Aptos Asks Major Exchanges to Stop Listing APT Perpetual Contracts

The Aptos Tokenomics team is reportedly asking big exchanges like Binance to stop listing of APT perpetual contracts.

Earlier on Tuesday, South Korean crypto exchange Upbit unexpectedly leaked the Aptos (APT) tokenomics. Top crypto exchange Binance has already announced the listing of APTUSDT perpetual contracts on October 19 after the APTOS network went live on the mainnet. In this context, the Aptos Labs team is reportedly persuading Binance to stop the listing on an urgent basis.

In fact, the much-anticipated Aptos, a VC-backed, layer-1 solution born from the ashes of Meta’s defunct Diem project, launched its mainnet on Monday. And its native cryptocurrency, APT, is now set to make its debut on the market.

The native coin of the Aptos blockchain has already begun trading on Binance, Coinbase, and FTX. The cryptocurrency is also be available for trading on MEXC, ByBit, Bitfinex, Huobi and OKX.

However, a few of those exchanges are launching another APT product. Binance, FTX, and OKX have said that they’ll launch perpetual contracts for APT just an hour after the token starts trading.

Perpetual contracts are a type of futures contracts that allow investors to bet on price movements of an underlying asset. To be short on an asset means an investor thinks the price will go down; being long on an asset means an investor is betting its price will go up. And since its launch on Monday, Aptos has faced criticism aimed at the project and its early investors.

One of the biggest sticking points has been that the project’s team waited as long as it did to release information about token distribution, after it had already been leaked online. But once news got out that 51% of the initial 1 billion APT supply is sitting with VCs and another 190 million APIT core developers, the hits kept coming.

That’s why there’s been a lot of trepidation about the launch of perpetual options right after the token hits exchanges. With all the negative sentiment around APT and its tokenomics, open interest in options contracts that bet against the fledgling token could become a real-time indicator of how many people are either expecting or rooting for the project to fail.

With standard futures contracts, expiry and settlement happens at regular intervals. That’s true across all types of markets, from commodities, securities, and cryptocurrencies. For example, CME’s micro Bitcoin and Ethereum options have weekly and monthly expirations. That means an investor can bet on BTC and ETH price activity over weeks or months. Nevertheless, perpetual options contracts have no expiration date. It grants the investor who buys it the right to buy or sell a specified amount of the underlying asset, in this case APT, at a price of their choosing.

On Tuesday morning, crypto reporter Colin Wu said on Twitter that the Aptos team has been trying to persuade Binance, which is an Aptos investor, to wait two weeks before launching its perpetual APT contracts, presumably to avoid shorting and downward pressure on the price of APT. Wu, however, provided no evidence or sources for his claim.

As the day went on, FTX and OKX announced plans to launch their own perpetual contracts at the same time as Binance. Both Binance and Aptos declined to comment when contacted by Decrypt.