Overview: X-explore analyzed the source of funds for all APTOS topping up to Binance. We found that 65% of the funds were deposited to the sybil address, accumulating over 6.3M APT Token, or over $50M in profit based on $8. This brought about severe selling pressure, causing the price of the currency to go all the way down. Meanwhile, we analyzed the correlation between the total amount of deposits and the coin price. This article is jointly published by X-explore and WuBlockchain.

Aptos, a leader of new public chains that is specialized into a modular public chain project, has recently launched its mainnet. Aptos is a Layer1 public chain project initiated by members of the original Facebook/Libra team, with the goal of building the most secure and scalable Layer1 blockchain. The Aptos ecosystem currently has established over two hundred projects. In March, Aptos already received two rounds of funding totaling $350 million from a16z, FTX Ventures, Jump Crypto, Multicoin Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Binance Labs and other investors.

Yesterday (October 18) Aptos officially announced the airdrop program: users who completed the Aptos Incentive Test Network application or minted the APTOS:ZERO Test Network NFT are eligible to claim APT tokens. A total of 20,076,150 APTs will be airdropped to 110,235 participants.

According to WuBlockchain Twitter, Aptos saw a huge crash after Binance went live (19th, 1:00 AM UTC), someone put up a sell order of 189,567 APTs for $13 USD, suspected to be a project or sybil attacker crash, which we have analyzed in depth.

The chart below shows the component analysis of the source of funds deposited by all users of the Binance exchange. As of 12:00PM UTC on October 19, Binance has accumulated 28,000 users deposited over 16,300,000 APT. Of these, 4,120,000 were deposited by market makers, and nearly 40%, or over 6,300,000, were deposited by X-explore as sybil addresses.

Market maker deposits are mainly concentrated before the opening of the market and within one hour after the opening of the market.

As time goes by, the total amount of deposits keeps decreasing, but the ratio of Sybil addresses to ordinary users' deposits remains basically the same, with Sybil users accounting for more than 65% of total deposits. The following addresses are the addresses of large sybil groups that deposit more than 50K APT in Binance.

In addition, we have an interesting finding: There is a significant correlation between the price of APT in Binance and the volume of deposits.

1. APT suffered a sustained plunge after the opening quotation, falling from $13 to as low as $6.7. This was probably due to the huge amount of deposits from the airdrop addresses.

2. Starting from 3:00 UTC, the deposit volume started to decrease and the selling pressure gradually decreased, bringing a rally in the coin price, up to around $9.

3. From 6:00 UTC, the amount of deposits remained constant and the rate of reduction slowed down . These are the other reasons for the drop in the price of the coin.

4. At 8:00 UTC, the deposit volume was halved again and the coin price thus rebounded again.

Aptos was too hasty in marketing the airdrop campaign. A huge number of Sybil addresses flocked into the exchange to cash out their coins because the release of the airdrop was setup before the listing of the main exchanges and Aptos did not make Sybil attack screening, which brought great selling pressure on Token and caused the price to plummet in the early days of the launch. Obviously, it is not friendly for real users.

We hope that all project parties will adopt a more robust marketing approach to avoid such incidents from happening again.

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