Aptos is just one big boys' club

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Read time: 4 mins (1 more than 3 but, alas, also 1 less than 5)

Dreaders, basically.

With a week's hiatus due to an unforeseen Macbook-related tragedy, I'm back with a bang to air some grievances and give you some light entertainment.

This is The Reveal, where the fun side of crypto is pumped and dumped into your inbox every Friday.

News Hits 🗞

1/ Aptos = Dross 🤭

Aptos, a new Layer 1 chain valued at $2 billion, launched this week and it failed magnificently, performing at just 0.004% of the speed they claimed it would and along with a series of dodgy revelations means it doesn't look great for the greedy lads.

When you find out that 51% of the tokens is owned by the team, the Discord was muted to avoid tricky questions, and there were no details about tokenomics supplied, it's probably wise to steer clear.

It looks like an intentional bid to hide team allocation as it'd be a major oversight not to display this information as a new entrant. Cheeky buggers!

I can only imagine the amount of Solana Shillfluencers scurrying along to the new chain to stake their rug flag into the fresh ground.

What's more: 80% of the tokens are currently staked which means that they're controlled by not just the team but also investors who will dump them on retail investors in all likelihood.

Welcome to crypto Gomorrah.

2/ Pointless Cottage, Gimmick Avenue, Lameville 🏠

"Wow! You can buy and sell houses as NFTs now. See Mum? It's not just trading JPEGS!"

Sort of. But not really at all.

This story spread quickly on Crypto Twitter in an attempt to prove the haters wrong, detailing a surprisingly cheap house that sold for $175k last weekend.

This sale went through as normal but as an extra bit of admin and work, it was also sold as an NFT to act as the signature of the transaction.

There's a great breakdown here about the ins and outs but essentially the situation is:

• All necessary paperwork had to be dealt with as usual

• If the T&Cs are breached, you may not own the house anymore

I guess it's kind of fun to play around with this but in terms of convenience, they've just added another step and some extra legal fees to draw up additional crypto-specific paperwork 👍

My guess is, if the owner gets hacked then I'm sure the underlying legals will be very convenient.

3/ Keyboard Warriors Will Save Crypto 🤓

At least 3 million new users have turned to crypto, scrambling to scoop up one of Reddit's Collectible Avatars NFTs.

Is this what adoption looks like? Maybe.

The Mountain Dew-guzzling, basement-dwelling Redditors have created more than 3 million wallets to buy and trade NFT avatars, which are based on the platform's Snoo character, since the series launched in July, according to chief product officer Pali Bhat.

As usual, any attempt at integrating NFTs into consumer products means you simply can't call them NFTs. Avatars, digital collectibles, you name it – anything but that mainstream media fodder term.

Reddit isn't the first to allow NFTs as PFPs but it has been one of the more well-received launches: the hype around Instagram's release has unsurprisingly waned.

It's also one of several blockchain-based features that have launched on Reddit this year.

After releasing the profile picture NFT collection, the site airdropped free Polygon NFTs to power users who had earned an especially high level of karma – another scoop for the business development team of the century at Polygon.

Shiny New Toys 👀

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A Digestif 🍸

BitBoy completely loses the plot and, for some reason, disses people with glasses:

Hope you enjoyed the read, enjoy your weekend you cheeky sod 🍻