trading.

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Hours into its first day of trading it declined further, down 46% by 12:50 p.m. Hong Kong Time, to $7.37

Coinbase, Huobi, OKX, FTX and Binance opened spot trading for APT at 1:00 UTC Wednesday.

The trading came as Aptos scrambled to control the narrative around its token's rocky rollout. Founder Mo Shaikh had spent part of Tuesday defending the network's controversial tokenomics and allegations about its processing speeds from critics on Crypto Twitter.

It’s exciting to finally bring Aptos to mainnet.

Acknowledged that it could have gone better. Building a decentralized protocol from the ground up is tough! Aptos is fortunate to have a fantastic community that's constantly evolving together.

Addressing some concerns below:
— Mo Shaikh (@moshaikhs) October 18, 2022

Still, the confusion continued into early trading hours as Aptos' discord was flooded by a mix of scammers and community members unable to redeem their token airdrops. The wave grew so bad that an Aptos moderator muted the channel for the second time this week.

Tokens of lending application Apricot Finance, which initially had the same APT ticker as Aptos, also declined because of name confusion. The token is down 47% in the last 24 hours on surging trading volume. CoinGecko now lists Apricot's token as APRT.

UPDATE (Oct. 19, 2022 04:50 AM UTC) – Updates price data throughout.

Aptos Trading

Danny Nelson

Danny is CoinDesk's managing editor for Data & Tokens. He formerly ran investigations for the Tufts Daily. At CoinDesk, his beats include (but are not limited to): federal policy, regulation, securities law, exchanges, the Solana ecosystem, smart money doing dumb things, dumb money doing smart things and tungsten cubes. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL tokens, as well as the LinksDAO NFT.

Sam Reynolds

Sam Reynolds is a senior reporter based in Asia. Sam was part of the CoinDesk team that won the 2023 Gerald Loeb award in the breaking news category for coverage of FTX's collapse. Prior to CoinDesk, he was a reporter with Blockworks and a semiconductor analyst with IDC.