Unlocking cryptocurrencies is generally the planned release of new tokens of a blockchain into the market. One of the most recent unlocks have garnered investor eyes as 4.5 million Aptos (APT) tokens worth about $50 million will be unlocked on Wednesday.
The unlock is scheduled to take place on April 12, 5:30 UTC and amounts to approximately 0.454 percent of the market's total supply of APT tokens.
The Aptos token is a layer 1 blockchain with resource objects based on the Move programming language. It was founded by Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, who were former META employees.
The token is currently priced at around $11.75. The circulating supply of the token being 180 million APT, it is valued at a market cap of about $2.3 billion. It is available on various popular exchanges like Gate.io, Binance, FTX, BingX, DigiFinex, etc.
Due to the news of the big unlock, Aptos has outperformed the larger crypto market in terms of price gains. The token also managed to overshadow Bitcoin and other top cryptos, in terms of price appreciation.
It has risen by almost 5.85% in the last 24 hours and 4.14% in the past week. The year-to-date gains of Bitcoin have been 82%, but for Aptos, it is 235%.
The last unlock of APT was done on February 12, when 4.5 million APT were released, which was 0.45% of its total supply. It was noticed that time that the prices of the tokens surged, which was the effect of the unlock. Only about 15% of the total market supply of APT has been unlocked so far.
The release of tokens is planned to drop every month, extended over a period of ten years. Unlocking usually indicates an initial drop in price due to the increase in the supply of tokens in the market. But, due to the price drop, it creates big opportunities for investment and encourages early investors to sell their tokens when the price is still high, creating selling pressure.
Even if a bearish effect is created due to the unlocks, the price of the token might go up from new investors buying it at the dropped price. So, the unlock is ultimately expected to have a positive outcome for the APT token.
Aptos is emerging as probably the best-performing layer-1 chain token. It has various unique features which are rarely found in other tokens. However, various investors are still doubtful about whether the hype is real or not. One reason for this is that before Aptos launched its mainnet last October, APT was clocking a transaction rate of about 130,000 transactions per second, which dropped after the launch.
It should, however, be noted that Aptos is rapidly going towards decentralization and is constantly working to improve its technology and make it more scalable. Coming up as one of the best-performing crypto tokens since the beginning of this year, it will be interesting to see how it performs till 2023 ends.